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Territorial contenders are political entities that control populated territories but lack recognition as sovereigns. They pose existential threats to their host states by reshaping recognized borders and generating zones of contested authority. States have strong incentives to eliminate them, and yet they persist—developing countries host an average of three territorial contenders within their borders. Understanding why territorial contenders survive and how they die is a critical puzzle in the study of state making. International forces offer important, if overlooked, explanations for these seemingly domestic processes. First, we argue that international rivals perpetuate the existence of territorial contenders by undermining a state's ability to reintegrate them through peaceful negotiations or by force. Secondly, the international human rights treaty regime provides a mechanism by which territorial contenders can galvanize support from potential allies, increasing a state's willingness and ability to resolve these disputes through peaceful reintegration processes.

Rivals – states with acrimonious, militarized histories – often intervene on opposing sides of civil conflicts. These interventions are known to exacerbate and prolong civil wars, but scholars have yet to fully understand why states engage in them, given the significant costs and countervailing strategic interests. Why Rivals Intervene argues that rivals are driven by security considerations at the international level – specifically, the prospect of future confrontations with their rival – to intervene in civil conflicts. Drawing on a theory of rivalry which accounts for this strategic rationale, John Mitton explores three case studies: Indian and Pakistani intervention in Afghanistan, Israeli and Syrian intervention in Lebanon, and US and Soviet intervention in Angola. The book examines a range of evidence, including declassified memoranda, meeting transcripts, government reports, published interviews, memoirs of political leaders, and other evidence of the thought process, rationale, and justifications of relevant decision-makers. The book claims that the imperatives for intervention are consistent across time and space, as rivals are conditioned by a history of conflict to worry about future confrontations. As a result, Why Rivals Intervene illuminates an important driver of civil conflict, with implications for how such conflicts might be solved or mitigated in the future. At the same time, it offers new insight into the nature of long-standing, acrimonious international relationships.

Given the conventional claim that external threats increase internal cohesion and government capacity, cross-country studies have examined how interstate conflict events influence domestic politics. This article reevaluates the in-group and out-group mechanisms by examining how international strategic rivalry, which indicates the presence of persistent external threats even in the absence of military conflict, affects domestic political competition. An alternative explanation suggests that the effect of external threats on political incentives of domestic actors differs between regime supporters and oppositions. We posit that the presence of international threats from rival states inflames domestic unrest and oppositions’ antiregime challenges, while making governments rely more on repressive tactics given resource constraints and a high level of domestic political intolerance. In addition, we propose that the domestic consequences of international rivalry are heterogeneous depending on the characteristics of political systems and the level of threat perception. Empirical tests reveal robust evidence for the hypotheses.

The European Union is portrayed as a realm of international cooperation and coordination, of convergence and cohesion (via freedoms of movement and common policies), retaining ingrained traits such as member states’ geopolitical competition (with national interests on collision courses, narratives contested, and rivalries in standby, still short of warfare). Known by the buzzword “polycrisis”, the tangled turbulence – made of (post-)pandemic sequels, supply-chain fractures, inflation surges, energy uncertainties, migration pressures, security threats, climate changes, technological disruptions etc. – heavily adds to this stress. Next to official calls for unity in the conclave, powered by new “deals” and more “funds”, divergent national behaviours emerge as scarcities remain asymmetrical and asynchronous. For instance, the “4.0” industries, allegedly part of the solution, become part of the problem since, for instance, the EU member states are unevenly endowed with strategic resource reserves and are unequally enabled in terms of relations with extra-EU critical suppliers. This article investigates the propensity for geopolitical and institutional competition in an EU claiming a monolithic view/voice globally as against rival US, rebel China or rogue Russia, all this in many regards, including the preparation for technological transformations. Firstly, an original Institutional Economics analysis is applied to the rationales for intra-EU inter-states competition, acknowledging the realities of the worldwide scarcity and spread of a series of technologically-critical resources, which become geopolitically frustrating. Secondly, a line of inquiry will be devoted to dehomogenizing the economic and political types of competition, emphasizing, for the latter, the soft power tools usable by various EU member states, including the appeal to “strategic trade”, acknowledging its limitations too. Thirdly, the national competitive impulses are scrutinized in a pair of breviloquent case studies: that of ex-colonial powers, activating their residual ties with former dominions, and that of ex-communist countries, resorting to regional formats to gain substance collectively.

As the United States, Canada, and other Western and world allies attempt to devise workable policies vis-à-vis the Syrian crisis, a common thread links many if not most putative policy \"solutions\": the need to engage local coalitions of regional actors to provide the military muscle to defeat the Islamic State, thereby setting the stage for a workable political solution to restore stability to the country as a whole. Given the experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan, neither the US nor its allies are particularly keen on deep involvement in Syria. Unfortunately, cultivating and encouraging increased involvement from regional actors (including Sunni Arab nations with, ostensibly, a \"vested interest\" in defeating the Islamic State) risks promoting long-term instability and conflict as regional political rivals—in particular Iran and Saudi Arabia—exploit and exacerbate the conflict for their own purposes. In a worst-case scenario, this could even contribute to a broader regional war along sectarian (Sunni-Shia) lines.

International conflict is neither random nor inexplicable. It is highly structured by antagonisms between a relatively small set of states that regard each other as rivals. Examining the 173 strategic rivalries in operation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book identifies the differences rivalries make in the probability of conflict escalation and analyzes how they interact with serial crises, arms races, alliances and capability advantages. The authors distinguish between rivalries concerning territorial disagreement (space) and rivalries concerning status and influence (position) and show how each leads to markedly different patterns of conflict escalation. They argue that rivals are more likely to engage in international conflict with their antagonists than non-rival pairs of states and conclude with an assessment of whether we can expect democratic peace, economic development and economic interdependence to constrain rivalry-induced conflict.

Rivalry between nations has a long and sometimes bloody history. Not all political opposition culminates in war-the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union is one example-but in most cases competition between nations and peoples for resources and strategic advantage does lead to violence: nearly 80 percent of the wars fought since 1816 were sparked by contention between rival nations. Long-term discord is a global concern, since competing states may drag allies into their conflict or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction.How Rivalries Endis a study of how such rivalries take root and flourish and particularly how some dissipate over time without recourse to war. Political scientists Karen Rasler, William R. Thompson, and Sumit Ganguly examine ten political hot spots, stretching from Egypt and Israel to the two Koreas, where crises and military confrontations have occurred over the last seven decades. Through exacting analysis of thirty-two attempts to deescalate strategic rivalries, they reveal a pattern in successful conflict resolutions: shocks that overcome foreign policy inertia; changes in perceptions of the adversary's competitiveness or threat; positive responses to conciliatory signals; and continuing effort to avoid conflict after hostilities cease.How Rivalries Endsignificantly contributes to our understanding why protracted conflicts sometimes deescalate and even terminate without resort to war.

La rivalidad emergente entre Estados Unidos y China es el rasgo más definitorio de la política internacional en un futuro previsible. Dado que ambas grandes potencias tratan de salvaguardar y promover sus intereses nacionales, la investigación se ha centrado cada vez más en cómo esta rivalidad configurará la política regional en todo el mundo. Sin embargo, la rivalidad también se desarrollará en el espacio exterior debido a su papel crítico en materia de seguridad y economía. La posición geográfica única de Brasil, su participación durante décadas en actividades espaciales y su ambición política de convertirse en un actor espacial relevante lo convierten en un importante actor latinoamericano en la emergente rivalidad internacional. La política espacial brasileña de “no alineamiento activo” pretende dar prioridad a sus intereses nacionales aprovechando las oportunidades que ofrecen las dos grandes potencias rivales. Comparte el énfasis de una estrategia pendular en evitar las opciones binarias de alineación, la ambigüedad estratégica y las contradicciones calculadas, y en maximizar la agencia y el margen de maniobra. Este artículo analiza la creciente importancia geopolítica del espacio en la emergente rivalidad sino-estadounidense, centrándose en cómo Brasil interactúa con las dos superpotencias en un entorno geopolítico polarizado. El artículo también evalúa las aspiraciones espaciales de Brasil y cómo una estrategia espacial sólida puede ayudar a Brasil a mantener una posición de liderazgo en América Latina. En consecuencia, el artículo destaca los marcos geopolíticos, jurídicos y políticos brasileños en relación con el espacio ultraterrestre y reflexiona sobre los retos y oportunidades actuales para las naciones emergentes, especialmente en la región, a la hora de participar en la compleja rivalidad internacional por el dominio del espacio.

This analysis examines the link between 'indirect rivalry factors' — situations in which states are neighbors of direct US rivals, and/or states that share rivalries in common with the US - and allocations of foreign aid to shed light on the impact of strategic calculations on a key area of foreign policy behavior. Blending literatures on rivalry/conflict and foreign aid, the study is situated in the relevant prior work and a theory is developed that links indirect rivalry factors with allocations of foreign aid. It is argued that indirect rivalry factors are likely to affect a state's foreign assistance as states in a rivalry strategically allocate aid to create friends and isolate their targeted rivals. In particular, it is argued that donors direct greater amounts of aid to (i) other states involved in a rivalry with the donor's rivals (rivalries in common, or 'rivals of my rival' effects) and (ii) states within the geographic region in which the donor's existing rivals are situated (neighborhood effects, or 'neighbors of rivals'). Hypotheses on the effects of these indirect rivalry factors on aid allocations are developed and then tested empirically against US foreign aid allocations from 1962 to 2000. The results lend support to the authors' theory of indirect rivalry factors and their impact on aid allocation.

We consider strategic trade policy for information and communication technology (ICT) product markets with international rivalry. Usually, ICT products exhibit network externalities and product compatibility (i.e., network compatibility). We demonstrate that the optimal strategic trade policy depends on the degree of network compatibility of ICT products. Furthermore, using an endogenous decision game for strategic variables (i.e., quantity and price), we consider the relationship between the optimal strategic trade policies and the endogenous mode of competition.