PRINCIPAL RIVALRIES

The largely unanticipated end of the cold war and the consequent diffi culties in explaining its demise underline the need to understand bett er the phenomenon of rivalries in world politics. There is, however, m uch more at stake than the history of the Soviet-American relationship because a respectable proportion of international conflict is embedde d within the contexts of specific dyadic feuds with specific pasts and futures. To ignore these contexts may seriously distort the entire an alytic undertaking of international relations. This article makes a ca se for identifying rivalries in terms of decision maker perceptions as opposed to the number of disputes over some period of time in which s tates engage. A second argument is that predominately positional and p redominantely spatial rivalries should be differentiated as two basic types. Finally, a third argument is advanced for categorizing position al rivalries with respect to their geopolitical milieu: dyadic, region al, global, and global-regional.