Regime Change and the Management of Territorial Disputes

• In Event: Poster Session: International Security 2

Abstract

Domestic political shocks like regime change play an important role in both the escalation and deescalation of violence within territorial disputes. In this essay I argue that these shocks lead to both escalation and deescalation because they act to disrupt the status quo relationship —friendly or hostile —between the two parties to the dispute. When the ex-ante relations between countries are friendly, regime change disrupts trade and investment ties and damages security cooperation. This increases the perceived value of owning the disputed territory, and in turn increases hostility between the disputants. When ex-ante relations are unfriendly, however, regime change has been shown to lead to new economic and security cooperation where it was impossible before. This cooperation serves to distribute the value of a piece of disputed territory, lowering the value of direct ownership and thus subsequently decreases hostility within the dispute. This essay presents a test of these arguments in a dataset of territorial disputes spanning 1945-2001 and provides multiple forms of evidence in support of the underlying argument. The findings presented here imply that accounting for the ex-ante relationship between disputing states is critical to understanding conflict outcomes and cannot be ignored in future scholarship.

Author

• Richard Saunders, Florida State University