University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2018 Tying The Adversary's Hands: Provocation, Crisis Escalation, And Inadvertent War Hyun-Binn Cho University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the International Relations Commons Recommended Citation Cho, Hyun-Binn, "Tying The Adversary's Hands: Provocation, Crisis Escalation, And Inadvertent War" (2018). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 3100. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3100 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3100 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Tying The Adversary's Hands: Provocation, Crisis Escalation, And Inadvertent War Abstract Recent tensions on the Korean peninsula and in the South China Sea have led to concerns that provocative actions, such as harsh rhetoric and low-level violence, might embroil the United States in an unwanted war. The international relations literature, however, does not offer a coherent theory of provocation and crisis escalation. Instead, scholars and policymakers rely on intuition or other mechanisms of escalation, such as those based on accidents, threat perception, or imperfect signaling to explain the dangers of provocation in crises. Drawing on recent insights in social psychology and the study of resolve, this dissertation advances a novel theory of provocation that explains how provocative rhetoric and military actions can distinctly lead to unwanted crisis escalation and conflict. I test my theory at the individual level with a survey experiment and use the findings ot develop three game-theoretic models that analyze how provocation affects crisis dynamics in different strategic contexts.