Escalation Management in the Early Stages of International Crisis

Authors: Dr. Kyle Beardsley (Duke University), Dr. Jonathan Wilkenfeld (START University of Maryland), & Phuong Pham (Duke University)

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This report evaluates how crisis actors respond to adversary actions in the early stages of an international crisis. We specifically consider the first three stages of a crisis: the trigger act from a challenger, the response act from the defender state which has been triggered, and then the counter-response
act from the challenger (see Figure 1). The latter two stages constitute the outcomes of interest: the defender’s response to a challenge and the challenger’s counter-response to a defender’s response. The propensity for defenders to respond with violence or for challengers to counter-respond with violence, we contend, should depend on their adversaries’ prior actions—respectively, the challenger’s use of a violent or non-violent trigger and the defender’s use of a violent or non-violent response. Moreover, we consider how observed characteristics of the adversary related to attributes such as military capabilities, alliance military capacity, and domestic instability condition the relationship between prior actions and actor responses.

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