Investigating the Relationship between Disaster Diplomacy and Rapprochement in International Rivalries : A Transient Effect of Disaster Diplomacy in the Greco-Türkiyesh Rivalry

Most recently, a question of how natural disaster like earthquake and tsunami affects the dynamics among adversarial states has been a frequent topic in the studies of international rivalries. A group of scholars focusing on pacifying effect of natural disaster claim that the disaster affects public opinion between rivals such that both leaders and actors in civil society conduct disaster diplomacy by provoking a sense of humanitarian solidarity which might result in an irreversible rapprochement. The paper, however, proposes an alternative argument that the disaster has only a transient effect on the rapprochement because most of rivalries are “issue rivalries” in which two competing states maintain highly hostile relations over territorial and maritime issues. In such rivalries, leaders, despite disaster diplomacy, are restricted from reaching the rapprochement partly because of their zero-sum perspective on the issues and partly because of hard-line audience costs at home. The paper demonstrates this theoretical argument against the case of disaster diplomacy between Türkiye and Greece both in 1999 and in 2023, and highlights the implication of the case study for future rivalry research.