A risk assessment framework for predicting state reactions to major international conflicts: An interdisciplinary approach

Abstract

This article presents an interdisciplinary risk assessment framework for predicting state reactions to major international conflicts (MICs). Drawing on Rausand and Haugen's risk assessment theory from management science, and incorporating five prominent international relations theories from political science, the framework addresses three structural problems that have limited existing foreign policy prediction: the generalizability problem, the deductive contradiction problem, and the data uncertainty problem. The framework answers three essential questions – "What can go wrong?", "What is the likelihood of that happening?", and "What are the consequences?" – by combining inductive historical sampling, a theory-neutral identification of causal-explanatory factors (CEFs), and a logistic regression model. The article's primary contribution is methodological: it bridges the gap between management science's underdeveloped risk assessment in international conflict contexts and political science's limited predictive capability over state behaviour.