Geographical perspectives on international cooperation and conflict

Chi, Sang hyun

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/29830 Copy

Description

Title

Geographical perspectives on international cooperation and conflict

Author(s)

Chi, Sang hyun

Issue Date

2012-02-06T20:20:26Z

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Flint, Colin

Committee Member(s)

• McLafferty, Sara L.
• Vasquez, John A.
• Cidell, Julie

Department of Study

Geography

Discipline

Geography

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• political geography
• geopolitics
• scale
• context
• spatial analysis

Abstract

This study is a quantitative and spatial analysis of international cooperation and conflict. Using geographic concepts and spatial analysis, this research revisits two sets of existing research questions 1) UN general assembly voting patterns and 2) the escalation of territorial disputes. Political geographers have emphasized the need to look at political issues using key concepts developed in geography. In this dissertation the concepts of context and scale are applied to revisit existing studies. First, the support to the U.S. in UN general assembly votes is examined at a regional scale. Previous studies on UN voting did not take spatial dependency into consideration despite the common inclusion of spatial dependence in the study of electoral geography. The research design in this dissertation uses spatial regression models to explore the spatial context and the scale at which the politics of UN voting is constructed. Second, previous studies of territorial disputes are revisited through the lens of contextual analysis. Building on theoretical and methodological developments in political geography and peace science, local spatial statistics are implemented and the results are compared to those of previous global scale analysis. Geographically weighted regression was used to take spatial heterogeneity into consideration in the model. The results of the analysis show that a contextual understanding provides different empirical results from the dominant approach of political science that was designed to identify universal political processes. The dissertation draws the broad conclusions that the application of regional and local scale analysis significantly changes the explanations provided by global scale analysis. The application of spatial analysis can make it possible to incorporate geographical concepts into the study of international cooperation and conflict. This dissertation confirms that geographical concepts and spatial analysis are useful in providing a better understanding international politics, one that focuses on contextualized rather than universal political processes.

Graduation Semester

2011-12

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/29830

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2011 Sang hyun Chi

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