Papers

Are states more willing to claim territories with economic resources? While previous theories of international relations assume that resources make a territory more tempting to claim all else equal, I argue that certain types of economic resources can make states less willing to claim a territory. The presence of capital-intensive resources in a territory—such as oil or minerals—raises concerns about how the benefits of acquiring the territory would be distributed within the nation. These distributional concerns make it harder and costlier for leaders to mobilize support over claiming resource-rich lands. Using original geocoded data of territorial claims in South America from 1830-2001, I show that states are indeed less likely to claim lands with oil or minerals, even when the resources lie within lands that can be claimed for historical or administrative reasons. I then illustrate the theoretical mechanism through a case study of Bolivia, comparing Bolivian attitudes toward reclaiming its two lost provinces of the Chaco and the Litoral. By showing how the presence of economic resources can become a liability in mobilizing unified support over the territory, this paper questions the widespread assumption that resources make territories more desirable all else equal.

What international issues become national interests worth fighting for, and why? Contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that issues without clear economic value, such as barren lands, are more likely to be perceived as national interests because they do not benefit any single domestic group. Since who benefits is unclear, politicians have an easier time framing such issues as benefiting the whole nation. I test this argument using survey experiments on the American public. The results demonstrate that first, issues providing diffuse benefits to citizens are more likely to be considered national interests than issues providing concentrated benefits to certain domestic groups. Second, issues with clearer economic value are harder to frame as having diffuse benefits because they are more easily associated with specific beneficiaries. This study proposes a new theory of national interest and offers a potential explanation for why people frequently support conflict over issues without obvious benefits. 

The rate at which states defend their allies in war has dropped from 81% during 1816–1944 to 7% in 1945–2016. I attribute the decline in honored alliances to a dramatic shift in the military capability of alliances. Contrary to the popular belief that alliances have become stronger after 1945, I find that the post-1945 international system also witnessed a significant increase in the number of weaker alliances. This bimodal distribution of alliances produced a pattern where alliances were either violated upon being attacked or never attacked in the first place, leading to a decline in the rate at which alliances were honored. I support my argument using alliance data over two centuries. This research advances our understanding of military alliances by documenting a polarization of alliances in terms of their military capability post-1945 and by providing an explanation for an empirical puzzle—a sharp decline in the rate of honored alliances after 1945.

Abstract: A significant component of intense rivalry between the United States and China in the recent decade has been competition for allies and partners. As nations are squeezed by both superpowers to choose a side, what has often been overlooked is that middle powers have agency. We examine middle power preferences in the case of South Korea, who faces a security-economic trade-off as a country that maintains a strong security relationship with the U.S. and a strong economic relationship with China. We field an original public opinion survey on 2,120 respondents in South Korea, and find that individual ideology and partisanship play a bigger role in determining their alignment preferences between the U.S. and China than personal economic considerations such as  individual job vulnerability to Chinese sanctions or reliance on Chinese goods consumption. 

Does school history education emphasizing narratives of past atrocities and violence from other countries increase support for hawkish foreign policies? We collect original data from 17 high schools and 34 classrooms in Seoul, South Korea, to examine whether anti-Japanese content in school history education affects high school students’ attitudes toward Japan. Additionally, we leverage a quasi-random high school assignment process in South Korea to compare how the attitudes of students educated with a more pro-U.S. textbook differ from those educated with a more anti-U.S. textbook. We find that while textbook content influences what kind of historical events students believe as "facts" and how they interpret historical events, textbooks are much less effective in shaping students’ current foreign policy preferences—negative evaluations of other countries’ historical behaviors do not necessarily lead to hawkish foreign policy preferences against the country. These findings have implications for studies on conflict and international rivalries.