Action-Reaction or Rational Expectations? Reciprocity and the Domestic-International Conflict Nexus during the “Rhodesia Problem”

In this article, the author makes a case for expanding our focus from national-attribute studies of intranational conflict toward strategic behavior studies of intranational conflict. One payoff of such a move is that it enables us to specify a linkage between the strategic behavior of both domestic and international actors and thus address the often theorized, but rarely established, intranational-international conflict nexus. Further, the author takes a synthetic approach to the recent debate between action-reaction and rational expectations models of international conflict behavior and derives hypotheses concerning the behavior of both domestic and international parties to an armed intranational conflict. The hypotheses are then tested in a time-series case study design using the Rhodesian/Zimbabwean case for the period from 1957 to 1979. The results demonstrate that there existed an intranational-international conflict nexus in this case and highlight the utility of adopting a strategic behavior approach to studying armed intranational conflict.