Regime, power, state capacity, and the use of violence in gray zone international crises

Chapter 5 notes that international conflict is increasingly characterized by a series of crises in a gray zone between overt war and peacetime competition. In such crises, what prompts states to choose gray/hybrid versus direct violent tools? What may prompt the defender states to escalate in response to such challenges? We use data from the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project spanning 1963-2015 to explore the propensity of states to use violence based on the power disparity between adversaries, their regime types, and state capacity. We find that more autocratic challengers are more likely to trigger crises through gray tactics. This preference of gray tools over non-gray violence (but not over non-gray non-violence) points to the strong normative impact against the use of force. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the use of gray/hybrid tools is most likely in near-peer crises, with violence (or escalation more broadly) mainly being the tool of the weak. Overall, state capacity seems to be key in determining propensity to use force to initiate or to escalate a crisis - suggesting a strong state-level explanation for international behavior.