Uncertainty about Power Shifts and Motivations to Fight

• In Event: Great (and Small) Power Politics

Abstract

Formal modelings of war demonstrate that expected large power shifts drive declining states to fight preventively, but few empirical studies have tested the preventive war hypothesis. Existing work only examines the relationship between the size of future power shifts and the probability of preventive war. I argue that uncertainty about whether power shifts will ever occur can mitigate states' preventive motivation to fight: states can be highly uncertain about whether power shifts will realize, thus their overall expectation about power shifts can remain ambiguous even conditional on large sizes of future power shifts. To precisely capture a state’s concern about future power shifts, I measure the uncertainty about future power shifts by estimating the variance of future military power. I incorporate it into a quantitative test of preventive war hypothesis, while accounting for the size of future power shifts and other related variables.

Author

• Haonan Dong, Vanderbilt University