International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)

My dissertation project seeks to answer the following questions:  Why does foreign intervention lead to differences in the way states institutionalise governance?  When might outside intercession into the domestic politics of weak states lead to the development of sovereignty?  After all, external intervention has been a key element of state formation from the creation of the British Raj to the establishment of Soviet client states to state-building in Iraq and Afghanistan today.  This line of enquiry is especially pertinent in a world where outside efforts to establish order in weak states seem unlikely to abate.

I argue that competition amongst external powers within fragile polities can actually foster the development of centralised sovereign states.  To do this, I develop a concept of perceived opportunity costs.  Essentially, as the expected returns from investing to secure a target state fall relative to those of other objectives, costs rise.  This approach considers how an actor manages the trade-offs between committing capabilities to safeguard a polity from rivals and pursuing alternative goals.  Such a perspective updates and refines standard accounts of expected gain that pay less explicit attention to how different objectives compete for limited capabilities.

When perceiving high individual costs of intervening in a weak state, contending foreign actors tend to discard their inclinations to seek total supremacy.  Instead, they settle on supporting sovereign statehood as the next best option to their greatest fear, the domination of that country by adversaries.  Convergent expectations about high intervention costs amongst outside actors, therefore, advance the development of sovereign statehood in weak states.  Alternatively, divergent cost perceptions promote fragmentation by encouraging external actors to adopt disparate approaches to secure a fragile polity from each other.

To test my claims, I examine and compare state formation processes in China, Indonesia, and Thailand from the early 1890s to the early 1950s.  I contend that foreign intervention counter-intuitively fostered China’s transformation from a fragmented polity into a sovereign state toward the mid-twentieth century as well as Indonesia’s de-colonization and maintenance of sovereignty in the same period.  It as well accounts for Thailand’s early movement toward sovereign statehood at the turn of the twentieth century.  In all these cases, when various outside actors expected robust intervention to be “expensive”, they jointly worked with local groups to promote sovereignty as a means to limit their opponents’ influence.  In exploring this dynamic, I underline how collaboration between local groups and foreign actors to compete against their respective external and domestic adversaries can contribute to governance.

The dissertation will be of particular interest to students of international relations as well as East Asian politics and history.  Based on an analysis of how foreign rivalries play out inside fragile states, my research can help both scholars and practitioners think about some of the complex issues at the intersection of international and domestic politics.  My findings indicate that it may be possible for external attempts to create stable governance in weak polities to succeed.  However, an outside power either has to overwhelm all foreign rivals and domestic groups in a state or seek coordination with other relevant external actors.  The first approach may require an inordinately high investment in intervention, whilst the second may entail conceding the initiative to others and risk various collective action, commitment, as well as coordination problems. 

In taking seriously the multifaceted relationships that exist between indigenous groups and outside actors, the dissertation expands on current knowledge about nationalism and collaboration.  Specifically, I look at the issue of local cooperation with foreign actors, a phenomenon common in cases of external intervention but under-emphasised in standard nationalist narratives, especially in China but also in East Asia more broadly.  I do so by triangulating from largely unseen archival material collected from Beijing, Nanjing, and Taipei, as well as new Chinese- and English-language secondary material.  This enables the thesis to highlight the conditions under which local and foreign actors may cooperate to establish order and control over a fragile polity.

My dissertation builds on, engages, and augments existing scholarship on state formation as well as international politics and security.  First, in looking at how foreign security competition may play out in domestic politics, I expand on work looking at how international systemic pressures can affect the inner workings of state formation in fragile polities.  Second, in taking power asymmetries between foreign and local actors seriously, I underscore the effect that force and material considerations can have on the success or failure of ideas about how to organise the state.  Different state forms remain mere concepts without agents to realise them in practice.  Finally, in examining foreign intervention, my theoretical framework can inform efforts to understand current externally-led efforts to institute order in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Additionally, this thesis will prove informative for the study of modern Chinese history in two significant ways, given its close assessment of new archival and secondary material.  My dissertation illustrates that external intercession into domestic politics was critical in preventing China’s disintegration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  This challenges perspectives that see foreign intervention simply as a driver of division.  Moreover, the consideration of local collaboration with outside actors in the thesis draws attention to a sensitive and under-emphasised phenomenon that deserves more systematic analysis than is currently the case.  Such a line of enquiry can help improve understandings about the origins, nature, and development of Chinese nationalism.