Three (or more) To Tango - Analyzing Expansion of Militarized Interstate Disputes.

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]