Geographical Proximity and Issue Salience: Their Effects on the Escalation of Militarized Interstate Conflict

The role of contiguity and territorial issues in conditioning states toward increasingly intense conflict has been a persistent theme in the literature of international relations. This paper investigates one particular aspect of the escalation puzzle in regard to these two dimensions, namely, their impact on the likelihood that militarized disputes will escalate in hostility and severity once the initial threshold of conflict has been broken. The results of ordinal level analyses reveal an interesting pattern. It appears that neither geographical proximity nor issue-type produce the expected positive effect in terms of hostility escalation. Both of these factors do, however, significantly increase the probability that conflict episodes will be marred by increasing numbers of lives lost, once uses of force are taken. These two sets of results suggest that when leaders are faced with the deaths of soldiers in the field, they are significantly less likely to stay the course of engagement if the stakes of contention do not center around territory.