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Abstract:
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Harvard Kennedy School Professor Graham Allison has published many articles and a book on the Thucydides Trap. The basic idea is that "when one great power threatens to displace another, war is almost always the result". For the 16 cases listed by Professor Allison, we quantified the time from competition engagement to outbreak of war in order to model the time course pattern. First, we fit six parametric survival models to the “time to war” data. Based on the AICc criterion, the exponential model is identified as the best model. Then, we combined all six models using Akaike weights. Based on the combined model, we predict that the risk or hazard of war is about 37% per decade, but in the first decade the risk is slightly elevated to 40%, and in the fifth decade the risk is slightly depressed to 34%. These findings may inform us about the trajectory of current and future great power competitions with Thucydides Trap dynamics.
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