Ethnicity, rivalry and territory: An interactive and multi-level approach to international conflict

The international dimensions of ethnic conflict have increasingly become of interest to scholars of international relations. While much of this literature has helped to explain how ethnicity affects international conflict, there are many issues related to ethnicity and interstate war that have yet to be explored. In particular, the possible interaction between ethnicity, a fundamentally domestic concern, and international issues, such as rivalry and territorial disputes needs to be explicitly analyzed.;In this dissertation, I argue that the findings of previous literature (i.e. that ethnic issues lead to violence and/or war) more likely reflect the ways in which domestic ethnic concerns interact with international variables, such as rivalry or territorial disagreements, to increase the war propensity of states, rather than show a strong direct link between ethnicity and war. Given their saliency, ethnic issues can easily mobilize large portions of society, help to give legitimacy to the actions of states, and may even serve as an additional constraint on the behavior of leaders. As a result, ethnicity may be manipulated by elites to serve political ends or by the masses to influence the actions of their leaders. In a rivalry situation, however, such ethnic issues must be considered with regards to the international rivalry context, as leaders are influenced not only by these domestic pressures, but also by the international context that they find themselves in. Further, ethnicity has been shown to have a particularly strong effect when attached to territory, and thus the possible interactive effects between these variables should be explored. Accordingly, this dissertation presents an interactive, multi-level approach to international conflict that accounts for the interactions between variables at the domestic and international levels and suggests that a rivalry-territorial dispute-ethnicity interaction is a particularly war prone combination. Furthermore, the specific process of this interaction is evaluated through a case-study analysis of the India-Pakistan rivalry.