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Journal of Conflict Studies
Dominoes or Dice:
Geography and the Diffusion
of Political Violence
by
Patrick O'Sullivan
Patrick O'Sullivan is Professor of Geography at Florida State University.
INTRODUCTION
The domino theory of international political interaction, which seemed laid
to rest over a decade ago,1 has
arisen in a more generalized form as an explanation of the geographical
incidence of turmoil. The geographical
cliché of a falling row of dominoes was first voiced in the Pentagon in
1953. It provided an image of the force
and process to be contained by the USA in the Southeast Asian shatterbelt.
In 1991, when the Soviet Union
suddenly collapsed, for a fleeting moment the image was reversed and
cartoons appeared with dominoes falling
in the opposite direction before the onslaught of Coca Cola, McDonalds and
Levi Strauss. The disturbing
resurrection of the domino theme, however, occurred in the corridors of the
Kremlin. In the councils of the
Russian military establishment the simile was applied to the spread of
Islamic fundamentalism among the people
of Central Asian republics and autonomous states.2
There is no well articulated theory of the geography of political violence.
Pronouncements on the issue tend
to take extreme positions. On the one hand there are those who emphasize
what they deem to be a contagious
spreading of eruptions from country to country in epidemic fashion. These
are the domino theorists. In the
diplomatic history literature D.J. Macdonald argues that the domino
principle took shape in the Truman era,
basing this on the metaphorical language employed by the administration.3
This has been countered by Frank
Ninkovitch pushing its origins back to World War I.4 He treats domino
theory as a symbol of the world vision
which was first grasped by Woodrow Wilson. This conception of modernity
contained, "[t]he knowledge that geopolitical space has been compressed to
a globally explosive density."5 Awareness and anxiety built up over
"the macro implications of micro conflicts."6 Ninkovitch traces the
evolution of this construction and its
implications for US interventionism through the Nixon administration. This
concern with the role of domino
theory in the relationship between perception and policy was also the
subject of B. Glad and C.S. Taber's writing
on the psychological dimensions of war.7 The focus of these works, however,
is on the perceptions of American
statesmen and their actions, not on the correspondence of their perceptions
to reality. When we turn to
practitioners there are clearly some who would agree with Henry Kissinger
that, "the Domino Theory was not
so much wrong as it was undifferentiated."8
Whilst not dismissing the impact of diffusing ideas and attitudes and the
increased connectedness of the
modern world, there are others who would give greater weight to local
circumstances in the explanation of lethal
competition for power, considering violence to be endemic. Robert McNamara
wrote on US involvement in
Vietnam that, "[o]ur misjudgment of friend and foe alike reflected our
profound ignorance of the history, culture
and politics of the people in the area."9 O'Sullivan has summarized the
scholarly and practical opposition to
domino theory.10
Domino theory, then, posits that the inspiration for violence spreads from
one epicenter and proceeds from
one neighboring country to another in contagious sequence. The counter
position would be that political
violence is a chance generated response to local circumstances. Obviously,
the domino proposition is the strong
case and the more attractive construction to the imagination. The purpose
of this artcle is to evaluate the merits
of the two positions. To this end a survey was made of the global
incidence of violent political events month
by month for 1993, recording the local and global circumstances of each
conflict in a brief description.11 1993
was the year that the dust settled sufficiently after the collapse of the
Soviet empire to begin to see the shape of
things to come. These data, collected from news sources, described
conflictual incidents in which there was a
loss of more than one life. This record of hot spots for 1993 provided a
factual basis for the exploration of the
geographical dimension of political linkage. Mapping the data provides
quantitative evidence of the possible
transmission process operating between neighboring states. Before
proceeding to this the context needs to be
established with a history of domino theory in the Cold War era and beyond.
ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION OF DOMINO THEORY
The inspiration for the application of domino theory in the Cold War can be
traced to William Bullitt, who had
been US ambassador to Moscow in the 1930s.12 He feared that a monolithic
communism spilling out from its
Russian source, would sweep through China and Southeast Asia to engulf the
world. H.J. Wiens presented a
more scholarly version of this justification of American intervention.13 He
asserted that the historical force of
Han expansion was being harnessed by Soviet strategists for an assault on
the colonial powers in order to build
a new, communist empire. The first official expression of this view was in
National Security Council document
64 in February 1950, where it was stated that, "Indochina is a key area of
South East Asia and is under immediate threat."14 What came to be called
domino theory was formalized in a 1952 National Security Council
document, describing an attack on Indochina as "inherent in the existence
of a hostile and aggressive communist
China," holding that the loss of one Southeast Asian country would result
in "relatively swift submission to or
an alignment with communism of the rest of Southeast Asia and India, and in
the longer term, of the Middle East
(with the possible exception of at least Pakistan and Turkey) would in all
probability progressively follow."15
Admiral Arthur Radford was responsible for the domino analogy. In 1953, at
a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff he advocated the use of nuclear bombing to relieve the French at Dien
Bien Phu to prevent Indochina and
Southeast Asia from falling "like a row of dominoes" to communism.16 By the
1960s in the Kennedy
administration Walter Rostow and Maxwell Taylor had transformed the simile
into a theory. Kennedy used it
as a justification for intervention in Laos.17
C.P. Fitzgerald sought to dismiss "the fallacy of the dominoes," pointing
to the fundamental significances of
age-old rivalries between Annamese, Khmers, Thais, Burmese, Malays,
Javanese and Filipinos, rather than
communism, as a source of conflict.18 R. Murphy questioned the domino
theory as a reliable representation of
Chinese intentions and doubted that adjacency was an effective measure of
influence.19 The savage suppression
of the Chinese-led communists in Indonesia in 1965 pointed up the
importance of local circumstances in
determining outcomes. This event refuted domino theory for McNamara and
he sought to counter its influence
and wind down US militancy in Southeast Asia.20 McNamara's 1995
confessional mémoire makes it quite plain that in his mind the domino
mentality was the first of the eleven causes of disaster in Vietnam,
concluding: "1)
We misjudged then as we have since the geopolitical intentions of our
adversaries (in this case North
Vietnam and the Vietcong, supported by China and the Soviet Union) and we
exaggerated the danger to the
United States in their actions."21
Domino theory, however, survived these attacks and lived on in the Nixon
administration, surviving into the
1970s in the minds of John Connally, Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger. They
took out a full page advertisement
in the 6 June 1976 issue of The New York Times, exhorting Italian leaders
to keep communists out of government
there to prevent Mediterranean dominoes from falling. Henry Kissinger
remains attached to the notion still. In
1994 he wrote, "[e]ven in the absence of a central conspiracy, and for all
the West knew at the time, the Domino
Theory might nevertheless have been valid. Singapore's savvy and
thoughtful Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, clearly thought so, and he has
usually proven right."22
As late as 1985 Harm de Blij and Peter Muller, in one of the most widely
used geography textbooks, identified
domino theory as, "the idea that the fall of South Vietnam would inevitably
lead to communist takeovers in
Kampuchea, Laos, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia and, ultimately, Indonesia and
the Philippines."23 They clearly
deemed this to be a predictive model. After an hiatus of two editions when
it disappeared, domino theory broke
the surface again in 1994. In the 7th edition, de Blij and Muller restated
domino theory as follows: "Properly
defined, the domino theory holds that destabilization from any cause in one
country can result in the collapse
of order in a neighboring country, starting a chain of events that can
affect a series of contiguous states in turn."24 This is a much more
general proposition about the transmission of violent political impulses.
With their
new, wider definition, de Blij and Muller turn our attention to Southeast
Europe where the domino effect has
moved strife "from Slovenia to Croatia, onto Bosnia-Hercegovinia and
SerbiaMontenegro, Albania and perhaps
even Greece and Turkey." Neodominoism would seem to come down to the simple
proposition that political
violence and instability, whatever its complexion, is contagious and
spreads to neighboring countries. This proposition creates some
expectations about the geography of violent events. Observations of actual
events,
then, will enable us to make a judgement about the value of the theory.
EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE
To match the domino theory proposition for consistency with the real world,
a survey was made of collective
violence indulged in the pursuit of political ends, whether it be warlike
action or domestic rebellion or repression,
generating conflict sufficiently deadly to result in the loss of more than
one life. To test a geographic proposition
a geographical presentation of these data is apposite. They are presented
as a series of monthly maps showing
the accumulation of violent events through the year. To show clearly
whether new incidents are or are not close
to prior scenes of violence, incidents are shown by flashes when they first
occur in a place, but as dots thereafter,
even though there may be a reoccurrence of violence in the same place.
A month by month summary of new additions to the map follows and will
suffice to introduce all of the
relevant venues for violence, with descriptions drawn from de Lorenzo.25
January In Africa there was a continuation of fighting between UNITA and
government forces in Angola; while
in Zaire President Mobutu's guards clashed with dissident troops in
Kinshasa. Civil strife gripped Djibouti and,
despite the presence of would-be peacekeepers, factional clashes persisted
in Somalia. Central Eurasia saw civil
war in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Tajikstan. In Europe Croats
mounted an attack against the Serbs
in Krajina and Muslims, Croats and Serbs did battle in Bosnia. The
Guatemalan civil war played on in the
Americas.
MAP 1: January
February In Africa Tutsi rebels launched an offensive against the
government in Rwanda. Togo was ripped
apart by fighting between political factions. Government and rebel forces
clashed in Chad. In Niger Taureg
rebels attacked a number of villages. In Asia Hezbollah attacked the
Israelis in occupied southern Lebanon. In
the Americas fighting broke out between recontras and the army in Nicaragua.
MAP 2: February
March In Africa fighting occurred between rebel factions in the Sudan. In
the Middle East clashes took place
between Israeli security forces and Palestinians in the Gaza and the West
Bank. In Asia Annamese communities
were attacked in Cambodia. In the Pacific Bougainville secessionists
clashed with Papuan government forces.
MAP 3:
March
April In the Philippines government forces clashed with communist rebels.
MAP 4: April
May In Sri Lanka the president was assassinated with a bomb that killed 23
others.
MAP 5: May
June Rebel forces attacked a refugee camp near Monrovia in Liberia.
MAP 6: June
July In South Africa an attack on an Anglican church took place and
fighting occurred between ANC and
Inkatha supporters. In Congo deadly clashes broke out between government
and opposition supporters in
Brazzaville. In Turkey Kurdish guerrillas attacked a Turkish village.
MAP 7: July
August In Algeria Islamic fundamentalists attacked and killed a former
prime minister. In Peru Sendero
Luminoso supporters massacred fellow tribesmen who rejected Sendero control.
MAP 8: August
September In Kenya government forces quelled ethnic violence. Islamic
fundamentalists attacked police in
Egypt. In India Sikh extremists bombed the offices of the Congress Party
in New Delhi. In Haiti violence
against supporters of President Aristide escalated.
MAP 9: September
October In Burundi a wave of Hutu violence followed an attempted coup by
Tutsi paratroopers. In Northern
Ireland an IRA bombing was followed by revenge killings by Ulster Freedom
Fighters.
MAP 10: October
November In Nigeria a military putsch took place. In Israel security
forces killed a number of Palestinian
militants in Gaza and the West Bank.
MAP 11: November
December There were no outbreaks of violence in places where there had not
been incidents earlier in the year
.
MAP 12: December
ANALYSIS
It is evident that there was not a great deal of cross border influence at
work in the incidence of political
violence in 1993. Of all incidents only about a quarter (30 out of 119)
involved cross border activity, and this
was often a matter of seeking refuge or attempted peacemaking by a
neighbor. The 30 incidents arose from just
10 conflicts. There was a spilling of internal strife into adjacent
nations from Angola, Sudan, Togo and Rwanda,
with the flight of refugees, borders being closed and troops massed on
them. Rwanda's troubles also brought
in French troops to protect their nationals. There was a bigger and
longer-lasting foreign intervention with
US/UN peacekeeping efforts in Somalia, which registered with incidents most
months of 1993. The southern
part of the Lebanon had a continuing foreign presence in the form of
Israeli occupation forces and their allies
at war with the Hezbollah. Bosnia was subject not only to UN peacekeeping
operations but also the intervention
of the Croatian army. There was Russian involvement in Georgia and
Tajikstan's civil wars, with the latter
spilling over into Afghanistan. Azerbaijan's conflict involved Armenia and
spilled over into Iran.
If we only consider the second six months worth of incidents, to allow for
a reasonable build-up of prior
events, only half (5 out of 10) of the new outbreaks occurred in places
adjacent to countries which had seen
violent incidents previously. There was an equal chance of a new outbreak
occurring in isolation or next door
to a prior event.
The greatest fear of contagion abroad is of the spread of Islamic
fundamentalism with its purported center of
emanation in Iran. There were, indeed, outbreaks that could be credited to
Iranian Shiite inspiration. The
Hezbollah movement in Lebanon is the most obvious example. The
transmission process of militancy is in some
instances a matter of personal experience, as a voluntary mujahidin in
Afghanistan on the part of some Egyptians
and Algerians for example. Apart from being carried by passenger plane, the
new jihad is carried on tape and
via fundamentalist radio and television broadcasts. Islam is no longer
spread from country to country by horse
and the sword. Fundamentalists inspired violence accounted for about 15
percent of events in 1993 (18 out of
119). These would include those in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Tajikstan,
Algeria, Egypt, and Azerbaijan. There
was some cross border influence in over half of these (10 out of 18), but
this was in some instances benign, such
as the effort of the Iranian president to bring about the October ceasefire
in Azerbaijan. This set does contain
the only conflicts that came close to full-blown war between nations in
1993. In both cases the aggressors were
not the Islamic parties. In Azerbaijan the Armenian army intervened, and
in Tajikstan the Russians were involved, with Islamic forces employing
Afghanistan as a haven. There were also accusations that the Russians
were interfering in Georgia. Although Iranian influence on the Hezbollah
in Lebanon is well-established, there
is no evidence of direct control of fundamentalist groups in Egypt and
Algeria, and certainly no discernible cross
border effect. The only reference to the rest of the world in Algeria was
the campaign against foreigners started
in September which set a 30 November deadline for all foreigners to leave
Algeria or face attack.
The other significant area of cross border interaction involved Rwanda,
Burundi and Zaire in the continuing
conflict between Hutu and Tutsi, which has been in train for 400 years.
Nowhere else was there a strong and
persistent pattern of foreign interaction. The overwhelmingly predominant
source of strife was conflict between
ethnically or religiously identified groups. Three-quarters of the
incidents could be put in this category (88 out
of 119). Among the others, political parties are often aligned ethnic
lines. In some instances, such as Somalia,
the fighting is between clans and bears little or no relationship to
broader geographic scopes and identities.
CONCLUSION
It seems that the foundations of many battles in 1993 were laid down long
ago and violence reflects local
circumstances of physical setting and history rather than recent political
inspiration. The incidence and
repetition of violence in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Levant, East
Africa and Central Asia does suggest an
alternative hypothesis concerning the geography of violence. The
clustering of violent events that does occur
may reflect the lie of the land rather than any contagious spreading
between neighboring countries of political
inspirations. The areas of rugged terrain which house so many ethnic
conflicts give the advantage to the defence.
Historically numbers of distinctive groups have managed to survive in such
settings, sheltered from the wholesale
eradication or assimilation visited upon people on the plains. Rather than
the great tracts of cultural
homogeneity of the lowlands, the landscape has preserved ethnic variegation
and, thus, the potential for violent
competition in rough landscape. As Vincent Malmström, writing of Eastern
Europe, put it, "[l]owlands and
open plains tend to be culturally homogeneous . . . mountain regions
demonstrate considerable heterogeneity,
owing not only to the fact that rugged terrain is divisive but only because
they serve as refuges from lowland
invaders."26 The geographic disposition of violence in the world is
possibly not a reflection of diffusion
processes, but rather of their opposite, of resistance and fragmentation.
These regions have seen rivalry and
conflict for a long time. It has at times been subdued by imperial
subjugation, but reemerges when empires shrivel.
The majority of violent events in 1993 were clearly local matters. The one
political force that was expanding
in significance was Islamic fundamentalism and it is evident that the
process of its spread and potency was not
conditioned by geographic contiguity. However, the perusal of a year's
worth of news reports is hardly an
adequate basis to entirely dismiss such an entrenched image of the
geopolitical process as domino theory.
Clearly, the original Cold War context would imply a more prolonged time
frame for the operation of the domino
effect, and so information collected over several years would be necessary
to test the theory's validity. This note
was a response to the novel application of the notion to political violence
in the post-Cold War era. Over the
longer haul 1993 may prove atypical. The twelve month time frame from
January to December may fail to catch
an important periodicity in violent events. As a longer series emerges so
greater linkage may be revealed. From
where we stand now there are insufficient observations to warrant a
thoroughgoing probabilistic assessment of
the relationships involved. But for the present, from the limited
information available, it does seem that domino
theory, the notion of a contagious epidemic process in the incidence of
political violence, has little to recommend
it as an explanation of the pattern of global violence which is emerging
with the 1990s.
Endnotes
1. Patrick O'Sullivan, "Antidomino," Political Geography Quarterly, 1, no.
1 (January 1982), pp. 57-64.
2. "The domino game," The Economist, 19 December 1992.
3. D.J. Macdonald, "The Truman Administration and Global Responsibilities:
The Birth of the Falling Domino Principle," in R. Jervis
and J. Snyder eds., Dominoes and Bandwagons: Strategic Beliefs and Greater
Power Competition in the Eurasian Rimland (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 112-44.
4. Frank A. Ninkovitch, Modernity and Power: A History of the Domino
Theory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1994).
5. Ibid, p. 56.
6. Ibid, p. 68.
7. B. Glad and C.S. Taber," Images, Learning and the Decision to Use Force:
The Domino Theory of the United States," in B. Glad ed.,
Psychological Dimensions of War (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990), pp. 56-81.
8. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 641.
9. Robert McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New
York: Random House, 1995), p. 322.
10. O'Sullivan, "Antidonimo."
11. J. de Lorenzo, "Hot Spots 1993," Working Paper no. 1 (Tallahassee, FL:
Department of Geography Florida State University, 1994).
This data on violent events and description of their circumstances was
compiled using Keesing's Record of World Events, Facts on
File, Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report, and The Economist.
12. W.C. Bullit, "A Report to the American People on China," Life, 13
October 1947.
13. H.J. Wiens, China's March Towards the Tropics (Hamden, CT: The Shoe
String Press, 1954).
14. Quoted in Kissinger Diplomacy, pp. 623-24.
15. N. Sheehan, H. Smith, E.W. Kenworthy and F. Butterfield, The Pentagon
Papers (New York: Bantam, 1971), p. 29.
16. Robert B. Asprey, War in the Shadows (New York: Doubleday, 1975), p. 708.
17. Department of State, Bulletin XLIV, 17 April 1961, p. 543.
18. C.P. Fitzgerald, "The Fallacy of the Dominoes," The Nation, 28 June
1965, pp. 700-12.
19. R. Murphy, "China and the Dominoes" Asian Survey, 6 (1966), pp. 510-15.
20. Sheehan et al., Pentagon Papers, pp. 271-74.
21. McNamara, Retrospect, p. 321.
22. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 628.
23. Harm de Blij and Peter O. Muller, Geography: Regions and Concepts, 4th
ed. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1985), p. 525.
24. Harm J. de Blij and P.O. Muller, Geography: Realms, Regions and
Concepts, 7th ed. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1994), p.
569.
25. De Lorenzo, "Hot Spots."
26. Vincent Malmström, Geography of Europe (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1971), p. 112.
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