Escalation dynamics and the severity of wars
Journal Article
Overview
abstract
Although very large wars remain an enduring threat in global politics, we lack a clear understanding of how some wars become large and costly, while most do not. There are three possibilities: Large conflicts begin with intense fighting, accumulate severity over a long duration, or escalate in intensity over time. Using detailed within-conflict data on civil and interstate wars (1946–2008), we show that escalation dynamics—variations in fighting intensity within an armed conflict—are the primary mechanism for producing large conflicts. Civil wars, however, tend to deescalate once they become very large, limiting their overall severity, while interstate wars exhibit a persistent risk of continual escalation. Simple models of within-conflict severity dynamics show that this distinction compactly explains the historical size distributions of civil and interstate wars, and unconditioned escalation is a plausible mechanism for Richardson’s law—the power law pattern in the frequency and severity of interstate conflicts. The dynamics of escalation within conflicts have broad implications for conflict theory and risk assessment.
