Author: Douglas M. Gibler, Toby J. Rider, Marc L. Hutchison
Publisher/Publication: Journal of Peace Research
Volume/Issue: 42 (2)
DOI/ISBN: 10.1177/002234330505687
Abstract: The culmination of a decade of quantitative studies of mutual military buildups and arms races in the conflict processes analysis approach. Douglas M. Gibler, Toby J. Rider, and Marc L. Hutchison sought in this paper to shed light on the dynamics of conventional arms races during periods of rivalry by analyzing the interplay between arms races and rivalry. This approach improves on previous studies in that a measure of interdependent arming exogenous to dispute initiation allows for a test of whether arms races actually deter the onset of militarized disputes or contribute to dispute escalation. Both the deterrence and escalation hypotheses are tested using a sample of “strategic rivals” from 1816 to 1993. The analyses reveals that arms races increase the likelihood of disputes and war. Furthermore, to account for the possibility that the arms race to war relationship may be spurious to dyadic hostilities accounting for both arms races and war, a selection model is employed that differentiates between dispute and war processes. This indicates that arms races do not contribute to deterrence and are instead associated with both disputes and war. One key decision was to assume that mutual military build-ups that take pace in the context of strategic rivalry are arms races, while those that do not, are not.