External Intervention and the Politics of State Formation

This book explores ways in which foreign intervention and external rivalries can affect the institutionalization of governance in weak states. When sufficiently competitive, foreign rivalries in a weak state can actually foster the political centralization, territoriality, and autonomy associated with state sovereignty. This counterintuitive finding comes from studying the collective effects of foreign contestation over a weak state as informed by changes in the expected opportunity cost of intervention for outside actors. When interveners associate high opportunity costs with intervention, they bolster sovereign statehood as a next best alternative to their worst fear – domination of that polity by adversaries. Sovereign statehood develops if foreign actors concurrently and consistently behave this way toward a weak state. This book evaluates that argument against three “least likely” cases – China, Indonesia, and Thailand between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.

Ja Ian Chong is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He received his PhD in politics from Princeton University in 2008 and was a 2008–9 Research Associate with the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program. His research has received support from the Chiang Ching-kuo International Foundation for Scholarly Exchange, the Woodrow Wilson Society of Fellows, the Bradley Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies and the Princeton East Asian Studies Program. He has worked in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, as well as the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies and the East Asian Institute in Singapore. He has previously taught at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His work has appeared in Twentieth-Century China and Security Studies.