What Do They Do When They Aren't Fighting? Event Data and the Nonmilitarized Dimensions of Interstate Rivalry

Recent research has shown that interstate rival adversaries account for most interstate conflict, and that militarized relations between rivals become more conflictual as the adversaries accumulate longer histories of conflict. The existing research on rivalry, though, has focused almost exclusively on militarized relations between rivals; little is known about non-militarized or cooperative relations between rival states. This study uses COPDAB event data to study non-militarized relations between states from the perspective of rivalry. The results indicate that relations between interstate rivals are more conflictual in non-military terms than relations between non-rival states, as expected, and relations between rivals tend to become increasingly conflictual as their rivalry evolves. Rivals also appear to engage in greater cooperation than non-rivals overall and as their rivalry evolves, indicating that interstate rivalry appears to lead to a greater intensity in relations along militarized, nonmilitarized, and cooperative dimensions. Finally, characteristics of past conflict between rivals such as dispute outcomes, dispute severity levels, and contentious issues are all shown to help account for subsequent changes in their nonmilitarized conflictual and cooperative relations.