MEASURING RIVALRY TERMINATION, 1816-1992

The predominant operationalizations of enduring rivalries use a period of time without a militarized dispute to identify the termination of such rivalries. The author argues that this misses the true terminatio n date of most rivalries because it does not identify when the underly ing disputed issues in the rivalry are resolved. The author suggests a n operationalization that identifies rivalry termination dates based o n a combination of the absence of militarized disputes and the use of public documents and statements that show issue settlement. Such an op erationalization can result in significant changes in rivalry terminat ion dates. The 1996 version of the Correlates of War militarized dispu te data set is used to apply this new measure to Goertz and Diehl's (1 995) set of enduring rivalries to produce new termination dates and sh ow that tests of a model of rivalry termination produce different resu lts when applied to this new data set.