A Relational Geography of War: Actor–Context Interaction and the Spread of World War I

Abstract

Claims by geographers that the geopolitical context of international politics matters requires that context be defined and operationalized in a way that enables analyses illustrating that actors’ behavior varies across different contextual settings. A geographic understanding of embeddedness and relational power is meshed with a well-established contextual theory of international politics to create an operationalization of context that helps to explain the diffusion of war. Using the case of World War I, we investigate the expansion of the war from a localized political crisis in Austria–Hungary to a disastrous global scale conflict involving dozens of states. We integrate contemporary geographic thinking on context with the foundational texts of the war diffusion literature to hypothesize that war-joining behavior is explained by a political entity's relative position in a simultaneously spatial and social network context. Using social network analysis-based methodologies to develop measures of context and evaluate our hypothesis, we find that context had an important impact on states’ war-joining behavior during World War I. An understanding of context that fuses simultaneous embeddedness in network and geographic space with relational power and the methodology of blockmodeling can be used to explore the diffusion of other wars and even other phenomena across geographically situated actors.

地理学者主张国际政治的地缘政治脉络之所以重要, 必须是该脉络被界定与操作的方式, 得以促成描绘行动者的行为在不同的脉络情境中有所不同的分析。镶嵌性及关係性权力的地理学理解, 与已确立的国际政治脉络理论相互配合, 以创造得以协助解释战争扩散的操作化脉络。我们运用第一次世界大战的案例研究, 探讨战争从奥地利—匈牙利的一个地方性政治危机, 扩散至涉及数十国的毁灭性全球尺度争议。我们将当代地理学对于脉络的思考, 与战争扩散文献的基础文本加以整合, 用以假设参与战争的行为, 可透过一个政体在共时的空间与社会网络脉络中的相对位置解释之。我们运用根据社会网络分析的研究法, 建立脉络的方法并评估我们的假说, 发现在第一次世界大战过程中, 脉络对于国家参与战争的行为具有重要的影响。对于融合了网络中的共时性镶嵌、具有关係性权力的地理空间, 以及块体建模的方法论的脉络理解, 可以用来探讨其他战争、甚至是其他现象横越身处于地理的行动者的扩散。

Las pretensiones de los geógrafos en el sentido de que importa mucho el contexto geopolítico de la política internacional requieren que el contexto se defina y operacionalice de modo que posibilite los análisis para ilustrar que la conducta de los actores varía en diferentes entornos contextuales. Un entendimiento geográfico de la integralidad y del poder relacional se engrana con la bien establecida teoría contextual de la política internacional, para crear una operacionalización del contexto que ayude a explicar la propagación de la guerra. Utilizando el caso de la Primera Guerra Mundial, investigamos el proceso de propagación de la guerra a partir de una localizada crisis política de Austria–Hungría, hasta convertirse en desastroso conflicto de escala global que comprometió docenas de estados. Integramos el modo de pensar geográfico contemporáneo sobre contexto con los textos fundacionales de la literatura sobre propagación de la guerra, para hipotetizar que la conducta de sumarse a la guerra se explica por la relativa posición de una entidad política dentro de una red contextual simultáneamente espacial y social. Usando metodologías de análisis con base en redes sociales para desarrollar mediciones de contexto y evaluar nuestra hipótesis, descubrimos que el contexto tuvo un impacto importante sobre la conducta de los estados de sumarse a la guerra durante la Primera Guerra Mundial. Un entendimiento del contexto que fusione la integralidad simultánea en el espacio eslabonado y geográfico con el poder relacional y la metodología de modelado en bloque, puede usarse para explorar la propagación de otras guerras e incluso otros fenómenos entre actores geográficamente situados.

Key Words:

• context
• relational power
• social network analysis
• war diffusion
• World War I.

关键词:

• 脉络
• 关係性权力
• 社会网络分析
• 战争扩散
• 第一次世界大战。

Palabras clave:

• contexto
• poder relacional
• análisis de redes sociales
• propagación de la guerra
• Primera Guerra Mundial

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Paul Diehl, John Vasquez, Jürgen Scheffran, and Toby Rider for their contributions to the ConflictSpace project of which this research is a part and the Annals reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. Funding for this project was provided by the Critical Initiatives in Research and Scholarship program at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

Notes

1. A second perspective on war diffusion identifies battle locations in space and over time (O’Loughlin and Raleigh 2008). Accordingly, a war is said to diffuse based on the changing spatial patterns of battles.

2. Albania, Liberia, Panama, Costa Rica, Montenegro, and San Marino were excluded because of data limitations. War joining was based on war declarations, although some states declared war but took no military action (Cuba, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua).

3. This connected states to each other if both had overseas colonies that were territorially contiguous or when a state's colony shared a land border with another independent state.

4. The first dyadic measure between two states i and j is simply the capability index score of state i and the second is the score of state j.

5. The formula for calculating correlations where there are r=1, 2, …, R relations between an actor i and an actor j is   where is the mean of the values in row i of the matrices (excluding the diagonal) and is the mean of the values in column i of the matrices. The result is a single matrix where the nondiagonal cells are correlation coefficients.

6. CONCOR treats all actors initially as members of the same cluster and then divides them into two separate subgroups. One can apply CONCOR to these subgroups to identify more detailed patterning.

7. The only exception is the case of the United States moving from a European subgroup in 1913 to a Central American subgroup in 1914 and back to a European subgroup in 1916. We discuss this case in the conclusion of the article.