Geography has been a central element in shaping conflict through the ages, and is especially important in determining which states fight, why they fight, when they fight, and more importantly, where they fight. Despite this, conflict literature has primarily focused on human geography while largely ignoring the geospatial context of ‘where' conflict occurs, or crucially, doesn't occur. Territorial disputes are highly salient issues that quite often result in militarized disputes. Terrain has been key to mitigating conflict even in the face of major variance in state capability and power projection. In this study I investigate how terrain characteristics interact with power projection, opportunity, and willingness and the impact this has across territorial disputes. Exploring terrain's interaction with these concepts and its effect among different types of conflict furthers our understanding of the questions listed above.

Although island disputes have returned to the geopolitical theatre on a small scale, to date, virtually no previous research on territorial interstate island disputes and violent escalation exists. This paper argues that when an island is positioned in a strategic location, because of its unique attacking, defending, and trade capabilities this may induce a willingness towards- and eventual use of violence in the attempt to conquer or defend the territory. This paper attempts to answer: under what circumstances do island disputes escalate? by modelling the influence of strategic locations on violent island disputes. It draws observations from Altman (2020c) and a novel data frame (1920 – 2020) with additional cases and an alternative operationalization of strategic locations along important lines of communication. It finds that island disputes are more likely to occur without BRD than non-island disputes. Meanwhile, island disputes escalate violently more often than they do not. An island’s strategic location, notwithstanding a broad or narrow operationalization, does not have a statistically significant effect on a violent outcome of a dispute. Instead, the presence of military garrisons, ceteris paribus, resulted in the most statistically significant effect. Consequentially, the causal mechanisms were adapted to include military garrisons.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / I present this thesis in two parts. The first is composed of a 35:41-minute documentary film entitled In the Crosshairs: how systemic racism compelled interstate development through Black neighborhoods. Accompanying it is this written essay that outlines my position and provides citations linking evidence to argument. Each component serves a different master. While the essay is intended for an academic reader, the film is intended for a general audience. Each component advances the argument. As a result of systemic racism, minority neighborhoods in Indianapolis have been devalued over time and, therefore, their residents have been left disproportionally vulnerable to displacement from federal interstate highway construction. They were vulnerable because their property was assessed as less valuable than surrounding land. Also, they lacked the political clout to resist “urban development”. Furthermore, their vulnerability was socially constructed. It never occurred to me that my place in society was arranged to my advantage. I didn’t feel advantaged in any way. Everybody I knew was like me or better than me, it seemed. As I matured, I learned that history is subjective and my world is only a small slice of history. I had never considered my whiteness an advantage. In truth, my situation has been shaped by a myriad of forces that were socially constructed. I discovered that the definition of “white” is fluid but, throughout history, has had an enormous impact on how people are treated. The following is a deep dive into what I discovered when I examined only one aspect of how race impacted the advantages I enjoyed simply because my parents were deemed sufficiently “white.”

This study uses the English School theoretical perspective in investigating European Integration. The research aims to understand how the European Defence-Industrial integration affect the European integration. By mapping the European Defence industrial block's political intention, and coupling it with the increased strength the block has received through the defence-industrial integration, the paper is able to conclude that the defence-industrial integration has led to the creation of a more integrated European defence-industrial society, that pressures the integration process-structure towards more politics of integration and cooperation.

This research focuses on the development of multi-criteria tools for measuring and analyzing the impacts of recurring and non-recurring congestion on freight corridors in the Portland Metropolitan Area. Unlike previous studies, this work employs several distinct data sources to analyze the impacts of congestion on Interstate 5 (I-5) in the Portland Metropolitan Area: global positioning system (GPS) data from commercial trucks and Oregon DOT corridor travel-time loop data and incident data. A new methodology and algorithms are developed to combine these data sources and to estimate the impacts of recurrent and non-recurrent congestion on freight movements' reliability and delays, costs, and emissions. The results suggest that traditional traffic sensor data tend to underestimate the impacts of congestion on commercial vehicles travel times and variability. This research also shows that congestion is not only detrimental for carriers and shippers costs but also for the planet due to major increases in GHG emissions and for the local community due to large increases in NOx, PM, and other harmful pollutants. The methodology developed throughout this work has the potential to provide useful freight operation and performance data for transportation decision makers to incorporate freight performance measures into the planning process.

"Where You Sit Matters: Diplomatic Networks and International Conflict" examines how a state's structural position within diplomatic networks influences its foreign policy behaviors, particularly in the domain of international security. Despite the established understanding in International Relations (IR) that relationships among countries matter, there is little empirical knowledge on what exactly the complicated web of those relationships looks like and how it impacts state behavior. Much IR literature tends to focus only on dyadic or multilateral relationships and treat networks as background, which has left a gap in our understanding of how the structures of international networks affect international outcomes. To address this gap, my dissertation uses network analysis and a variety of statistical methods to reveal key structures of diplomatic networks and examine their impacts on a state's foreign policy behavior. My argument extends in three directions. The first part uses a large-n, cross-sectional analysis to examine the impacts of a state's broker position within diplomatic networks on its decision to initiate and escalate militarized interstate disputes (MIDs). By using the rare events logit and Heckman selection models, I find that occupying a broker position in diplomatic networks increases a state's decision to initiate MIDs over the nearly 200-year period from 1817 to 2001; its marginal impact is nearly twice that of military capability. The second part employs a separable temporal exponential random graph model (STERGM) to examine how key structures of diplomatic networks influence a state's decision to terminate diplomatic ties. My findings show that the breakdown of diplomatic ties is not a rare event and network dynamics play a role in terminating ties: states take cues from other countries in the network to decide whether or not to terminate diplomatic ties. The last part uses a community detection method, specifically a link communities method, to reveal latent communities of the diplomatic network and identify key countries that belong to multiple communities. I find that the diplomatic network resembles a hierarchical structure in that diplomatic communities tend to overlap; only a small number of major powers simultaneously belong to multiple communities and few communities are independent from those major powers.

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In 1973 , the citizens of Nebraksa embarked upon the Nebraska I-80 Bicentennial Sculpture Project, which provided large roadside sculptures along Interstate 80. A controversial project, referred to as an outdoor sculpture garden, it was completed in 1976 as a lasting commemoration of America's Bicentennial, The sculptures are interspersed for approximately five hundred miles throughout the state and located on alternate sides of the expressway at roadside rest areas.

Does a leader's psychology affect his/her likelihood of initiating a militarized interstate dispute? The study of leadership psychology has continuously found support for the central assumption that leaders matter in explaining a state's foreign policy behavior. However, many of these research projects have relied on small-sample case studies and experimental methods that have limited generalizability. In this paper, I use two variables drawn from the research program on leadership trait analysis (distrust and need for power) in a multivariate large-n study to explain the initiation of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs). 1,601 cases are drawn from the Correlates of War MID data set. First, using an ANOVA model, I demonstrate that MID initiators have higher average scores for both distrust and need for power and that this difference is statistically significant. Then, using logistic regression, I demonstrate that distrust and need for power have statistically significant positive effects on the likelihood of MID initiation. I conclude by comparing the predicted probabilities of the psychological variables of interest with territorial contiguity. All of these methods demonstrate that the psychological traits of leaders have an important effect on the likelihood of MID initiation.

This dissertation examines how the state-building process relates to civil-military relations and how political influence of the military affects state's conflict behavior. By doing so, this study aims to introduce a nuanced consideration of the well-known civil-military problematique, which might be summarized as the threat the military can constitute to the polity that it is created to protect. I treat this paradox by addressing the following research questions: Why do some militaries have a qualitatively higher level of influence in politics than others? Second, how does the military's influence in politics affect a state's domestic conflict behavior? And third, how does it affect state's international conflict behavior? I develop a theory that when the military is heavily involved in the state-building process, it gains an unusual place within politics, gets itself imprinted in the DNA of the state, and gains undue political power. I name such militaries as state-builder militaries and argue that such states experience qualitatively different civil-military relations, in which the military acts as an extremely Praetorian institution. I argue that state-builder militaries would be able to insulate their political power from the democratization process that the country might experience and behave as persistent interveners in politics. I also argue that state-builder militaries would not want to retreat to their barracks as easily as predicted by the mainstream literature on military regimes. These arguments also contribute to the state-building scholarship. I present this theory by process-tracing the Turkish Military's longstanding political influence over the last 150 years. For my second and third research questions, I look at the price states pay when their militaries have undue influence on political decision-making. I argue that secessionist movements will be deterred from the military's political power and would refrain from engaging in violent secessionist strategies. I also contend that politically powerful militaries would be associated with a higher likelihood of interstate conflict initiation over territorial disputes. I find empirical support for these arguments by using large-N quantitative time-series cross-sectional research designs. The theory developed in this study regarding the impact of state-builder militaries on political development has important theoretical implications for the existing scholarship on civil-military relations, state-building, and democratization. Similarly, my findings regarding the relationship between political influence of the military and domestic and interstate conflict behavior of the state call for a nuanced consideration of the military-conflict nexus. The arguments developed in this study and its empirical findings also have policy implications regarding the political roles of the military, secessionist conflict, and interstate conflict over territorial disputes.