JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Sociological Review. I investigate how and why the Shah's policies of accommodation and repression escalated the revolutionary mobilization of the Iranian population. Several major theories-micromobilization theory, value expectancy, and bandwagon (critical mass) models-are used to sort out the empirical relationships between protest behavior (violent and nonviolent), strikes, spatial diffusion, concessions, and repression in the year prior to the Shah 's exit from Iran. Estimates from Poisson regression models show that repression had a short-term negative effect and a long-term positive effect on overall levels of protest via repression's influence on spatial diffusion. I infer that this pattern of effects stems from a combination of deterrent and micromobilization mechanisms. Concessions expanded the protests by accelerating massive urban strikes that in turn generated more opposition activity throughout Iran. Spatial diffusion was encouraged by government concessions and massive labor strikes. Mutually reinforcing relationships between concessions, strikes, and spatial diffusion indicate the significance of intergroup dynamics in the revolutionary process. CONCESSIONS, REPRESSION, AND POLITICAL PROTEST IN IRAN 133 I For recent empirical research on the relationship between repression and violence, see Davis and Ward 2 McAdam (1988:134-35) defines the micromobilization context as a small-group setting in which processes of collective attribution are combined with rudimentary forms of organization to produce mobilization for collective action. Examples include preexisting groups like unions, churches, fraternal/service organizations, and friendship networks.

Addressing the disputed relationship between war and the expansion of governmental expenditures and revenues, Box-Tiao intervention models are applied to a number of British (1700-1980), United States (1792-1980), French (1815-1979), and Japanese (1878-1980) spending and taxation series. Distinguishing between global and interstate wars, the more intensive and extensive bouts of warfare (global wars) tend to bring about abrupt, permanent impacts in contrast to the temporary changes associated with most interstate wars. The observed displacements are reflected in both war-related and nonwar-related types of expenditure and are also observed before 1900. Although our findings are not universally applicable and are subject to various other qualifications, they may be interpreted, in general, as reinforcing the need for an appreciation of the persistent centrality of war, especially global war, in the discontinuous growth and expansion of the modern state.

After bringing together independent information on contested territory, rivalries, and conflict escalation (militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) and war), we examine the timing of the temporal ordering of these three processes. Contrary to conventional expectations, we find the contested territory-militarized dispute-rivalry ordering to be rare. Rivalries and contested territory often begin at the same time. Next, after setting up a unified model, we find the triadic combination of contested territory, contiguity, and strategic rivalry to be a strong explanatory combination for MIDs and war over time . We also control for other explanatory factors such as mixed regime type and major power status. These findings provide strong support for arguments such as Vasquez's steps-to-war theory that specify these sources of conflict escalation.

International conflict is neither random nor inexplicable. It is highly structured by antagonisms between a relatively small set of states that regard each other as rivals. Examining the 173 strategic rivalries in operation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book identifies the differences rivalries make in the probability of conflict escalation and analyzes how they interact with serial crises, arms races, alliances and capability advantages. The authors distinguish between rivalries concerning territorial disagreement (space) and rivalries concerning status and influence (position) and show how each leads to markedly different patterns of conflict escalation. They argue that rivals are more likely to engage in international conflict with their antagonists than non-rival pairs of states and conclude with an assessment of whether we can expect democratic peace, economic development and economic interdependence to constrain rivalry-induced conflict.

One of the democratic peace puzzles is the question of whether and to what extent the democracy → peace relationship underestimates the possibility that peace precedes democracy: the reversed causal arrow hypothesis. From a war making-state making perspective, democratization needs to be viewed as a partial function of external threat and domestic power concentration. All three variables are found to be interrelated as predicted and related in turn to the external conflict behavior of major powers from 1816 to 1992. These monadic findings, however, do not appear to negate the dyadic relationship between democratization and selectively reduced conflict behavior. In sum, there is substantial support for the reversed causal arrow hypothesis, but it does not render the regime type → conflict behavior relationships spurious. Rather, it enriches the understanding of the context in which democratization has emerged to have some effect on international politics.