Principal Rivalries

冷战在很大程度上出乎意料的结束，以及随之而来的解释其消亡的困难，强调了更好地理解世界政治中竞争现象的必要性。但是，比苏美关系的历史更利害攸关的是，相当一部分国际冲突都植根于过去和未来的特定二元对立的背景中。忽视这些背景可能会严重歪曲整个国际关系分析工作。这项调查根据决策者对竞争等级的看法来确定竞争，主要对手，而不是国家参与的争端数量。从1494年到1993年收集了所有大国和1816年到1993年收集了所有小国的基本竞争数据，包括参与者的信息、时间长短、对竞争对手构成的安全威胁的看法和利害关系问题。在研究竞争时可能需要的其他类型的信息已经存在于其他数据集中，并且没有被复制。这个项目创造了一个竞争环境，可以整合到其他现有的研究项目中。＊＊＊

9507561 Thompson The largely unanticipated end of the Cold War, and the consequent difficulties in explaining its demise, underline the need to better understand the phenomenon of rivalries in world politics. But there is much more at stake than the history of the Soviet- American relationship for a respectable proportion of international conflict is embedded within the contexts of specific dyadic feuds with pasts and futures. To ignore these contexts may seriously distort the entire analytical undertaking of international relations. This investigation identifies rivalries in terms of decision- maker perceptions of a hierarchy of competitive, principal opponents as opposed to the number of disputes in which states engage. Basic rivalry data, including information on participants, length, perceptions of the security threat posed by the competitor and the issues at stake, are gathered on all major powers from 1494 to 1993 and all minor powers from 1816 to 1993. Other types of information that might be desirable in the study of rivalries already exists in other data sets and are not being duplicated. The project creates a rivalry set that can be integrated into other existing research programs. ***