Suchergebnisse

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.

This study reports the results of a project to construct dyadic-level data from the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) project data collection. The project defines coding rules used in identifying crisis dyads and applies them to identify 766 crisis dyads for the period from 1918 to 1994. This research makes it possible to perform a careful comparison of crisis dyads to dyads involved in militarized interstate disputes (MIDs). The comparison indicates that conflicts that qualify as both a MID and a crisis are significantly more severe than conflicts that do not pass both thresholds. The study offers a robustness analysis of Russett and Oneal's Triangulating Peace (2001) and finds that two of the three Kantian variables theorized to inhibit conflict involvement maintain a relationship similar to the onset of international crises as they do for MIDs. The analysis indicates that economic interdependence is a somewhat weaker inhibitor of crises than MIDs.

The challenges of teaching quantitative research methods in international relations are well documented. The key to igniting interest & engaging students lies in creating a participatory learning environment in the classroom. This article discusses these challenges & describes a new piece of software that may be helpful in that regard. The ICB Interactive Data Library enhances access to the information available in the ICB (International Crisis Behavior project) data by organizing it into an interactive software package (Brecher, Hewitt, & Wilkenfeld, 2000). The ICB Library is an especially valuable teaching tool because it allows students to easily access the resources from a major data collection project, which, in turn, exposes them to the challenges & opportunities offered by quantitative research in international relations. After describing the ICB Library, this article will discuss how it can be used in the classroom via problem-based learning techniques. 3 Figures, 1 Appendix, 14 References. Adapted from the source document.

An essential, but often overlooked, role of concepts lies in how they constitute or define populations. Explicit choices made by researchers about concept structure are tied inextricably to the selection rule for identifying cases to include in analyses. Concept construction issues are absolutely crucial because the concept structure used interacts in various, usually hidden, ways with theories & hypotheses that researchers want to test. The concepts used to select cases may be correlated with common dependent variables hence producing selection bias. We illustrate this potential by exploring international crises as they have been conceptualized by the ICB Project. We show that two alternative conceptualizations of "crisis" produce populations that correlate with common ICB dependent variables. Our empirical analyses pay particular attention to variables related to power because they are particularly susceptible to being influenced by these selection effects. 4 Tables, 1 Figure, 44 References. Adapted from the source document.