ABSTRACT
In recent years, there has been much attention focused on the possible waning of interstate war. Much of this theorizing has resulted from the absence of a direct war among the major states, specifically the United States and the Soviet Union, during the Cold War. In the post-World War II period, however, the assumption that more states would mean more war turned out not to be true. The independence of a number of colonies greatly increased the number of system members while the number of interstate wars seemed to remain about the same. To this end, in addition to examining the probability of a militarized dispute escalating to war, the analysis will also introduce a control variable—the type of dispute: territorial, policy, or regime. Examining the type of dispute is important in that previous work has found that territorial disputes have a higher probability of going to war than disputes over regime or general foreign policy questions.
