IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/jocore/v56y2012i4p675-703.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Foreign Direct Investment and Territorial Disputes

Author

Listed:
  • Hoon Lee

    (Department of Political Science, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA)

  • Sara McLaughlin Mitchell

    (Department of Political Science, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA)

Abstract

This study evaluates the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and interstate conflict, focusing on four prominent causal mechanisms: the declining benefits of territorial conquest, increasing preference similarity, increasing opportunity costs of violence, and improved information signaling. Empirical analyses show that new territorial issues are less likely to arise as global levels of FDI increase, although monadic and bilateral FDI flows have no effect on states’ decisions to start new issue claims. Higher bilateral FDI flows between two disputants significantly reduce the chances for escalation to high levels of violence over issues and improve the chances for peaceful management. Increasing global levels of FDI also reduce the chances for severe militarized conflicts. Opportunity costs are an important mechanism linking FDI and states’ conflict management practices, as the pacifying effect of bilateral and monadic FDI on militarized conflict becomes stronger in dyads with a history of militarization over the issues at stake.

Suggested Citation

  • Hoon Lee & Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, 2012. "Foreign Direct Investment and Territorial Disputes," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 56(4), pages 675-703, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:sae:jocore:v:56:y:2012:i:4:p:675-703
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://jcr.sagepub.com/content/56/4/675.abstract
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Abb, Pascal, 2013. "What Drives Interstate Balancing? Estimations of Domestic and Systemic Factors," GIGA Working Papers 238, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:jocore:v:56:y:2012:i:4:p:675-703. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://pss.la.psu.edu/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.