Escalation of Conflict: The Spiral of Hostility

Most conflicts do not start as full-blown hostility. They begin as small disagreements, minor frustrations, or competing demands. Yet over time, many of these disputes grow far beyond their original cause, pulling both sides into a contest that neither truly wanted. This intensification is what scholars of peace and conflict call escalation. Understanding how and why conflicts escalate is one of the most important steps toward learning how to manage and eventually resolve them.

What escalation actually means 🔗

Escalation is the process by which a conflict grows in severity or scale over time. It can happen between two individuals, between communities, or between nation-states. In each case, the dispute becomes more intense, the tactics become harsher, and the willingness to cooperate shrinks. Conflict escalation is often modelled in systems theory as a form of positive feedback, where each hostile action produces a stronger hostile reaction in return.

The key feature of escalation is that it is rarely a single dramatic jump. Instead, it moves in steps. A threat invites a counter-threat. An insult invites a sharper insult. A defensive move by one party is read as an aggressive move by the other. With each step, the stakes rise and the room for compromise narrows.

The spiral of hostility 🔗

The clearest way to picture escalation is as a spiral. In the conflict-spiral model, conflict breeds more conflict. Each party extends and intensifies the dispute by reacting in a punitive or defensive way to the other side’s behaviour. As one classic account of intergroup conflict explains, this produces a continuing spiral of escalation that traps both parties, regardless of how small the original source of friction may have been.

This is an important insight. The spiral model does not focus on a single “first cause” or on identifying one guilty aggressor. Instead, it describes the dynamic, interactive process through which two parties find themselves caught in an upward spiral of hostilities. Even a trivial starting point can produce a serious confrontation once the spiral takes hold.

Why fear and defensiveness drive the spiral 🔗

Escalation feeds on fear. When one side perceives a threat, it responds in a way meant to protect itself. The problem is that protective measures often look threatening from the other side’s point of view. This is the heart of the spiral model in international relations: well-intentioned, defensively motivated actors can stumble into an arms race or even war, because the means one party uses to make itself more secure often have the unintended effect of making the other party less secure.

This dynamic is closely tied to the idea of the security dilemma. As scholars describe the security dilemma, an increase in one state’s security, such as building up its military strength, leads other states to fear for their own safety, since they cannot be certain whether that strength will be used defensively or offensively. The result is tension, escalation, or open conflict that no party actually wanted.

Misperception and the self-fulfilling prophecy 🔗

A central reason conflicts spiral is that parties misread each other’s intentions. A defensive build-up gets interpreted as preparation for attack. A cautious silence gets read as contempt. Once each side assumes the worst about the other, it acts accordingly, and those very actions confirm the other side’s worst fears. In this way escalation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: both sides justify their own hostile behaviour as a necessary response to a threat that their behaviour helped create.

The political scientist Robert Jervis captured this neatly by contrasting two ways of reading an opponent. According to one widely cited summary of deterrence and spiral dynamics, the spiral model emphasises the tragic risk of self-fulfilling prophecies and escalation between actors who are actually security-seeking, while the deterrence model warns instead about the danger of appeasing a genuinely aggressive opponent. Because another party’s true intentions can never be known with certainty, deciding which situation you are actually in is a genuine dilemma.

How escalation gathers speed 🔗

Escalation does not always proceed at a steady pace. Certain factors can suddenly accelerate it, while others quietly make it more likely over the long term.

Trigger events and hostility thresholds 🔗

A trigger event is a specific incident or action that provokes a sharp jump in the conflict, usually by crossing a threshold of what the other side will tolerate. As one overview of conflict escalation triggers and patterns notes, this hostility threshold is the point at which an action is seen as so provocative that it demands a major escalatory response. A single border clash, a harsh public statement, or a sudden show of force can act as this kind of spark.

Polarisation and the silencing of moderates 🔗

As a conflict heats up, the parties tend to drift toward more extreme and mutually exclusive positions. This polarisation makes compromise harder, because moderate voices on both sides get marginalised and harsher actions start to seem justified. When the people advocating restraint lose influence, escalation accelerates.

Structural factors 🔗

Some escalation has less to do with any single incident and more to do with the underlying situation. Structural escalation occurs when the very structure of a conflict, such as a sharp imbalance of power, competition over scarce resources, or deep historical grievances, makes escalation more likely even without a dramatic trigger. These deeper conditions form the soil in which conflicts grow.

Stages on the escalation ladder 🔗

One of the most influential attempts to map this process is the nine-stage model developed by the conflict scholar Friedrich Glasl. His framework, summarised in a widely used account of Glasl’s nine-stage model of conflict escalation, treats escalation as a downward slope divided into three broad levels, with three stages each.

In the first level, the conflict is still rational and the parties believe a mutually acceptable solution is possible. It begins with hardening, when opinions crystallise into fixed positions, and moves through debate and then a shift from words to actions. By the middle level, the goal changes from solving the problem to gaining the upper hand: each side tries to damage the other’s reputation, issues threats, and resorts to ultimatums. In the final level, the parties abandon any thought of mutual gain. Their aim becomes pure damage to the opponent, even at growing cost to themselves. Glasl describes how, at the very last stage, the drive for self-preservation is given up entirely, leaving no check at all on destructiveness.

What makes this model so useful is its emphasis on the internal logic of escalation. As the summary stresses, the model locates the cause not in the personalities of the individuals involved but in the situational pressures acting on them. Conscious effort is needed to resist these escalation mechanisms, because they build a momentum of their own.

Real patterns of escalation 🔗

These ideas are not merely abstract. The classic historical illustration of the spiral model is the naval rivalry before the First World War. As one accessible explanation of the spiral and deterrence models describes, Germany expanded its navy hoping to dissuade Britain from acting against its interests, but this build-up only convinced Britain that it was being threatened, prompting Britain to expand its own fleet and draw closer to France. Each defensive step provoked the next, and the spiral helped pull Europe toward war.

Researchers have also documented this dynamic at the level of communities. A recent study on the reciprocal escalation of violent extremism found that opposing groups expressed stronger support for hostility when they perceived hostility from the other side, demonstrating a vicious cycle of gradual escalation that builds well beyond the initial act. The same pattern appears in everyday life, such as hate crimes spiking after a major attack, showing that reciprocal hostility tends to feed on itself.

Why escalation is so hard to reverse 🔗

The longer a conflict spirals, the more entrenched each side becomes in its position, and the lower the chances of peaceful negotiation. Several factors make this difficult to undo. Research on patterns of escalation identifies recurring obstacles, including the simple desire to win or at least not to lose, a rising sense of how much is at stake as the conflict drags on, and persistent misunderstandings and misperceptions between the parties. Poor communication makes all of this worse, because the channels that might allow a calming signal to get through are exactly the ones that break down as hostility grows.

The role of third parties 🔗

Because escalation has its own momentum, the parties often cannot stop it on their own. This is where third-party intervention becomes important. A neutral outsider, whether a mediator, a respected community elder, or an international organisation, can interrupt the spiral by restoring communication, correcting misperceptions, and offering each side a way to step back without appearing to surrender. The good news, captured in the same account of the conflict-spiral model, is that de-escalation can also occur in a spiral fashion, with conciliatory moves prompting reciprocal goodwill, just as hostile moves once prompted reciprocal hostility.

What do you think? Can you identify a recent dispute, whether personal, political, or international, where defensive moves by one side were misread as aggression and ended up making the conflict worse? And if you were a third party in that situation, what single step might have been enough to slow the spiral before it spun out of control?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_escalation
2. https://academicweb.nd.edu/~rwilliam/xsoc530/conflict.html
3. https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/download/power/chpt/spiral-model.pdf
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_dilemma
5. https://www.defensepriorities.org/explainers/grand-strategy-deterrence/
6. https://fiveable.me/international-conflict/unit-4/conflict-escalation-triggers-processes-patterns/study-guide/PVhoWSXGR4MaUw8L
7. https://mediate.com/glasls-nine-stage-model-of-conflict-escalation/
8. https://goodauthority.org/news/good-to-know-spiral-and-deterrence-in-international-conflicts/
9. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12673851/
10. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA2200/RRA2215-1/RAND_RRA2215-1.pdf