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Why do some Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) expand when most remain restricted to their original disputants? Existing literature on war diffusion treats war as a disease that 'infects' any country in contact with those fighting the war thereby making them susceptible to joining the war as well (Most and Starr 1989, Siverson and Starr 1991, Yamamoto and Bremer 1980). In doing so it over-predicts diffusion-expansion of wars. In contrast, this paper recognizes the strategic nature of occurrence of conflict and the decision to participate in it. States make such decisions taking into account what others are doing. States have multiple and simultaneous interactions with other states that are involved in the same conflict and with those that are uninvolved but not extraneous to the dispute. These interactions between states occur within networks of economic, political and security ties and over a physical geographical space. How states are positioned in these network spaces affects their likelihood to join an ongoing dispute and consequently whether a conflict expands or not. This paper uses network analysis to (a) build networks for multiple relationships like contiguous neighbors, militarized rivalry, alliances and IGO memberships, and (b) create measures for potential joiner states' positionality in these networks. The paper then empirically analyzes multiple hypotheses about how a potential joiner state's positionality in these network spaces can have different, reinforcing or opposing effects on that state's decision to join an ongoing dispute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the conditions under which rivalry relationships affect the diffusion of militarised interstate disputes.Pre-dominant explanations of how and why conflicts expand miss three aspects of the story.One, countries can actively try to encourage or constrain war expansion by ‘(de)activating’ rivalry linkages of the warring states with other potential joiners.Two, conflicts are less like a common cold and are better conceptualized as a strategic interaction between states that are fighting as well as those that potentially might.Three, conflict diffusion to other countries does not necessarily take place through contagious-infection but can be actively propagated or resisted.Conflicts do not necessarily diffuse through a passive, contagion process over a physical contiguous space. They might be more dynamic occurring through hierarchies and/or networks of rivalry linkages.Different rivalry linkages get ‘activated’ depending on who the original disputants are and who subsequently joins the conflict.Empirical analysis of how rivalry inter-linkages are a mechanism of conflict diffusion is carried out by conducting social networks analysis of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) over 1816-2001 period. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]