Fresh Water and Maritime Issues in World Politics

该项目旨在提高我们对民族国家如何管理其争议问题的理解，重点关注民族国家之间在共享淡水供应和海洋区域方面的分歧，以补充最近对领土主张的研究。自20世纪70年代中期以来，以问题为基础的世界政治研究方法发展缓慢。这种方法将世界政治描述为行动者使用多种潜在手段（包括单方面发起军事化冲突、双边谈判以及涉及有约束力或无约束力的第三方援助的多边尝试）来寻求问题的满足。从这种基于问题的方法中发展出经验可检验的假设，以解释管理或解决问题的尝试的发生和成功。重点放在这些问题的突出性、过去处理这些问题的尝试、区域和全球体制背景以及对手的特点上。过去对争议性问题的研究由于缺乏系统的数据来对争议性问题的性质和管理的命题进行实证检验而受到阻碍。战争问题相关（ICOW）项目最近收集的数据通过收集有关领土问题的程度、突出性和管理的数据克服了这些问题，因此为问题方法的假设提供了实质性的支持。这项拟议研究的主要目标是研究淡水和海洋问题，其方式与最近对领土问题的研究相同。收集了20世纪所有淡水和海洋问题的数据，包括问题的范围（世界范围内的问题数量和每个问题涉及的具体行为者），它们的显著性（每个问题的特征使其对相关国家或多或少有价值），以及试图单方面，双边或多边地管理这些问题。该集合允许使用这两种额外的问题类型来测试一般问题方法的假设，作为对我们当前领土问题知识的补充，并且-结合现有的领土问题数据-首次允许对不同问题类型的管理进行比较研究。所提出的分析结果对理论和政策都有重要意义，从提高对外交政策制定、谈判、国际法和国家间冲突过程的学术理解到协助政府确定和平解决其问题的可能性。这一点尤其重要，因为这项建议所涉及的问题，即对往往稀缺的淡水资源和可能富含石油或鱼类的海洋区域的管理，被认为是下个世纪冲突的主要根源之一。淡水和海洋问题数据的收集也有助于推进一个问题在世界政治中的处理方法。由于缺乏有关问题的系统数据，这一进展已大大放慢；现有的为数不多的系统数据收集主要集中在领土这一单一问题上。最后，根据本提案收集的数据集将公开发布，供该领域的其他学者使用。尽管创建新的数据资源是改进问题和世界政治命题测试之后的次要目标，但在我们对这些新收集的数据进行原始分析完成很久之后，这是一个重要的好处，有助于政治科学领域。

This project is intended to improve our understanding of how nation-states manage their contentious issues, focusing on disagreements between nation-states over shared freshwater supplies and over maritime zones, to supplement recent research on territorial claims. A general issue-based approach to world politics has developed slowly since the mid-1970s. This approach depicts world politics as the quest for issue satisfaction by actors that use numerous potential means (including the unilateral initiation of militarized conflict, bilateral negotiations, and multilateral attempts involving binding or non-binding, third-party assistance). Empirically testable hypotheses are developed from this issue-based approach to account for the occurrence and success of attempts to manage or settle issues. Emphasis is placed on the salience of the issues, past attempts to manage the same issues, the regional and global institutional context, and characteristics of the adversaries. Past research on contentious issues has been impeded by a lack of systematic data for empirical testing of propositions about the nature and management of contentious issues. Recent data collection by the Issue Correlates of WAR (ICOW) project overcomes these problems by collecting data on the extent, salience, and management of territorial issues, and, thus, offers substantial support for the hypotheses of the issues' approach. The primary objective of this proposed research is to study freshwater and maritime issues in the same manner as this recent research on territorial issues. Data are collected on all freshwater and maritime issues in the twentieth century, including the extent of the issues (the number of issues worldwide and the specific actors involved for each one), their salience (characteristics of each issue that make it more or less valuable to the involved states), and attempts to manage these issues unilaterally, bilaterally, or multilaterally. This collection allows the hypotheses from the general issues' approach to be tested using these two additional issue types as a supplement to our current knowledge of territorial issues, and -- in combination with the existing data on territorial issues -- for the first time, allows comparative study of the management of different issue types. The results of the proposed analyses have important implications for both theory and policy, ranging from improved academic understanding of processes of foreign policy making, negotiations, international law, and interstate conflict to the possibility of assisting governments in the identification of peaceful solutions to their problems. This is especially important because the issues covered by this proposal, the management of often-scarce freshwater resources and of potentially oil- or fish-abundant maritime zones, are argued to be among the leading sources of conflict into the next century. The collection of freshwater and maritime issue data also helps to advance an issues' approach to world politics. This advance has been slowed considerably by the dearth of systematic data on issues; the few systematic data collections that exist focus primarily on the single issue of territory. Finally, the data sets collected under this proposal will be released publicly for use by other scholars in the field. Although the creation of a new data resource is a secondary objective behind the improved testing of propositions on issues and world politics, this is an important benefit that helps the field of Political Science long after our original analyses with this newly collected data are completed.