Essays on Power Shifts, Information Uncertainty and International Conflict

Abstract

Studies on international conflict identify large shifts in countries' relative power as a major cause of war. However, the rise and fall of nations is a common phenomenon in international politics and significant shifts in relative power do not always cause wars. Moreover, bilateral interstate relationships can involve competition and cooperation, which complicates countries' incentive about whether to launch preventive wars. My dissertation studies the causes and consequences of power shifts on the prospect of conflict and peace. In the first chapter, I study how do states improve their bargaining power by intentionally stalling crisis negotiations, and why do their adversaries sometimes tolerate bargaining delay. I argue that this is because states cannot perfectly distinguish between intentional and unavoidable delays. I study a game-theoretic model and show that declining states' uncertainty about the source of delay allows rising states may mask bargaining delays behind natural exogenous delays to complete a peaceful power shift. In the second chapter, I conduct an empirical test on how shifts in relative power impact the risk of war. I quantify states’ contemporaneous uncertainty about future military power and devise a measure of uncertainty about expected power shifts. My empirical results show that the provocative effect of large shifts in relative power on war initiation diminishes with the uncertainty surrounding them. Thus, we may miscalculate the risk of war by overlooking states’ uncertainty about expected power shifts. In the third chapter, I build a game-theoretic model to investigate how countries allocate resources between cooperation in which mutual contribution is most beneficial and competition in which countries gain from outnumbering others' resources. The country that wants to revise the status quo faces the trade-off that whether to pretend to be a cooperative partner, or evade cooperation to have more resources for the competition. I investigate how countries’ perceptions about others' intentions and the ex ante balance of power influence the patterns of bilateral interaction.