A Crisis-Density Formulation for Identifying Rivalries

This study reports the results of a project that identifies interstate rivalries through the repeated incidence of international crises using data from the International Crisis Behavior project. Despite the existence of other rivalry data collections, a crisis-density population of rivalries has the potential for making important new contributions to this growing literature. The article discusses several justifications for this new formulation for rivalry and then presents an operational procedure for identifying interstate rivals through repeated crises. The study compares the resulting population of crisis-density rivalries to other well-known populations and discusses how attributes of the different rivalry conceptions account for the differences and similarities between the identified populations. The study finds that the crisis-density approach tends to identify rivalries that have reached higher levels of hostility and militarization. Rival relationships characterized by numerous low-level militarized disputes may be likely to qualify for enduring status with dispute-density procedures, but not under the crisis-density approach. In comparison to other populations of rivalries, however, crisis-density rivalries, especially those that are enduring, are very similar in terms of the likelihood of experiencing full-scale war.