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. To show that these mechanisms can significantly impact ealr crises, I closely examine the Sino-IndiaWar of 1962 and Sino-Soviet Border Conflict of 1969 using primary Chinese sources, and briefly review three additional cases of more recent crises. In the conclusion, I discuss the implications for coercive diplomacy and crisis management. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Political Science First Advisor Avery Goldstein Keywords Crisis Escalation, Inadvertent War, Provocation Subject Categories International Relations This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3100 TYING THE ADVERSARY’S HANDS: PROVOCATION, CRISIS ESCALATION, AND INADVERTENT WAR Hyun-Binn Cho A DISSERTATION in Political Science Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2018 Supervisor of Dissertation Avery Goldstein, David M. Knott Professor of Global Politics and International Relations Graduate Group Chairperson Alex Weisiger, Associate Professor Dissertation Committee Avery Goldstein, David M. Knott Professor of Global Politics and International Relations Michael C. Horowitz, Professor Alex Weisiger, Associate Professor TYING THE ADVERSARY’S HANDS: PROVOCATION, CRISIS ESCALATION, AND INADVERTENT WAR c COPYRIGHT 2018 Hyun-Binn Cho This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ Dedicated to my parents, Dr. Hee-Kyung Kang and Dr. Myung-Rae Cho. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Above all, I thank my dissertation committee. I feel remarkably fortunate to have been able to work with Avery. His wise counsel, unfaltering support, shrewd critiques, and friendship motivated me to pursue my doctoral studies with greater ambition. Mike has been a unique source of inspiration. His sharp questions, generous encouragement, and unfathomable productivity motivated me to push beyond my limits as a scholar. Alex’s kindness, depth of insights, and modesty never ceases to amaze me. He was on the receiving end of too many late-night emails, and his pain-staking efforts to help me develop the game theoretic models in Chapter 4 motivated me to go a step deeper with the entire dissertation project. I would also like to thank members of the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Edward Mansfield and the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics were tremendously supportive over the years. Matt Levendusky, Marc Meredith, and Ryan Brutger gave me helpful comments at the early stages of developing the survey experiment in Chapter 3. Devesh Kapur graciously helped me prepare for fieldwork in India. Yue Hou gave me plenty of helpful advice. Megan Kauffmann, Naya Blackman, and Rebekah Rosenberg helped me get over many administrative hurdles. My cohort and the gradaute students in the department kept me in good cheer throughout the years. Juman Kim and his family, in particular, have been extremely kind to me. A special thanks goes out to the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania. Avery Goldstein, Jacques deLisle, and Yuanyuan Zeng generously supported a project that would have only been a dream: the China and International Relations (CHAIR) graduate research workshop. I founded CHAIR in 2014 to bring together graduate students from across the United States working on China and IR, and through the years, the workshop has helped me mature as a junior scholar. I thank all iv those who participated in the workshop and the colleagues in the department who organized the workshop in subsequent years, making CHAIR an annual event: Brian Chao, Siyao Li, Chris Liu, Will Piekos, and Scott Wingo. For my final year in the Ph.D. program, I was fortunate enough to spend a year as a pre- doctoral fellow at the Intitutie for Security and Conflict Studies (ISCS) at the George Washington University. I am enormously grateful to Charlie Glaser for giving me the opportunity to spend a year in Washington D.C., and for the comments and encouragement that helped sharpen and better articulate my theory. I also thank Stephen Biddle and Elizabeth Saunders for giving me insightful suggestions on my project, Bruce Dickson and Caitlin Talmadge for being generous with their time to offer me advise, and Alex Lennon and Matt Levinger for being supportive of my research. I also learned a great deal from the graduate students whom I became acquianted with while at the ISCS: Ryan Baker, Rush Doshi, Dan Jacobs, Mike Joseph, Jooeun Kim, Alex Kirss, Kendrick Kuo, Daisuke Minami, Shahrya Pasandideh, Jen Spindel, Brian Razinsky, and Frances Yaping Wang. I have also incurred debts to those from other institutions. I presented a paper summarizing my core arguments at the Harvard International Security Conference 2017, and I thank Stephen Walt for detailed and encouraging comments. I also thank the organizers of the conference, Joshua Kertzer and Tyler Jost, as well as Austin Carson and the conference members, for helping me improve my arguments. The chapters in this dissertation have also benefited from comments and critiques on papers that I presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting 2015 and 2017, and the International Studies Association Annual Convention 2016, 2017, and 2018. For help conducting field research in Beijing and New Delhi, I am also grateful to Peking University’s School of International Studies and the University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India. v Finally, I thank Myung-Rae Cho, Hee-Kyung Kang, Hyun-Seung Ashton Cho, and our family dog, Jeje. This dissertation would not have been possible without the patience, love, and support of my family. vi ABSTRACT TYING THE ADVERSARY’S HANDS: PROVOCATION, CRISIS ESCALATION, AND INADVERTENT WAR Hyun-Binn Cho Avery Goldstein 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 to develop three game-theoretic models that analyze how provocation affects crisis dynamics in different strategic contexts. To show that these mechanisms can significantly impact real crises, I closely examine the Sino-India War of 1962 and Sino-Soviet Border Conflict of 1969 using primary Chinese sources, and briefly review three additional cases of more recent crises. In the conclusion, I discuss the implications for coercive diplomacy and crisis management. vii Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENT . iv ABSTRACT . vii LIST OF TABLES . xi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS . xiii CHAPTER 1 : Introduction . 1 Provocation in International Politics . 12 The Argument in Brief . 22 Plan of Dissertation . 27 CHAPTER 2 : Provocation, Crisis Escalation, and Inadvertent War . 29 Provocative Effects and Resolve in Interstate Crises . 29 The Logic of Provocation . 34 Provocation,