This article addresses the scholarly debate on the relationship between interstate rivalry and military capacity. We draw on Tilly's bellicist theory of state formation in early modern Europe and Thies’ modifications to predatory theory, which prioritizes the role of interstate rivalry on state building, to explain variation in military capacity. We unpack the rivalry mechanism into spatial and positional rivalries and test how these two types of rivalry affect military capacity, and how positional rivalries affect military capacity in the long-term. Using time-series cross-sectional data analysis, we find that positional rivalries increase military capacity in the long term. Also, we find that spatial rivalry influences military capacity in the long-term, but its effects are uneven across indicators of military capacity, and it has a smaller effect on military capacity in comparison to positional rivalries. We conclude that not all types of rivalries have a uniform effect on military capacity and that competition over regional dominance, that is, positional rivalries, are the most impactful on military capacity. This study offers a more nuanced test of Tilly's bellicist theory and Thies’ modified predatory theory on state capacity.

本文讨论了关于国家间竞争与军事能力之间关系的学术辩论。我们利用蒂利关于早期现代欧洲国家形成的好战理论和蒂斯对掠夺性理论的修改，该理论优先考虑国家间竞争在国家建设中的作用，以解释军事能力的变化。我们将竞争机制分解为空间竞争和位置竞争，并测试这两种类型的竞争如何影响军事能力，以及位置竞争如何长期影响军事能力。使用时间序列横截面数据分析，我们发现从长远来看，位置竞争会增加军事能力。此外，我们发现空间竞争会长期影响军事能力，但其影响在军事能力指标上并不均衡，与位置竞争相比，它对军事能力的影响较小。我们得出的结论是，并非所有类型的竞争对军事能力都有统一的影响，区域主导权的竞争，即位置竞争，对军事能力的影响最大。这项研究对蒂莉的好战理论和蒂斯关于国家能力的改良掠夺性理论进行了更细致的测试。