Rogue states and territorial disputes

Abstract

This article examines whether rogue states are more aggressive in challenging other states’ claims to territory in comparison with non-rogue states. Rogue states are defined as those which systematically violate accepted international human rights norms of gender and ethnic nondiscrimination and protection from state repression. Hypotheses suggest that states that regularly violate international human rights norms are more likely to challenge other states’ territorial claims and that dyads with rogue states are more likely to experience territorial claims. Empirical analyses of data from two datasets on territorial claims provide support to the theory. Territorial claims are more likely in politically relevant dyads as the potential challenger’s rogue state score increases. Territorial claims are also more likely to emerge as the minimum rogue state score in a dyad increases. The substantive effect of rogue status is sizable, increasing the chances for a territorial claim by as much as 500%.

Keywords

Conflict human rights rogue states territorial disputes

Conflict scholars have amply demonstrated the risks of militarized conflict between countries embroiled in highly salient territorial disputes (Hensel, 2001; Hensel et al., 2008; Huth, 1996; Huth and Allee, 2002; Senese and Vasquez, 2003, 2008). The territorial approach to the study of war often distinguishes between the behavior of challengers, or states that challenge the territorial status quo, and targets, or states that defend the current territorial status quo. Analyses of territorial claims datasets have shown that challenger states are often more aggressive in their use of military force to pursue their issue-related goals in comparison to target states. This relates to older work in conflict studies that focuses on differences between revisionist and status quo states (Jones et al., 1996).

However, most explanations for the variance in states’ status quo orientations focus on differences between democratic and non-democratic regimes. Democracies are less likely to challenge the borders of other democratic states (Mitchell and Prins, 1999), which could also be a function of democracy developing in the aftermath of settled border disputes (Gibler, 2007, 2012). Major power states are also seen as being more aggressive than minor power states owing to their ability to project capabilities at greater distances and their more widespread regional or global security interests (Bremer, 1992). In this article, we build on the idea of rogue states, defined as those which systematically violate accepted international human rights norms of gender and ethnic nondiscrimination and protection from state repression (Caprioli and Trumbore, 2006), to determine whether and how human rights observance may influence states’ foreign policy status quo orientations. Our work builds on scholarship showing that human rights rogues are more likely to engage in aggressive interstate conflict behavior (Caprioli and Trumbore, 2006; Hudson et al., 2008/2009) and violate other existing international norms concerning illicit development of weapons of mass destruction and sponsorship of terrorism (Caprioli and Trumbore, 2007).

Using territorial claims data from the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) Project (Hensel et al., 2008) and Huth and Allee’s (2002) territorial dispute dataset, we analyze the onset of territorial claims to determine if rogue states challenge land boundaries more frequently than their non-rogue counterparts. Our results show that potential challengers who regularly violate human rights norms are more likely to challenge the territorial status quo than states that provide better protection for their citizens’ human rights. We also find that, as the minimum rogue state score in a dyad increases, the likelihood of a dyadic territorial claim rises. Countries that treat their citizens poorly are more likely to be revisionist states internationally, which in turn increases both the frequency of border disputes and the potential for interstate militarized conflict. The promotion of positive human rights norms therefore has an added benefit of removing one of the most contentious issues from the global arena.

Our article is organized as follows. First, we describe the concept of a rogue state and summarize previous work linking rogue states and interstate conflict behavior. Second, we review research on territorial disputes, focusing on the distinction between revisionist and status quo states. Third, we develop our theoretical argument linking rogue state status, the onset of territorial claims and revisionist status. This is followed by the research design and empirical analysis sections. We conclude with a summary of our findings and some thoughts about directions for future research.

Defining rogue states

The concept of the rogue state began to emerge in US foreign policy and national defense circles early in the 1980s when the USA first became seriously concerned about the problem of state sponsorship of international terrorism. Over the next decade, the concept was refined and expanded to include illicit pursuit of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and aggressive foreign policies which could threaten American interests in regions of specific strategic concern (Caprioli and Trumbore, 2005). By the early 2000s, the notion of rogue states—those sponsoring terrorism, pursuing WMD and as a consequence aggressively threatening their neighbors—became nearly synonymous among American policy-makers and policy analysts with the post-Soviet threat environment (Bowen, 2000; Rubin, 1999). A wide range of American defense initiatives and foreign policy orientations flowed from this emphasis, including continued development of missile defense and stealth aircraft technologies, the Pentagon’s two-war doctrine of the 1990s, dual containment of so-called “backlash states” in the Persian Gulf during the Clinton Administration, the proposed “rogue state rollback” strategy which featured in the 2000 presidential campaign, and the post-9/11 Bush Doctrine (Caprioli and Trumbore, 2005; Dombrowski and Payne, 2003; Klare, 1995; Lake, 1994).

The rogue state concept, which became popular with policy-makers, was based on the premise that states that consistently violate important international norms of behavior represent particular dangers to international peace and stability. The norms that matter most were assumed to be the international prohibitions against supporting terrorism and illicitly developing weapons of mass destruction. Rogue states were, in the words of then Secretary of State Madeline Albright: “those that not only do not have a part in the international system, but whose very being involves being outside of it and throwing, literally, hand grenades inside in order to destroy it” (Albright, 1998).

At the simplest level, rogue states have been defined the way that Albright described them more than 20 years ago: they are rule breakers, flouting the norms and conventions that the rest of international society have established and largely agreed to live by. Yet, the number of officially designated rogue states never amounted to more than a handful of actors repeatedly singled out by the USA for special condemnation (Caprioli and Trumbore, 2005; Hoyt, 1999). Meanwhile, critics of the rogue state concept have long argued that the subjective and politicized manner in which foreign policy-makers have applied the label has rendered it bankrupt as a meaningful, analytical category (Bowen, 2000; Litwak, 2000; O’Sullivan, 2000). As a consequence, international relations scholars have typically rejected it as a basis for systematic analysis (Caprioli and Trumbore, 2005). Bowen (2000: 14–15) persuasively lays out the general academic case against the way the rogue state concept emerged and how it is used:

The phrase has been used in the USA as a label of stigmatization to generate domestic and international support for remedial policies against states whose behavior has been deemed unsavory and unacceptable … In the process, it has been applied to a diverse array of states and regimes with unique histories and characteristics. Consequently, it oversimplifies the problems associated with successfully correcting their potential destabilizing behavior.

In an effort to address this issue, Caprioli and Trumbore (2005) examined the international conflict behavior of two sets of states, those singled out as rogues by policy-makers, dubbed “rhetorical rogues”, as well as those whose behaviors fit the “objective rogue” criteria of terror sponsorship and illicit WMD pursuit (Caprioli and Trumbore, 2005: 780–782). Their analysis found that, as a group, rogue states, whether those designated by policy-makers or those whose behavior fit the objective criteria for rogue status, were no more aggressive in terms of conventional military conflict behavior than non-rogue states. They found that rogue states, as identified in the conventional manner, were no more likely to become involved in interstate disputes in any given year, no more likely to initiate militarized disputes, and no more likely to use force first when militarized disputes turned violent (Caprioli and Trumbore, 2005: 178). In short, the concept of rogue states, as such states were defined by policy-makers, seems to hold little analytical value.

Prior to the emergence of the standard rogue framework described above, however, was an earlier conception in which rogues, or outlaw states, were identified on the basis of how they treated their own citizens (Litwak, 2000: 49–51). For much of the 1970s, the label international pariah was applied by both academics and policy analysts to states whose regimes’ egregious abuse of their own domestic populations had led to their diplomatic isolation from much of the rest of the international community (Dunn, 1977; Freeman, 1978). Among those so described as pariahs were the white-minority governments of South Africa and Rhodesia (Gregory, 1980; Grundy, 1976; Guelke, 1980; Vayrynen, 1979), Chile during the Pinochet regime (Mikenky, 1977), Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge (Donnell, 1980; Simon, 1979; van der Kroef, 1980) and Israel (Dowty, 1978). Unlike those labeled as rogues under the later formula, these pariahs were not generally considered to pose serious security problems to the USA or other states, primarily because their brutality was focused inward on their own people rather than against external enemies. While there was concern that such states might seek to acquire nuclear weapons, the assumption was that their pursuit of such capabilities would be defensively motivated, driven by their diplomatic isolation and the resulting lack of other avenues to security such as alliance relationships, security guarantees, and access to arms transfers (Burt, 1977: 135).

In a series of publications, Caprioli and Trumbore (2003, 2005, 2006, and 2007) sought to rehabilitate the concept of rogue states and reclaim it from the field of US national security policy by returning to the concept’s international pariah roots. They argued (Caprioli and Trumbore, 2007: 41–42) that:

The idea that there are in fact rogue states, however defined, is an attractive notion. The premise that states that systematically violate international norms are also particularly dangerous to international society is valuable in that it forces us to think seriously about the characteristics or factors that lead states toward violent or otherwise dangerous international behavior. It also affirms the idea that the international system is a society of states with accepted norms of behavior and that violations of those norms have critical implications for the stability and security of the system as a whole.

Their work parts company with the US security policy community on the question of which norms matter for the purpose of identifying potentially aggressive or dangerous states.

Caprioli and Trumbore argue that rogue states should be understood as those which systematically violate the settled norms of internationally recognized human rights of nondiscrimination and the security of persons (Caprioli and Trumbore, 2006: 134–136). While the incorporation of human rights into the rules of the international society of states is far from complete, human rights scholars note that, whatever the disputes over the details and politics of the implementation of human rights norms, virtually all states accept as authoritative the standards outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the international human rights covenants (Donnelly, 2001, 2003; Forsythe, 1991, 2000; Howard and Donnelly, 1997). “The Universal Declaration has been endorsed regularly and repeatedly, by virtually all states. For the purposes of international action, ‘human rights’ means roughly ‘what is in the Universal Declaration of Human rights’” (Donnelly, 2003: 22).

In this context, systematic violations of human rights are understood as manifestations of what Galtung (1969: 171) referred to as structural violence: “There may not be any person who directly harms another in the structure. The violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances”. As Galtung argues, violence is understood as a process transcending the relationship of actor to subject or perpetrator or victim. Beyond direct physical harm intentionally done by one human being to another, violence manifests itself in the lowered life expectancy that results sometimes unintentionally as a side-effect of unequal social and economic structures. Human rights violating states are complicit in this structural violence through the promulgation of domestic policies that create, maintain or exacerbate domestic inequalities and power hierarchies via systematic discrimination and repression, or informally by failing to recognize, address and remediate the violence inherent in their domestic social systems.

Caprioli and Trumbore further argue that rogue states so defined, which they term “human rights rogues”, would be more likely to engage in aggressive international conduct as the violent norms which govern their domestic societies are externalized and transferred into the international arena. In this manner, they adopt the causal logic inherent in the normative explanation for the democratic peace, that states duplicate patterns of domestic politics in the international arena and apply the same norms concerning conflict resolution in both domestic and international settings. In short, they argue “that the same norms influence both domestic and international behavior”, and that for states whose “prevailing norms and values are violent, one would expect to see violent conduct … externally” (Caprioli and Trumbore, 2007: 46).

They test this proposition by examining the international conflict behavior of human rights rogues, finding that such states are more likely to become involved in militarized interstate disputes and more likely to escalate those disputes to violent levels in comparison with states that regularly respect human rights (Caprioli and Trumbore, 2006: 141–143). In a separate study, they also find that human rights rogues are more likely to initiate militarized interstate disputes and more likely to be the first to resort to the use of violent force when involved in such a dispute (Caprioli and Trumbore, 2007: 51–55).

Other work has confirmed and extended these findings linking human rights conduct with international conflict behavior. Sobek et al. (2006) find that joint respect for human rights decreases the probability of conflict in dyadic interactions. More recently Peterson and Graham (2011) find that a wide disparity in human rights norms increases the likelihood of dyadic conflict.

Beyond their conventional international conflict behavior, there are strong indicators that human rights rogues also are prone to violating other settled norms of international conduct in ways that constitute unconventional threats to international peace and stability. Caprioli and Trumbore (2007: 56–58) find that human rights rogues are more likely to be identified as state sponsors of terrorism as well as to pursue or possess weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. Thus the conventional idea of rogue states as those who pursue WMD or sponsor terrorist groups stems more frequently from the way in which such states treat their citizens. In sum, the literature on human rights rogues strongly suggests that human rights behavior can be seen as a kind of “canary in a coal mine”, signaling the likelihood that a state will either respect or violate other internationally accepted norms of behavior.

Based on this earlier body of research, we reject the policy-oriented characterization of rogue states identified as those sponsoring terrorism and illicitly pursuing banned weapons, and instead define rogue states as those which systematically violate internationally agreed-upon human rights norms. The human rights regime has expanded dramatically in the past few decades, with various treaties, documents, and courts that have defined the norms of the regime. This includes the United Nations (UN) Universal Declaration on Human Rights, major treaties such as the Convention against Torture and the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and active human rights courts such as the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the International Criminal Court. While the human rights regime advances a variety of norms, we follow Caprioli and Trumbore (2006) by focusing on nondiscrimination and the security of persons. Rather than adopt the more cumbersome “human rights rogue” label favored by Caprioli and Trumbore, we simply refer to these as rogue states throughout the remainder of the article.

Territorial disputes and revisionist status

The concept of revisionist status has long-standing roots in the study of international relations. Some authors draw upon sociological theories and focus on states’ status discrepancy and how this relates to their overall belligerence. The basic idea of the status-inconsistency model is that, if a country’s diplomatic status does not accord with its military status, it is likely to become frustrated and engage in more aggressive uses of force (Galtung, 1964; Wallace, 1973). The classic example is Germany in the period before the First World War, which did not achieve the same level of diplomatic prestige as France or Great Britain despite a massive increase in its military and industrial strength (Wallace, 1972: 50). In an analysis of states in the central system from 1820 to 1964, Wallace (1972) finds that diplomatic status inconsistency is positively correlated with battle fatalities in interstate war, military personnel and alliance aggregation.

The idea of revisionism also finds strong roots in the literature on power transition theory, which sees a challenger state as one that is dissatisfied with the status quo established by the global or regional hegemon (Kugler and Lemke, 1996; Lemke, 2002; Organski, 1968; Organski and Kugler, 1980). In the power transition model, war becomes a greater possibility when a dissatisfied challenger achieves parity with the dominant global or regional power. Power transition scholars often focus on extraordinary military buildups (Werner and Kugler, 1996) or alliance portfolio similarity with the dominant state (Kim, 1991; Lemke and Reed, 1996) as indicators of dissatisfaction, but the literature also points to the initiation of territorial disputes as another potential measure of dissatisfaction.

Kacowicz (1995), for example, attributes the democratic peace to joint satisfaction with the status quo. He argues that well-established democracies do not fight wars against each other because they are more likely to be satisfied with the territorial status quo. Kacowicz’s (1995: 268) argument is based on two premises: (1) well-established democracies are less likely to make nationalistic or irredentist claims against their neighbors; and (2) well-established democracies have more often been satisfied states in their regions owing to their power dominance. This is similar to the normative democratic peace theory that views a state’s external foreign policy behavior as correlated with its internal norms and behavior. Democracies’ more peaceful foreign policy stems from their greater respect for neighboring states’ territorial claims. Miller (2009) makes a similar argument in his theory of state-war propensity, viewing territorial disputes as one piece of a state’s overall revisionist status or more specifically related to a state’s frontier status, whereby unclear and disputed borders produce a large number of conflicts in the area.

The territorial literature considers this broad relationship between regime type and conflicts over territorial borders. Most unsettled border issues occur between non-democratic states (Gibler, 2012; Owsiak, 2013)—states which generally have worse human rights records as well. Territorial MIDs that occur between democracies are typically between democratizing states that have not yet achieved mature democratic status (Mitchell and Prins, 1999). Owsiak (2013) finds that human rights practices are significantly better in countries that have settled all international border disputes compared with states that have one or more ongoing territorial disagreements. The question is whether states who eschew international human rights norms also reject other norms regarding territorial ownership such as sovereignty rights or uti possedetis juris (borders drawn during colonial times are maintained in the post-colonial era).

We extend this logic to considering how rogue state behavior influences states’ willingness to challenge other states’ territorial claims. As we discussed in the preceding section, rogue states are characterized by their systematic violation of accepted norms of international behavior. This is evidenced by states’ domestic human rights conduct and the causal effect this has on their conflict behavior at the international level.

In keeping with the tendency of states to externalize their domestic norms, the prior research reviewed above indicates that rogue states, whose egregious violations of human rights are reflections of underlying domestic norms of violence and inequality, are more likely to become involved in militarized interstate disputes (MIDs), more likely to initiate such disputes, more likely to become involved in violent conflicts, and more likely to be the first in a dispute to resort to violent force. It is important to note that the latter two patterns do not suggest a tendency toward reactive use of force when rogue states find themselves embroiled in international disputes. Rather, their greater likelihood of initiating militarized interstate disputes and using force first when involved in MIDs suggests a general tendency to challenge or disrupt the existing international status quo that may also manifest itself in territorial disputes. In short, and given their record in other areas, when involved in territorial disputes, we would expect rogue states to be willing to play the revisionist role rather than defend an existing territorial status quo. Given the expectation that states will externalize their domestic norms of behavior in their international interactions, we also expect that the lack of respect for human rights domestically will manifest itself in more violent interactions with neighbors when diplomatic disagreements over land ownership arise.

H1: Rogue states are more likely to challenge the territorial status quo than non-rogue states.

As is common in the democratic peace literature, we also test the hypothesis using a weakest link approach (Dixon, 1994), under the premise that the more rogue-like state’s norms for human rights behavior will dominate the overall dyadic interaction. Given that our measure for rogue state status captures an increasing degree of human rights’ violations as the score rises, we anticipate that, as the minimum rogue state score in a dyad increases, territorial claims should be more likely to occur.

H2: As the minimum rogue state score in a politically relevant dyad increases, a challenge to the territorial status quo is more likely to occur.

Research design

To determine how states’ human rights rogue status influences the onset of territorial claims, we analyze data on conflicts over territory from the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) project (Hensel et al., 2008). The ICOW data includes information on issue claims in the Western Hemisphere, Europe and the Middle East. A territorial issue claim occurs when official representatives from one country claim a specific piece of territory owned or administered by another country (Hensel et al., 2008: 128). We also estimate models using territorial dispute data from Huth and Allee’s (2002) study, which covers all regions of the world.² Huth and Allee (2002: 300) define a territorial dispute as a disagreement over “a) the location of international boundaries … b) the refusal of one government to recognize another’s claim of sovereign rights over islands … or c) the refusal of one government to recognize another state as a sovereign … unit”. Our datasets are limited temporally to 1980–2001 owing to the years of coverage for our rogue state measure.

Our hypotheses focus on the relationship between states’ rogue status and the occurrence of a territorial claim. Thus we need to generate a sample of pairs of states that have the opportunity to experience a territorial dispute. Building upon Lee and Mitchell’s study (2012), we utilize politically relevant directed dyads as the unit of analysis, including pairs of states that share a direct land or water border (up to 400 miles) or contain a major power as defined by the Correlates of War project. Directed dyads include one case for state A to state B and another case for state B to state A each year. This approach allows us to match state A with the territorial dispute datasets more carefully because the ICOW and Huth and Allee datasets provide information about which state is the challenger of the territorial status quo (or revisionist state). We use politically relevant dyads because most territorial claims occur between contiguous neighbors (e.g. India–Pakistan, Ecuador–Peru) or involve a major power intervening in a territorial dispute involving a current or former colony (e.g. UK and Belize vs Guatemala, UK and Canada vs USA).

Dependent variables

The sample of politically relevant dyads is generated with EUGene (version 3.204; Bennett and Stam, 2000). The dependent variable equals 1 in years where the directed dyad experiences a territorial claim and 0 otherwise. Out of 29,289 total politically relevant directed dyadic observations from 1980 to 2001 in the ICOW dataset, 469 dyads (1.6%) experience territorial issue claims. In the Huth and Allee dataset, which covers a broader set of regions, 1009 (2.34%) of the 43,056 politically relevant dyads experience territorial disputes. Given that our dependent variable is dichotomous, we utilize a logit model controlling for dependence across the years of a territorial dispute by clustering the standard errors by dyad. This also captures the dependence between multiple territorial claims involving the same pair of countries. Focusing on the challenger state as the revisionist state is consistent with the approach taken in the MID project, whereby the state seeking to overturn the pre-existing territorial status quo is labeled the revisionist state (Jones et al., 1996: 178).

Key theoretical variables

We utilize the Rogue State Index (RSI) developed by Caprioli and Trumbore (2006, 2007) for our key theoretical variables. We create RSI measures for the potential challenger and potential target state separately (Challenger Rogue Score_t, Target Rogue Score_t), as well as a weakest link measure that records the lowest rogue score in the dyad (Minimum Dyad Rogue Score_t). The RSI measure includes three broad components: (1) an ethnic discrimination index created from the Minorities at Risk project (Gurr, 1993); (2) a gender discrimination index capturing the percentage of women in the legislature, percentage of women in the paid labor force and fertility rate (Caprioli, 2004); and (3) a repression index based on the political terror scale (Gibney, 2004; Poe et al., 1999). We use a version of the RSI measure described in Caprioli and Trumbore (2007: 51), which “is weighted to correct problems associated with a statistical correlation among index variables … both the ethnic discrimination and repression variables are each assigned half the weight of the gender discrimination component, resulting in an RSI index scaled from 0 to 8 in increments of 0.5”. Higher values on the scale represent higher degrees of states’ violations of citizens’ human rights.

The RSI is a composite capturing a state’s patterns of domestic political and economic discrimination on the basis of gender and ethnicity along with the violent repression of political dissent or opposition. While Caprioli and Trumbore (2006) show that the three individual components of the index have independent effects on interstate conflict behavior, they and we use the indexed variable as it is consistent, first, with the causal logic which holds that it is the cumulative effect of overall respect or disrespect for human rights norms that captures the underlying societal norms of violence externalized as international conflict and dispute behavior, and second, with the understanding that, under the Universal Declaration model, human rights are treated as “an interdependent whole, rather than as a menu from which one may freely select (of choose not to select)” (Donnelly, 2003: 23). Disaggregating the index and testing its components separately would thus lead to the implication of an assumed hierarchy amongst these human rights indicators. The ethnic and gender discrimination components of the RSI reflect norms of the rights of individuals to equal concern and respect as enshrined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, while the political repression component captures the individual right to personal integrity and security of person as expressed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention Against Torture and similar treaties.

It is important to recognize that the RSI is not a proxy for regime type. Both democratic and non-democratic states evidence characteristics consistent with the human rights rogue label, particularly in the areas of ethnic and gender discrimination. While it is true that democracies are in general less likely to qualify for rogue state status when defined in terms of human rights observance, Caprioli and Trumbore (2006: 137) find that regime type accounts for only 12% of the variance observed in the RSI.

There is quite a bit of missing data for the RSI. To deal with this potential problem, we also created an interpolated version of the RSI dataset if we had RSI scores recorded at two points in time with missing years in between. We interpolated those scores using the average values. For missing values at the beginning or end of the dataset’s time series, we did not interpolate those values.

In the ICOW dataset, the average RSI score is 3.65, while in the Huth and Allee dataset, the average RSI score is 3.87. These figures are slightly lower than the 4.18 average RSI score reported by Caprioli and Trumbore (2007: 51) for all states in the international system from 1980 to 2001. When comparing potential challenger states (state A), we see higher average RSI scores for dyads with territorial disputes. In the ICOW dataset, the average RSI score is 4.59 for challengers in territorial disputes and 3.64 for (potential) challengers not involved in territorial disputes. A similar pattern obtains in the Huth and Allee dataset, with an average challenger RSI score of 4.68 for challengers in territorial disputes and 3.85 for (potential) challengers not involved in territorial disputes.

Control variables

We include several control variables building upon other studies of territorial disputes by Huth and Allee (2002), Hensel et al. (2008) and Lee and Mitchell (2012). Relative state capabilities in the dyad (Capability Ratio (C/T CINC)_{t −} ₁) are measured using the composite index of national capabilities (CINC) scores derived from the Correlates of War (COW) project’s dataset on national material capabilities (Singer et al., 1972). The CINC score captures a country’s global share of military, economic, and demographic capabilities. We divide the potential challenger’s CINC score by the potential target’s CINC score and use the lagged value (t−1); the measure ranges from close to 0 to 0.99 with a mean around 0.50 in both datasets.

We also consider the effect of economic development on territorial disputes. Gartzke (2006) finds that states with higher levels of economic development are less likely to engage in conflict over territorial borders with neighboring states. We measure economic development (Challenger GDP/capita_t−₁) as a state’s GDP per capita in logged US dollars, lagged one year (World Bank, 2009). We also include a dyadic measure of economic interdependence to capture the opportunity costs that border disputes can generate for dyadic trade (Simmons, 2006). We measure Bilateral Trade Flows_t−₁ as the sum of imports of state A from state B and imports of state B from state A in logged millions of US current dollars and lagged one year (Gleditsch, 2002).

We include a variable, Dyad Peace Years, to count the number of years since the two states last engaged in a militarized dispute against each other. In addition to clustering the standard errors by dyad, this also helps to deal with potential serial correlation in the data. Finally, we include Distance between the two states in each directed dyad measured as the distance between national capitals in miles (Bennett and Stam, 2000). Further distances should reduce the chances for territorial disputes.

Empirical analyses

Recall that the first hypothesis expects rogue states to be more likely to challenge the territorial status quo than non-rogue states. Given that we are using the RSI index, this implies that challengers to the territorial status quo should have a higher RSI score on average. The first set of analyses employ the Huth and Allee territorial dispute dataset. We see in Table 1 that hypothesis 1 finds support in our logit models using the original RSI dataset (model 1) or the interpolated dataset (model 4). The rogue state index is positive and statistically significant at the 95% level in both models. On the other hand, the (potential) target state’s rogue score is not significantly related to the occurrence of a territorial dispute using the original RSI dataset (model 2), but is positive and statistically significant for the interpolated RSI data sample (model 5). This shows that there is a closer connection to the potential challenger’s rogue state status and the occurrence of a territorial dispute, which is plausible given that the challenger is generally the revisionist state that does not accept the issue status quo. This behavior is thus consistent with the norm-violating tendencies we observe from rogue states generally. We see a similar pattern in Table 2, where we utilize the ICOW territorial claim data. The potential challenger’s rogue state score is positively and significantly related to the occurrence of a territorial claim, while the target state’s rogue score parameter estimate is positive but not statistically different from zero. This supports our theoretical argument that rogue states extend norms of repression and violence to the international scene and therefore challenge other states’ claims to territorial ownership more frequently. It is further evidence of the kind of aggressive behavior that rogue states display in militarized interstate disputes generally.²

Table 1.

Territorial claim onset, Huth and Allee data

	Original Caprioli and Trumbore data			Interpolated data
	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3	Model 4	Model 5	Model 6
	Challenger rogue score	Target rogue score	Minimum rogue score	Challenger rogue score	Target rogue score	Minimum rogue score
Challenger Rogue Score_t	0.246**			0.253***
	(0.108)			(0.089)
Target Rogue Score_t		0.168			0.254***
		(0.107)			(0.088)
Minimum Dyad Rogue Score_t			0.255***			0.378***
			(0.074)			(0.071)
Capability Ratio (C/T CINC)_t− ₁	−0.764*	−0.216	−0.764**	−0.572	−0.658*	−0.692*
	(0.458)	(0.437)	(0.374)	(0.378)	(0.382)	(0.360)
Challenger GDP/capita_t− ₁	−0.395***	−0.249*	−0.276**	−0.273**	−0.253**	−0.204*
	(0.141)	(0.128)	(0.118)	(0.133)	(0.118)	(0.112)
Dyad Peace Years_t	−0.096***	−0.077***	−0.084***	−0.069***	−0.066***	−0.066***
	(0.015)	(0.016)	(0.015)	(0.021)	(0.020)	(0.019)
Bilateral Trade Flows_t− ₁	0.324***	0.203***	0.253***	0.256***	0.243***	0.244***
	(0.095)	(0.070)	(0.071)	(0.075)	(0.072)	(0.065)
Distance_t	−0.506***	−0.321**	−0.367***	−0.448***	−0.366***	−0.346***
	(0.125)	(0.133)	(0.120)	(0.110)	(0.112)	(0.111)
Constant	2.167*	0.515	0.643***	0.709	0.134	−0.759
	(1.221)	(1.186)	(1.021)	(1.109)	(0.972)	(0.953)
N	14,908	14,408	23,691	29,152	28,295	31,599
Pseudo R ²	0.31	0.19	0.23	0.21	0.18	0.19
Wald χ ²	189.02***	79.57***	163.39***	91.88***	88.97***	120.58***

Note: Numbers in parentheses are clustered standard errors (by dyad). p-Values: *** p < 0.01, ** p < 0.05, * p < 0.1.

Table 2.

Territorial claim onset, ICOW data

	Original Caprioli and Trumbore data			Interpolated data
	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3	Model 4	Model 5	Model 6
	Challenger rogue score	Target rogue score	Minimum rogue score	Challenger rogue score	Target rogue score	Minimum rogue score
Challenger Rogue Score_t	0.272**			0.210*
	(0.128)			(0.118)
Target Rogue Score_t		0.121			0.186
		(0.136)			(0.120)
Minimum Dyad Rogue Score_t			0.199**			0.252**
			(0.102)			(0.108)
Capability Ratio (C/T CINC)_t– ₁	−0.734	0.332	−0.341	−0.528	0.297	−0.134
	(0.883)	(0.636)	(0.656)	(0.592)	(0.655)	(0.665)
Challenger GDP/capita_t– ₁	−0.480***	−0.494***	−0.550***	−0.514***	−0.659***	−0.634***
	(0.166)	(0.161)	(0.160)	(0.144)	(0.153)	(0.148)
Dyad Peace Years_t	−0.036*	−0.028	−0.029*	−0.018	−0.022	−0.017
	(0.020)	(0.017)	(0.017)	(0.016)	(0.016)	(0.016)
Bilateral Trade Flows_t– ₁	0.112	0.148	0.140	0.031	0.075	0.090
	(0.175)	(0.100)	(0.118)	(0.103)	(0.104)	(0.100)
Distance_t	−0.513**	−0.344	−0.378	−0.401*	−0.297	−0.338*
	(0.223)	(0.286)	(0.249)	(0.213)	(0.208)	(0.200)
Constant	2.610	1.591	2.180	2.541	2.647*	2.464
	(2.122)	(2.036)	(2.081)	(1.694)	(1.540)	(1.687)
N	11,195	11,101	17,491	20,581	20,217	23,194
Pseudo R ²	0.17	0.10	0.12	0.11	0.12	0.12
Wald χ ²	93.67***	24.06***	46.74***	29.15***	34.62***	34.32***

Note: Numbers in parentheses are clustered standard errors (by dyad). p-Values: *** p < 0.01, ** p < 0.05, * p < 0.1.

Substantive effects for the rogue state variables are presented in Table 3 and generated using Clarify (Tomz et al., 2003). All control variables are set at their mean or mode. For model 1, increasing the challenger’s rogue state score from the sample minimum (0) to the sample maximum (7) increases the probability of a dyadic territorial claim from 0.002 to 0.012, a 500% increase in the likelihood of a border dispute. We find similar effects for the interpolated RSI data, as the probability of a territorial dispute increases by 468% as the challenger’s rogue state score goes from its minimum (0.0037) to maximum value (0.021). In the ICOW dataset, a territorial claim is 533% more likely when comparing a state with the highest rogue state score to a state with the lowest score (using model 1). The findings in Tables 1 and 2 fit with our theoretical prediction that states that consistently violate their citizens’ human rights are more likely to disrespect other state’s existing claims to mainland or island territories.

Table 3.

Changes in predicted probabilities for territorial claim onset

	Rogue score(minimum)	Rogue score (maximum)	Percentage change
Huth and Allee data
Challenger rogue score	0.002	0.012	+500%
Target rogue score	0.0066	0.020	+203%
Minimum dyad rogue score	0.003	0.018	+500%
Interpolated challenger score	0.0037	0.021	+468%
Interpolated target score	0.004	0.026	+550%
Interpolated minimum dyad score	0.0036	0.022	+511%
ICOW data
Challenger rogue score	0.003	0.019	+533%
Target rogue score	0.009	0.018	+100%
Minimum dyad rogue score	0.005	0.018	+260%
Interpolated challenger score	0.007	0.026	+271%
Interpolated target score	0.007	0.025	+257%
Interpolated minimum dyad score	0.006	0.031	+417%

Note: The probabilities are calculated with Clarify by holding each variable of the model at its mean or mode.

Hypothesis 2 looks at the dyadic effect of rogue state status, predicting that a territorial claim is more likely as the minimum rogue score in a politically relevant dyad increases. We test this expectation using the Huth and Allee dataset in Table 1 (models 3 and 6) and the ICOW dataset in Table 2 (models 3 and 6). We see a strong effect for the minimum rogue state score in all four models; territorial claims are more likely to occur in dyads where the least rogue-like state becomes more of a human rights rogue. The substantive effect of the weakest link measure ranges from 500–511% in the Huth and Allee data to 260–417% in the ICOW data.

The control variables exhibit some similarities across the two datasets, but some differences as well. The capability ratio variable is negative and significant in several models employing the Huth and Allee dataset (Table 1), implying that territorial disputes are less likely as the challenger’s capabilities relative to the target state increase. This variable does not have a significant effect in any models using the ICOW data (Table 2). The economic development variable is negative and highly significant in both sets of analyses, supporting Gartzke’s (2006) prediction that more developed states are less likely to have territorial disputes with their neighbors. The amount of peace years in the dyad is also negatively related to the occurrence of a territorial dispute, showing stronger effects in the Huth and Allee models (Table 1). Bilateral trade flows have no effect in the ICOW analyses (Table 2), but show a positive and significant relationship to territorial disputes in the Huth and Allee models. Finally, distance has a negative and statistically significant effect in both datasets, supporting our expectation that more distant states are less likely to engage in territorial disputes.

Conclusion

The results of this study serve to confirm previous findings on the connection between domestic patterns of human rights abuse and aggressive international conflict behavior. The definition of rogue states as serial human rights abusers first and foremost is reconfirmed. If rogue states are further understood in terms of the extent to which their external conduct violates existing norms of international conduct, then it comes as no real surprise that rogue states are more likely to appear as a revisionist state challenging a territorial status quo, or that dyads containing rogue states are more likely to find themselves embroiled in territorial disputes. These findings are consistent with the research described earlier which found that rogues are more likely to become involved in militarized interstate disputes generally, are more likely to initiate those disputes and are more likely to be the first to resort to the use of force when such disputes turn violent.

Together with the earlier research, these findings lend further support to those who have argued that a discussion of human rights compliance deserves a place in the broader conversation about how to enhance international peace and security. This has implications beyond academic inquiry. These findings are also relevant to questions of the place of human rights promotion as a foreign policy priority. These findings suggest that a broad-based approach to promoting improvements in human rights performance may have a real impact on reducing the likelihood of conflict in the international system, both generally and in the specific problematic area of territorial disputes. Such policies, aimed at countering the threat of rogue states by transforming their approach to human rights, would be a far cry from the confrontational and militaristic policies that governments like the USA have developed in the past to counter the rogue state threat.

Footnotes

Funding

We are grateful to Stephen Gent and two anonymous reviewers for their comments. The ICOW data analyzed in this article was collected with financial support from the National Science Foundation (SES-0960320, SES-0214417 and SES-0079421).

Notes

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