Author Description

While territorial disputes have been an enduring feature of international politics for centuries, systematic knowledge about the origins, evolution, and termination of such disputes is limited. In Standing Your Ground: Territorial Disputes and International Conflict, Paul Huth, through an examination of 129 territorial disputes between 1950 and 1990, provides clear and compelling answers to such questions as: When are international borders likely to be disputed? When are territorial disputes likely to escalate to high levels of conflict? When will disputes be settled peacefully by compromise and concessions?. Presented here is a new theoretical approach for analyzing the foreign policy behavior of states that integrates insights from traditional realist as well as domestic politics approaches to the study of foreign policy. Huth's approach is premised on the belief that powerful explanations of security policy must be built on the recognition that foreign policy leaders are domestic politicians who are very attentive to the domestic implications of foreign policy actions. Hypotheses derived from this new modified realist model are then empirically tested by a combination of statistical and case study analysis.