Do Sheep Cause Wars
Scare Tactics: The Politics of International Rivalry. By Michael P. Colaresi Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005. 232 pp., $34.95 (ISBN: 0-8156-3066-2).

International conflict can emerge from seemingly benign interactions. In 1955, some 480 sheep straying into Jordan from Israel led Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan to call for immediate military action against Jordan (p. xv).

So begins Michael Colaresi's fascinating book, Scare Tactics: The Politics of International Rivalry . Actually, the answer is “no.” Sheep do not cause wars. In principle, Colaresi argues, sheep could trigger a war, but only in the context of an ongoing international rivalry and only when “a distinct constellation of domestic and international pressures” exists (p. xvi). Given that the Israeli sheep in 1955 did not trigger a war, the book's setup is a “bait-and-switch.” So is the book's title. It has nothing to do with “scare tactics.” Nonetheless, it is well worth reading.

Colaresi's real goal is to improve our understanding of the circumstances under which rivalries will escalate or de-escalate. He begins with a literature review in which he shows persuasively that this is something not particularly well understood. The most serious weakness of existing theories, Colaresi suggests, is that they fail to integrate domestic and international factors. As a result, they inappropriately privilege considerations at one level of analysis or the other, and they fail to specify thresholds or directions for change (either toward conflict or toward peace). In making this argument, Colaresi's chief targets are Paul Diehl and Gary Goertz's punctuated equilibrium model of rivalry initiation and termination (Goertz and Diehl 1995; Diehl and Goertz 2000) and Jack Snyder's (1991) logrolling and coalition-building theory of overexpansion, but Colaresi also takes a hard look at theories that focus on power transitions, diversion, regime type, and learning. Colaresi offers an alternative …