Principal Rivalries

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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. ***