Inadvertent Expansion: How Peripheral Agents Shape World Politics

The Elliott School Book Launch Series and the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies present the book launch for featuring author, Dr. Nicholas Anderson.

About the Event

• 12:00PM, Opening Remarks, Alyssa Ayres, Dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University
• 12:05PM, Author's Remarks, Nicholas Anderson, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, George Washington University
• 12:40PM, Audience Q&A

This event is open to the public and the media and it will be on the record. It will not be livestreamed, however, it will be recorded. Please register to join us in-person in Room 602 at the Elliott School of International Affairs.

About the Book

In , Nicholas D. Anderson investigates a surprisingly common yet overlooked phenomenon in the history of great power politics: territorial expansion that was neither intended nor initially authorized by state leaders.

Territorial expansion is typically understood as a centrally driven and often strategic activity. But as Anderson shows, nearly a quarter of great power coercive territorial acquisitions since the nineteenth century have in fact been instances of what he calls "inadvertent expansion." A two-step process, inadvertent expansion first involves agents on the periphery of a state or empire acquiring territory without the authorization or knowledge of higher-ups. Leaders in the capital must then decide whether to accept or reject the already-acquired territory.

Through cases ranging from those of the United States in Florida and Texas to Japan in Manchuria and Germany in East Africa, Anderson shows that inadvertent expansion is rooted in a principal-agent problem. When leaders in the capital fail to exert or have limited control over their agents on the periphery, unauthorized efforts to take territory are more likely to occur. Yet it is only when the geopolitical risks associated with keeping the acquired territory are perceived to be low that leaders are more likely to accept such expansion.

Accentuating the influence of small, seemingly insignificant actors over the foreign policy behavior of powerful states, offers new insights into how the boundaries of states and empires came to be and captures timeless dynamics between state leaders and their peripheral agents.

About the Author

Nicholas Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at The George Washington University. His research and teaching interests include great power politics, military intervention and territorial expansion, conventional military operations, and East Asian international relations., published by Cornell University Press, is his first book. His research and other writings have also been published in journals such as International Security, International Interactions, Political Science Quarterly, The Washington Quarterly, Strategic Studies Quarterly, the Australian Journal of International Affairs, and International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, among other outlets. He previously had fellowships at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, the MacMillan Center Program on Japanese Politics and Diplomacy at Yale University, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He received a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.

Host or Publisher Elliott School Book Launch Series