Issues and Conflict

This chapter reviews the contentious issues approach to world politics. This approach focuses on specific issues that states contend over, such as territorial sovereignty, maritime resources, and the usage of shared international rivers. States’ choices among foreign policy options, such as militarized force, bilateral negotiations, or third party mediation, depend on the salience or importance of a contested issue. Data collection projects designed to test propositions from the issue approach are discussed. Findings from studies employing these datasets are summarized, including the linkage between territorial disputes and militarized conflict, as well as the more general pattern of militarization of highly salient issues. Several factors that improve the chances for peaceful conflict management are identified. Directions for future development of the issue-based approach include further research on the onset of new issue claims, the evolution of issue rivalries, the role of domestic and international institutions in issue management, and the role of issues in civil wars. INTRODUCTION International relations theorists implicitly assume that international conflict begins for a reason. Clausewitz' famous statement that war is the pursuit of political goals by military means reflects this idea, suggesting that conflicts begin because of nation-states' desire to achieve their respective goals on one or more contentious issues. Many explanations for militarized conflict and war revolve around specific issues as sources of conflict, ranging from leadership of the international system to control over territory. Yet more than thirty years ago, Michael O'Leary (1976: 321) lamented, “everybody knows that issues are important.But what is equally obvious is that this ‘obvious’ fact has made little, if any, impact upon systematic research in the field. ” Sixteen years later, Paul Diehl (1992: 337) noted that “despite initial positive reviews and more than a decade of time, the issue paradigm approach has not germinated such that its use is seriously evident, much less widespread, in the discipline. ” That situation has changed dramatically in the past two decades. The contentious issues approach to world politics has made great strides due to path-breaking theoretical work on contentious issues as well as data collection efforts that have allowed for systematic testing of issue-based hypotheses. For example, the territorial explanation of war has made significant advances in the interstate conflict literature. Territorial claims involving specific disagreements over the ownership of territory have been shown to be one of the most important causes of militarized dispute onset and escalation to interstate war (Huth 1996; Hensel 2001; Huth and Allee 2002; Hensel and Mitchell 2005; Senese 2005; Senese and Vasquez 2003, 2008). Territorial issues have been at the heart of some of the most conflict-prone interstate relationships in the past few centuries, such as conflicts involving Ecuador and Peru, France and Germany, Israel and Egypt, and India and Pakistan. While conflict scholars have long known that contiguity (having a shared land or water border) is an important predictor of militarized conflict (Bremer 1992), research on territorial issues has helped to show exactly why borders are dangerous. Borders that remain contested lead states down the steps to war, while contiguous states with mutually accepted borders are not likely to fight each other (Vasquez 1993, 1995; Senese and Vasquez 2003, 2008). For example, India and Pakistan’s inability to resolve the Kashmir border dispute leaves open the possibility for future militarized conflict, while the United States and Mexico have enjoyed decades of peace following the settlement of their land borders. Furthermore, the lack of territorial disputes can have additional benefits, as settled borders help to create peaceful environments within which democratic institutions can flourish, providing one account of the emergence of the democratic peace (Gibler 2007). Many of the early contributions were made possible by the collection of variables measuring the issues involved in armed conflict, which were included in data sets such as the Correlates of War project's Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data (Jones, Bremer, and Singer 1996), the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) data (Brecher and Wilkenfeld 1997), the Comparative Research on the Events of Nations (CREON) project (Herman et al 1973), and data from Kalevi Holsti's 1991 book Peace and War. More recently, Huth and Allee have provided scholars with rich time series data on territorial disputes (Huth 1996; Huth and Allee 2002), and the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) project has provided data on territorial, river, and maritime claims (Hensel 2001; Hensel et al. 2008). The issues approach to world politics offers several advantages over other theoretical perspectives on interstate conflict. First, it can account for significant variation in foreign policy strategies by focusing attention on the importance of disputed issues. Disagreements over some borders result in repeated confrontations and costly wars, while others are resolved completely through diplomacy. Furthermore, while territorial issues have led to war between many adversaries over the years, those same adversaries don’t always fight over other types of issues, such as shared rivers or maritime boundaries. Traditional power-based theories of conflict, such as balance of power theory (Haas 1953) or power transition theory (Kugler & Lemke 1996), have a hard time explaining this variance in foreign policy behavior. Second, the issue based approach also gives us leverage for studying patterns of escalation to militarized conflict. Many early studies that focused on issues recorded the issues that were under contention in militarized conflicts or wars, which was a step in the right direction, but these studies failed to account for similar issues that were resolved solely via peaceful means. While territorial issues are widely regarded as the most conflictual issue, only about half of all territorial claims have produced even a single militarized threat (Hensel 2001), and even fewer have led to full-scale war. This has led scholars to emphasize issue claims, or diplomatic disagreements over specific issues, such as borders, maritime zones, or cross-border rivers. Our chapter will discuss many of the insights about effective conflict management that have been gleaned from analyses of issue claim datasets. Finally, the issue-based approach helps us understand more clearly how disputes are related to each other over time and the process of conflict dynamics (Diehl 2006). Many studies on interstate rivalries count the number of militarized disputes in a dyadic relationship without considering how the disputes might be connected. By focusing on what is actually being contested in a dyadic interstate relationship, we can get a much better handle on why some pairs of states become rivals and why some of those rivalries become much more violent than others. The remainder of the chapter is organized as follows. First, we discuss some of the early theoretical and empirical efforts in the issue-based approach. We describe several datasets that have collected information on the issues at stake in interstate conflicts and issue claims for particular types of issues. Second, we review the major empirical findings in the issue-based literature, focusing our attention on the factors that promote successful conflict management. We conclude by discussing avenues for further work in this field, including a better understanding of how new contentious issues emerge, how international institutions can play a role in managing issues that do arise, and how issues can help us understand the onset and evolution of interstate rivalries. We also argue that the issue-based approach to world politics could be leveraged to understand other forms of conflict, such as civil war. EARLY WORK ON CONTENTIOUS ISSUES Some of the earliest research on contentious issues focused on general patterns of foreign policy and was largely descriptive in nature. In the first systematic effort to theorize about contentious issues, Rosenau (1966) developed an issue typology based on the tangibility of the issue’s ends, or “the values which have to be allocated,” and the tangibility of the means “which have to be employed to effect allocation. ” Rosenau’s typology identified four primary issue areas in foreign policy interactions: “‘status area’ (intangible ends/intangible means), ‘human resources area’ (intangible ends/tangible means), ‘territorial area’ (tangible ends/ intangible means), and ‘nonhuman resources area’ (tangible ends/tangible means). ” Numerous empirical studies 1 “Tangibility is.whether a stake's end can be photographed and its means purchased. Intangible ends are those that cannot be seen directly, such as prestige, status, and rights. A tangible means.must be purchased before it can be used; thus troops or money are tangible. Intangible means are. verbal actions, such as diplomatic communications or negotiations, or nonverbal actions of diplomatic personnel” (Vasquez, 1983:181). 2 For other typologies in this literature see Wolfers (1962), Lowi (1964), Zimmerman (1973), and Mansbach and Vasquez (1981). demonstrate that tangible issues involve fewer actors, less frequent and durable contention, and more cooperative interactions (Rosenau 1966; Mansbach and Vasquez 1981; Vasquez 1983; Bercovitch and Langley 1993; Hensel and Mitchell 2005). Intangible issues, on the other hand, are more difficult to settle and experience increased risks of militarized conflicts with fatalities (Schelling 1960; Pruitt 1971; Rubin and Brown 1975; Fearon 1995; Brams and Taylor 1996; Hensel and Mitchell 2005). Other early research on issues characterized real world interactions based on the number or frequency of i