GPIS dissertation 6/10
Old Dominion University
College of Arts and Letters
The Graduate Program in International Studies
FAITS ACCOMPLIS IN THE SHADOW OF SHIFTING POWER
Joshua Hastey
The military fait accompli is so understudied a phenomenon in the international relations literature that even its definition is not widely known. A fait accompli is a unilateral revision to the status quo in an ongoing dispute over some distribution of benefits. Though recent work has demonstrated that faits accomplis are relatively common events in international history and current international relations, the subject remains undertheorized and empirically underexplored. This dissertation seeks to open up the conversation about faits accomplis in two complementary ways. First, it advances an original formal model of faits accomplis in the shadow of power shifts, interacting the effects of dynamic power on a rising state’s decision to use faits accomplis to revise the status quo in an ongoing territorial dispute. Second, it tests the predictions of the theoretical model against the evidence amassed in two cases of territorial disputes, China’s maritime territorial disputes with its Southeast Asian neighbors in the South China Sea, and those with Japan in the East China Sea.
The dissertation aims contribute to the international relations literature at three levels of generality: China’s security strategies, the security dynamics of East and Southeast Asia, and the growing body of work on faits accomplis in security studies. I offer and apply a coherent structural explanation of China’s behavior in the South China Sea while also providing insight into when and where we might expect faits accomplis in other contexts, and under what conditions such faits accomplis may give rise to war.
The results of the succeeding analysis are provocative. They question the received wisdom of Power Transition Theory that rising states will challenge declining states only once they approach parity of power. Instead, my model and analysis suggest that any shift in power, accompanied by sufficiently low costs of revision, can trigger faits accomplis on the part of dissatisfied rising states. They also suggest that the conditions for preventative war are weaker than previous formal models have predicted, making war a more likely outcome of power shifts than was previously thought.
Dissertation Chair: Dr. Jesse Richman
Dissertation Committee: Dr. Regina Karp, Dr. Cathy Wu, Dr. Andrew Collins
June 10, 2020
12:00 p.m.
ZOOM: https://odu.zoom.us/j/93655599262.
dissertationhastey.docx (14.5 KB)
Posted By: Margo Stambleck
Date: Tue Jun 02 08:30:54 EDT 2020