Background

My research examines international conflict and conflict management. I focus on armed conflict and peaceful management of disagreements between countries over territory, international rivers, and shared ethnic groups.  I am the founder and co-director of the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) research project, which collects information on territorial, river, maritime, and ethnic/identity disputes around the world and received the 2019 J. David Singer Data Innovation Award from the American Political Science Association.  My research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Conflict Management and Peace Science, GeoJournal, International Negotiation, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Politics, and Political Geography.

My curriculum vitae provides contact information as well as more details of my professional background and my career so far, and more information on my personal background is available elsewhere on this web site.

Note that this page is not updated as frequently as other parts of this web site. My curriculum vitae includes the latest list of my research, published and otherwise.

Recurrent Conflict and Rivalry

My dissertation and a good deal of work since then focus on the processes and consequences of recurrent interstate conflict and rivalry. I have been particularly concerned with developing an evolutionary model of conflict and rivalry, in which past events and interactions have an important influence on later relations between the involved states. Beginning with my 1998 APSA paper and my chapter in Bill Thompson's book Evolutionary World Politics, I have emphasized domestic politics in this evolutionary model, along with the role of issues (see below in the section on territorial claims and the ICOW project).

Related Publications

The General Theoretical Model

Paul R. Hensel, "Evolution in Domestic Politics and the Development of Rivalry: The Bolivia-Paraguay Case." In William R. Thompson, ed., Evolutionary World Politics. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Paul R. Hensel, "An Evolutionary Approach to the Study of Interstate Rivalry." Conflict Management and Peace Science 17, 2 (Fall 1999).

Paul R. Hensel, The Evolution of Interstate Rivalry. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1996.

Empirical Analyses (Accounting for Recurrent Conflict/Rivalry)

Paul R. Hensel, "The Evolution of the Franco-German Rivalry." In William R. Thompson, ed., Great Power Rivalries. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. (Please note that this is an earlier version of the paper, not the final published version.)

Paul F. Diehl, Jennifer Reifschneider, and Paul R. Hensel, "United Nations Intervention and Recurring Conflict." International Organization 50,4 (Autumn 1996): 683-700.

Paul R. Hensel, "One Thing Leads to Another: Recurrent Militarized Disputes in Latin America, 1816-1986." Journal of Peace Research 31,3 (Aug.1994): 281-297.

Empirical Analyses (Using Recurrent Conflict/Rivalry to Explain Other Phenonomena)

Paul R. Hensel, Gary Goertz, and Paul F. Diehl, "The Democratic Peace and Rivalries." Journal of Politics 62, 4 (November 2000): 1173-1188.

Other Work Related to Recurrent Conflict and Rivalry

Paul R. Hensel, "Interstate Rivalry and the Study of Militarized Conflict." In Frank Harvey and Ben D. Mor, eds., Conflict in World Politics: Advances in the Study of Crisis, War, and Peace. New York: St. Martin's Press (for International Political Science Association), pp. 162-204.

Paul R. Hensel and Paul F. Diehl, "It Takes Two to Tango: Non-Militarized Response in Interstate Disputes." Journal of Conflict Resolution 38,3 (Sept.1994): 479-506.

Work in Progress

The General Theoretical Model

Paul R. Hensel, "Domestic Politics and Interstate Rivalry: An Empirical Analysis." Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Atlanta, September 1999.

Paul R. Hensel, "Domestic Politics and Interstate Rivalry." Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, 1998.

Empirical Analyses (Accounting for Recurrent Conflict/Rivalry)

Paul R. Hensel, "'Hot Hands' and Cold Wars: A Reassessment of the Stochastic Model of Rivalry." Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, September 2001.

Paul R. Hensel and Paul F. Diehl, "Punctuated Equilibrium or Evolution? A Comparative Test of Two Models of Rivalry Development." Submitted to Journal of Conflict Resolution, September 2000.

Thomas E. Sowers II and Paul R. Hensel, "Political Shocks, Evolution, and the Origins of Interstate Rivalry." Presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, March 2002. Earlier versions of what became this paper were presented at the 1998 Vienna conference and the 1997 Peace Science conference.

Paul R. Hensel, "What Do They Do When They Aren't Fighting?: Event Data and the Nonmilitarized Dimensions of Interstate Rivalry." Originally presented as "Adding Event Data to the Study of Interstate Rivalry" at the 1996 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, San Diego.

Paul R. Hensel and Sara McLaughlin, "Power Transitions and Dispute Escalation in Evolving Interstate Rivalries." Presented at the 1996 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco.

Empirical Analyses (Using Recurrent Conflict/Rivalry to Explain Other Phenonomena)

Paul R. Hensel, "Political Democracy and Militarized Conflict in Evolving Interstate Rivalries." Presented at the 1995 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago.

Political Geography and Territorial Claims

Beyond interstate rivalry, I have long had a research interest in political geography. This interest manifested itself in my very first publication, a paper with Paul Diehl on shatterbelt regions, and in courses that I teach at both the graduate and undergraduate level. More recently, though, my geographic interests have centered around territorial claims. I have written several papers on militarized conflict over territory, and I am currently in the process of collecting and analyzing a large data set (the ICOW project, described below) on contentious issues that has begun with territorial claims.

Related Publications

See also my papers and research interests in the ICOW project, described below

Paul R. Hensel, "Territory: Theory and Evidence on Geography and Conflict." In John A. Vasquez, ed., What Do We Know about War?. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000, pp. 57-84.

Paul R. Hensel, "Charting a Course to Conflict: Territorial Issues and Interstate Conflict, 1816-1992." In Paul F. Diehl, ed., A Road Map to War: Territorial Dimensions of International Conflict. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999, pp.115-146. (This is an updated version of an article that appeared in Conflict Management and Peace Science 15, 1 (Spring 1996): pp. 43-73)

Paul R. Hensel and Paul F. Diehl, "Testing Empirical Propositions about Shatterbelts." Political Geography 13,1 (Jan.1994): 33-51.

Work in Progress

John Tures and Paul R. Hensel, "Measuring Opportunity and Willingness for Conflict: A Preliminary Application to Central America and the Caribbean." Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington D.C., September 2000.

The ICOW Project

Related to my research interest in conflict over territory is a more general interest in contentious issues. Although almost all systematic research related to issues so far has focused on a dichotomy between territorial issues and all other issues, the theoretical arguments that appear in this research often involve "issue salience" or other concepts that appear to have much broader application than simply to territorial issues. My Issue Correlates of War, or ICOW, research project is meant to address this problem by developing an explicit issue-based framework for the study of world politics and by collecting systematic data on multiple types of issues (beginning with territorial claims, but moving on to freshwater issues, maritime issues, and hopefully many others). More details on the ICOW Project are available elsewhere on my web site.

Related Publications

See the list of ICOW-related papers on my ICOW web page.


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Last updated: 9 October 2019
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