From ice to fire: A quantitative analysis of violent thawings in non-international frozen conflicts

From Eastern Europe to the Middle East and South-East Asia, the post-WWII world order has been characterized by the presence of separatist entities that possess many attributes of states yet fail to attain full international legitimacy. The disputes between these de facto states and their parent states often result in “no peace, no war” arrangements that some scholars describe as frozen conflicts. The literature on the subject seems to be “frozen” itself, still unresolved in defining the concept, or limited to studying the issue with either single case studies or small-N comparisons. This article seeks to provide a wide-ranging examination of the dynamics underlying the development of non-international frozen conflicts, with a particular focus on the fluctuations between stalemates and violent thawings. To do so, a quantitative analysis is conducted on an original dataset encompassing 651 dyad-years. The research argues that disruptive events such as leadership changes and alliance shifts reduce the duration of a stalemate. On the other hand, stabilizing factors such as power parity, support from a major power, the presence of a peacekeeping operation, and autonomy arrangements make the stalemate more durable.