Dan Altman, "Taking Territory: The Persistence of Conquest Since 1945" (Cornell UP, 2026)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

New Books Network

Episode: Dan Altman, "Taking Territory: The Persistence of Conquest Since 1945" (Cornell UP, 2026)

Host: Eleonora Matiacci
Guest: Professor Dan Altman, Associate Professor of Political Science, Georgia State University
Date: July 12, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores Professor Dan Altman’s new book, Taking Territory: The Persistence of Conquest Since 1945 (Cornell University Press, 2026). Prof. Altman challenges the conventional wisdom that territorial conquest effectively ended after World War II, arguing instead that conquest persists—albeit in smaller and less conspicuous forms. Through theoretical development, empirical data, and examples ranging from small island disputes to major wars, Altman paints a nuanced picture of how territorial acquisition remains central to global conflict, its causes, and its alarming implications.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Conquest

[03:18] Prof. Dan Altman:

• Prevailing view: Conquest largely ended post-WWII due to a strengthened norm of territorial integrity.
• Reality: "There is a lot more conquest than we thought and that the international community rarely does a whole lot. And when it does, it's usually because of interests and not because of norms."
• Full-scale annexations declined, but seizures of parts of countries have persisted globally since 1945.

The War Expectations Theory

[06:05] Prof. Dan Altman:

• Altman’s theory posits that post-WWII, states have shifted towards strategically seizing smaller, less defended territories in hopes of avoiding major war.
• The "fait accompli" (accomplished fact) strategy: Take territory quickly and gamble on the opponent's reluctance to escalate.
  • Memorable examples:
    • Kargil conflict (India-Pakistan, 1999)
    • Falklands War (Argentine attempt at a quick takeover)
• "The fait accompli has become, over time, more and more the predominant strategy of conquest. This idea, you just sort of take it and try to get away with that." [06:40]
• Many conquests target unpopulated or militarily weak areas (e.g., South China Sea).

Empirical Findings: Causes & Consequences

[11:40] Prof. Dan Altman:

• Pre-WWII: Conquest involved whole states, large areas, or undefended slivers.
• Post-WWII:
  • Dramatic decline in conquering whole states.
  • Seizure of small, often "worthless" pieces of land persists.
  • Large-scale limited aims wars in the Cold War (e.g., India-Pakistan, Arab-Israeli), but now rarer.
  • "The only major empirical claim of the territorial integrity norm literature that holds up...is the decline in attempts to conquer whole states." [12:55]
  • U.S. interventions never occurred over partial annexations.
  • Territorial wars remain a leading cause of conflict even when conquest is supposedly ‘dead’.
• Motives:
  • Economic/resource explanations overblown.
  • Most conquests are not about resources or strategic value.
  • Image Value/Careerism: Personal ambitions of military and political actors, including field commanders seeking fame or promotion. E.g., Buhari in Nigeria (1983/1985/2015).
    • "These people are often the people really pushing for conquest. There’s a handful of interesting cases where they just do it without permission at all." [14:23]
  • Sometimes seized lands are recaptured by the victim, or exchanged for equally empty land with minimal bloodshed.
• Reversal of conquest:
  • Diplomatic solutions rarely succeed.
  • Most reversals happen "at gunpoint", especially for conquests of whole countries (e.g., Kuwait 1991, South Korea 1950).
  • For partial annexation, usually no third-party intervention; outcomes determined by direct conflict and relative power.

Data and Methodology

[18:19] Host Eleonora Matiacci:

• Praise for Altman’s More Than Conquest dataset: Comprehensive coverage of all territorial conquest attempts, successes and failures, providing rigorous empirical backbone.

Broader Implications: Escalation and Nuclear Risk

[19:38] Prof. Dan Altman:

• Small-scale territorial disputes can escalate rapidly—sometimes between nuclear states.
  • Example: Sino-Soviet border conflict over Zhenbao Island, Kargil War (India-Pakistan).
  • "These are the places where the most important crises, you know, two, two of the most bloody and most important nuclear crises in history happen." [20:25]
• The U.S. has mostly sat out these conflicts, especially in the Global South, but may not have the luxury going forward (e.g., Senkaku Islands, South China Sea, Taiwan, Estonia).
  • "This problem is not one the US is going to be able to sort of stick its head in the sand and ignore going forward." [23:39]

Recent Trends & Prognosis

[25:52] Prof. Dan Altman:

• Pessimistic about the future: data since 2020 shows an uptick in territorial grabs (Ukraine, Armenia/Azerbaijan, India/China).
  • "So pessimistic is the answer. And it's. That's not just me. Like the world has gotten worse over the last five years." [25:52]
  • Yet, previous decades (1990s, Cold War) were also rife with conquest; current trend may be a "return to normal", albeit a troubling one.
• The norm of territorial integrity is under strain, but it was never as robust as sometimes believed.

Core Message

[29:25] Prof. Dan Altman:

"If you want it in a sentence, I would say conquest has not gone away, but they have gotten smaller."
[29:25]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Conventional Wisdom:

  "Rumors of the demise of conquest have been a bit exaggerated."
  [03:18]

• On Motives for Minor Conquest:

  "Sometimes it is the frontline unit and theater commanders who have this chance by grabbing even a small piece of territory to make a name for themselves, to make themselves national heroes."
  [13:54]

• On Policy Implication:

  "Conquest has not gone away, but they have gotten smaller... that is this big problem that countries in many parts of the world have to confront..."
  [29:25]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:45 – Introduction & main research puzzle
• 03:18 – Critique of conventional wisdom on conquest
• 06:05 – War Expectations Theory & strategic adaptation
• 11:40 – Empirical findings: causes and consequences of conquest
• 14:23 – Motives: "Image value" and careerism
• 17:00 – Diplomatic versus military reversal of conquest
• 18:19 – Dataset contribution ("More Than Conquest")
• 19:38 – Implications: nuclear escalation, U.S. policy, contemporary flashpoints
• 25:52 – Recent trends, pessimistic outlook, "return to normal"
• 29:25 – Core message: conquest persists in smaller forms
• 30:11 – Ongoing research: why do states and publics value small territories?
• 33:43 – Coercion vs. Imposition in international conflict

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Conclusion

Altman’s research upends the notion that territorial conquest is a thing of the past, showing instead how—and why—it persists in less conspicuous but still dangerous forms. The book’s rigorous theory and evidence illuminate the enduring centrality of territory to international politics, the personal and political motives that drive land grabs, and the limits of international norms and diplomatic remedies. The risk for escalation—including between nuclear powers—remains alarmingly present. For policymakers, scholars, and concerned listeners, the lesson is clear: "Conquest has not gone away, but it has gotten smaller."

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Transcript

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[Eleonora Matiacci]

Hello. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Eleonora Matiacci, an associate professor of political science at Amherst College. Today I'm here with Professor Dan Altman, who's an associate professor of political science at Georgia State University. His new book is called Taking Territory the Persistence of conquest since 1945. It was published in 2026 by Cornell University Press. In their Cornell Studies in International affairs series. Professor Altman, thank you for joining us and welcome.

[Professor Dan Altman]

Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

I will start by quoting the very first lines from your book. Whoops. Few acts are more consequential in international politics than seizing cherry. George for millennia, conquest played a central role in the deadliest wars. End quote. Professor Altman, why yet another book on taking territory? What is the conventional wisdom on this massive topic and why were you dissatisfied with it?

[Professor Dan Altman]

So this may surprise a lot of your listeners, but the conventional wisdom in the studies of conquest trends that have been done over the years is that conquest largely went away after World War II. In some accounts, it went away immediately after World War II. In some accounts, it took until about 1975 to fully go away. But either way, the argument is that this idea, this thing called the territorial integrity norm, grew much stronger after World War II. Basically, this is a norm that says it is not okay to conquer territory. It is wrong. For some of the proponents of this argument, the idea is that because it's wrong, states simply don't do it. For others, it's more of a logic where because it's wrong, when states do try to do it, the international community steps in and stops them. You can think about the Korean and Gulf wars as sort of the. Sort of go to examples here, but it turns out that there is a lot more conquest than we thought and that the international community rarely does a whole lot. And when it does, it's usually because of interests and not because of norms. So what I show in this book is that while taking over whole countries did decline a lot after World War II. Taking over parts of countries continued, persisted, continued. We've seen many, many of them, really across the entire period from 1945 till now. It's never gone away. It's continued to be a major cause of war. So that is sort of the main conventional wisdom, the sort of demise of conquest. Rumors of the demise of conquest have been a bit exaggerated. Conventional wisdom that I challenge. But there are others. There's also a very different idea that, well, why would you take territory? It's because it's valuable, right? It's because it has resources. It's because it has strategic locations. What sense would it make for countries to get into these big crises and fight wars over kind of small, worthless areas? But they do like that. That logically, that makes perfect sense. But history is clear that this happens all the time. And it's a significant cause of war, significant cause of crises, and something we need to worry about even though resources usually aren't present, even though the locations usually aren't strategically valuable. So we need some other explanation.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

Great. So I think you're right that this conventional wisdom that conquest went away mostly after World War II might surprise many of us nowadays. And I agree, if you actually look at the news, you see exactly what you were talking about. Taking over part of countries doesn't seem to have gone away. Now that you told us what you found puzzling in this kind of take on territorial conquest, explain to us your theory. You formulate 13 hypotheses to test, which is a lot. Tell us more.

[Professor Dan Altman]

Yeah, So I call my argument War Expectations Theory. And the basic idea here is that while conquest hasn't gone away, it has changed. And to the key to understanding that is understanding that that over time, countries have become more and more sort of strategic and judicious and careful to design their conquests in a way that tries to avoid war. So when we think of conquest historically, and this was more common up through World War II, you start a war, if you win the war, you take over large territories, right? But more and more over time, conquest has come to be that you grab a small piece of territory and then you make this in sort of a calculated gamble that you can get away with keeping it without ever having to fight at all. And some of these are bloodless and successful, others of these sort of backfire and you get sort of, you know, the, the Cargo conflict in 1999 between Pakistan or the Falklands War was meant to be just a quick sort of fait accompli by the Argentinians. And of course, the, the British didn't go along with that plan. But, but for the most part, this strategy is, is, keeps, keeps war sort of out of the picture. So the fait accompli has become, over time, more and more the predominant strategy of conquest. This idea, you just sort of take it and try to get away with that. And we see more and more, therefore, states targeting smaller territories, even territories that if you really want to minimize the risk of war, don't have populations and don't have military forces that need to be dislodged to take them. You can think about occupying little islands in the South China Sea or small pieces of the border between China and India, such as in the crisis in 2020 that ended up eventually killing 20 plus soldiers. These are sort of good examples of what I'm talking about. Other parts of this argument are that, you know, we think about, sort of, not surprisingly, territorial Disputes. Territorial conflict is the sort of, maybe the most important cause of war historically, certainly one of the top candidates, you might think, if conquest is getting smaller or going away, that's no longer true. And while there is some decline there, it's not as large as one would think, because there's a specific chain of events where you try to grab a small piece of territory, thinking you can get away with it. But sometimes you're wrong, sometimes you miscalculate how much the other side cares how willing they are to fight. And so you have this specific sequence of events where miscalculated fait accompli provokes a war that has become, you know, one of the leading sort of causes of war, sort of chains of events that lead to war. We need to understand that. And then finally, I think this theory that you're sort of trying to take territory while avoiding war more and more over time is also helpful for understanding not just taking territory, but what the victim does about it, what the defender does. What do you do when the piece of your territory is seized? And it turns out most of the time what you can do is seize it back. So seizing smaller territories provokes war at a much lower rate, but it's not more successful than seizing larger territories. Not much anyway. And the reason is that there's a fair number of times where you see something and they just seize the exact thing right back. There are some other times where you move forward in one area and they move forward in a different empty area and nobody even has to shoot in some of those cases. But either way, it isn't this sort of silver bullet that is always successful.

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[Eleonora Matiacci]

You know there's, there's. So, so you explained to us your war expectation theory. You told us the role that the, the accompli plays in the theory. At some point I hope now we're going to switch to the findings. But there's like there are some questions that you address in your book about, well, why would you try to get territory that is of little value? But hopefully we can get to that question. I wanted to switch to the findings to the empirics. Right now the book is actually divided in two parts. First the causes of conquest and then its consequences. Walk us through what you find in each of those two parts.

[Professor Dan Altman]

So first of all, there's the parts of the book that test my argument and they find broadly what I just described. They find that we see sort of before World War II, such as in the period World War I to World War II, we see conquests of whole states, of large parts of states, and of these small sort of parts of states that have lower war risk, places that maybe aren't populated or defended. They're all common. Right. And then we see after World War II taking over whole countries declines. And then around the 1980s we see even taking sort of large parts of countries with what's sometimes called the limited aims strategy. So where you, you plan to fight a war and you're trying to seize maybe a province or more, but you're hoping it will be a limited war. This often doesn't work very well. But we see a fair number of these during the Cold War. You can think about Somalia, Ethiopia, the Arab, Israeli wars, most of the wars, Pachino, Pakistan, situations like that. These have become rarer since the 1980s, although Armenia, Azerbaijan a few years ago is an interesting exception to that. Just like Ukraine is of course the very big and Important exception to the most recent exception since the Gulf War, to the decline in attempts to conquer entire states. So we see all that. We also see that seizing territories with the characteristics I mentioned reduce the risk of war on the territorial integrity norm. We see just really the only major empirical claim of the territorial integrity norm literature that holds up to my sort of conquest data is the decline in attempts to conquer whole states. But we don't see that for attempts to conquer parts of states. We don't see the international community regularly intervening to oppose conquest attempts. In fact, I don't think the United States has ever, in the entire history of the country fired a shot to defend a country over anything less than an attempt to conquer the entire country. Country, right. So if you think about US commitments to Japan to defend the Senkaku Islands or to the Philippines, potentially over parts of the Spratly Islands, this would be. Or to Taiwan, you know, or to Taiwan or its outlying islands. The US has actually never done anything like fighting over places like that before and has chosen not to time and again, when opportunities have arisen, which I think is interesting. We also see that territorial war remains sort of maybe the most important cause of war even in this period when conquest was supposedly not happening anymore, which is very important. Then you asked about motives. So we don't see that states are seizing territory very frequently. Where there are resources, where there are strategic value. There are some cases of each. Saddam Hussein did like to seize oil. I will not say the Golan Heights or the Sinai lacks strategic value. But for the most part, I think these explanations are overblown. They fit our sort of theoretical intuitions about why states would want territory more than the actual history. And so I argue instead what's. What's most important in these cases is what I call image value. So it's not so much about what's in the land. It's about the benefits to various political actors. It could be heads of state, could be the top brass in the military. But most interestingly, sometimes it is the frontline unit and theater commanders who have this chance by grabbing even a small piece of territory to kind of make a name for themselves, to make themselves national heroes. And there's evidence in the book that these people are often the people really pushing for conquest. There's a handful of interesting cases where they just do it without. Without permission at all, just do it completely on their own initiative. They're not always completely honest with their home governments in making the case for this. Or they might sometimes portray it as a defensive move. When it's not. And then there's evidence also that a fair number of the people who seize even relatively small areas go on to become like the top general in their army some years later, or even the head of their country. For example, in 1983, a small border conflict between Nigeria and Chad. A colonel named Muhammadu Buhari seizes some disputed islands in Lake Chad without permission, gets reprimanded for it. But not too long later, in 1985, there's a military coup and they end up putting him in charge. And then remarkably, in 2015, he is democratically elected to be president of Nigeria again, which is just funny. So these little events, I mean, and by the way, they seem little to us. They're not as little to the countries involved in the global South. They're maybe the most important conflict they have in a 20 year period. Some instances they make a big impact. So I call this the careerist theory. The idea that sort of officers are doing this for their own sort of ambitions and benefits. And they may not see it that way. You know, motivated reasoning is a powerful drug. They'll tell themselves a story where this is in the national interest, but it's a chance to sort of go from a nobody to a hero. And I think that's important in not all of these cases, but an interesting and significant number of them. And then I can add consequences. So I'll just focus on one finding here from the part of the book about consequences. So big part of that sort of section of the book looks at what can we do about conquest attempts. Right, the different ways. So conquest attempts happens. Can we reverse it? How are conquest attempts reversed? And there are a number of diplomatic options. Could be bilateral negotiation, could be the international community or something like the. The ICJ steps in and, and mediates kind of arbitration. Right, sorry, arbitration by the icj, mediation by other actors, all these things. And what I find basically it's a bit depressing, is that there are some notable successes for diplomacy, but on the whole, fewer than you'd want, fewer than you'd hope. And in general, if conquest is reversed, it's reversed at gunpoint. And to be more specific, if it's a conquest of a whole country, it's usually reversed by some powerful third actor eventually coming in. This is mostly just cases during World War II, but also the Kuwait and South Korea cases I mentioned. But if it's a part of a country, and those are the episodes I'm really interested in this book. Most of all, typically nobody intervenes. And these are the post 45 cases. Right. And the victim is just sort of on their own and sometimes they win that war or win that fighting and actually more than you might think. So that's typically how a conquest either succeeds or it fails at gunpoint most of the time. Relative power is also the strongest statistical predictor of who wins, who keeps control of seized territory, even though it's not actually a predictor of whether conquest attempts occurring. So all of that is a bit depressing, particularly if you think about places like the South China Sea and what could be done if China seizes more territory there. But it is unfortunately, what I find this is like.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

I should thank you for breaking down these findings across the two sections of the book. I just want to mention these massive data set that you put together. I believe it's called More Than Conquest dataset. It is thorough, it is very rich. There is information on all these attempts, whether they were successful or not, and in my view is sort of the backbone of the book. And it's a huge contribution to the field. You said something while you were answering this question about how sometimes we choose to fit the evidence to our theories more than the other way around. And these types of deep dives into the evidence make those processes less likely. It's harder to tell ourselves a certain story when we are faced with so much evidence. So I just wanted to mention this. It's impressive. It's impressive. Thank you for doing that on behalf of the field. So you told us a little bit about the findings. You talked about the image value of the territory. You talked about these career theories that you put forward. You told us about the limits of diplomatic efforts to mediate these conflicts. Tell us now about the implications of your findings.

[Professor Dan Altman]

Yeah, so there we could spend the whole podcast episode talking about different specific implications of different parts of the book. But let me start. Let me give you sort of a main answer that maybe goes in a direction you weren't expecting, which is the possibility of nuclear war. So that's not a question that one would naturally think is at issue here. And when we think about sort of that problem, we tend to think about the Cuban Missile crisis, which I would not categorize as it's as a sort of territorial dispute. But when we look a little deeper, the two actual incidents where nuclear powers were directly, more or less openly shooting at each other on the battlefield were the Kargil war in 1999, when Pakistan tried to get away with grabbing some hills in the Kargil district of Kashmir that were at least approaching A somewhat important highway, but not exactly like the. The epitome of valuable real estate in the grand scheme of things. And then an even clearly less valuable territory, the Zembao Island. This is a river island in the Usuri river between China and the Soviet Union. That led was the proximate sort of place where a Chinese ambush of a Soviet patrol led to the Sino Soviet border conflict. This is like an uninhabited, small, basically worthless island. These are the places where the most important crises, you know, two, two of the most bloody and most important nuclear crises in history happen. You could think about, it's a somewhat different. But you can think about the role of West Berlin as a smaller territory, although more important perhaps than the two I just mentioned. That was sort of the. The sort of crux of some of the other most important Cold War crises. The reality is that this specific problem of that, that this book focuses on, of seizing small territories, trying to get away with it, but sometimes not succeeding in the situation blowing up into a crisis and sometimes a war. It's just very important for thinking about future threats, even the threat of nuclear war, just, just sort of go around China's periphery. Start with the Senkaku Islands, disputed with Japan, small, uninhabited. With Taiwan, that's a bigger issue, right? Bigger, bigger territory. But Taiwan has Kinmen and Meizu, little islands that are inhabited right off the Chinese coastline. There were serious crises over them in the 50s. It also has Ichiwaba and the Spratlys. And then you keep going and you get the Philippines, another, another US ally like Japan that disputes the Spratly Islands with China, Malaysia and Vietnam also disputing those. And then you get over to India and actually Bhutan as well, where China has in the last decade nibbled, if you will, encroached in various areas along the disputed borders there, building just villages to stake a claim to territory. In Bhutan, occupying areas at India's expense, particularly in Ladakh, you know, there's another sort of nuclear tandem, right? India and China. And we could keep going and talk about India and Pakistan, although that's a different situation. Like, these are very serious problems. And, and one thing that's interesting is. So I show in the book that even since 1975, the period when conquest is really supposed to be rare, wars are still mostly fought over territory. But if you look a little more closely at that, what you'll see is that there are the wars over territory and there are the wars that involve the United States and they're very like negatively correlated. They're almost. They're not. They're not with the Gulf War. They're not entirely separate, but they are mostly separate. And this is, I think part of the problem is that these wars, basically there are the wars involving the US and then there are all these territorial wars. And mostly in the global South. Of course, now we have one in Europe, but mostly in the global South. And it's caused us sort of the way the US just sits them out, the way it did with Armenia and Azerbaijan's war a few years ago has caused us to underestimate how common and important these are. And that's particularly a problem because more and more the threats that we worry about are this type of threat just involving our allies in China. Or you could think about Narva, for example, in Estonia, and the threat to Narva from Russia as another example. This problem is not one the US Is going to be able to sort of stick its head in the sand and ignore going forward.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

I did not understand where you were going to go, and you started with nuclear war at the beginning of it, but now I kind of really, really see it. Like I really see it. That's a great implication to delve into from the ones you present in the book. Thanks for doing that. Next question. You've been working on this book for years. How many

[Professor Dan Altman]

decade, roughly? Maybe that's how it's done.

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[Eleonora Matiacci]

Now that the book is out and the world looks the way it does. So the book came out in 2026. Do you feel more optimistic or more pessimistic about the future of conquest?

[Professor Dan Altman]

So pessimistic is the answer. And it's. That's not just me. Like the world has gotten worse over the last five years. It's subjective. I mean, and in fact, if you look at the International organization article that has some of the key arguments here from 2020, the trend lines are going down. And if you look at, in the book, the trend line flips up at the end and the conquest trend line, the parts of, you know, conquest of parts of states, basically conquest trend line flips up at the end because things have been bad in the last few years and they're, you know, the better known Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan cases. There's also smaller Armenia, Azerbaijan case. There's a case in Africa, and then of course, the India, China border crisis. And that's, that's a lot of conquest in the last six years. So some of my colleagues are sort of making the case that like, the norm of territorial integrity is in danger. Right. It's. It's weakening. This is a huge problem. And it's not hard to understand given all the conquests, given that it's coming for places like Ukraine, where it wasn't before, you know, Europe, basically the west, to some extent, you can see where they're coming from on that. I would push back, though, in the sense that I think that to say it's gotten so much worse portrays the past in an overly rosy way. And let me be more specific here. We see kind of an interesting low point in conquest from let's call it 2001-2013, sort of the peak global war on terrorism era, although I'm not saying there's a causal relationship there. This is also more or less peak of US power. And then we see more since, particularly since 2020. So that is discouraging and perhaps tracks with this sort of declining US power in the world. And now, of course, we have a president who's very explicit with his sort of lack of adherence to the territorial integrity norm. You can think about his lack of interest in supporting Ukraine, but also Greenland, Canada, et cetera. So all of that is Very alarming. But the problem is, if we go back before 2001, even to the 1990s, the real peak of sort of PA Americana, there's a lot of conquest, there's a lot of war over territory, you know, all throughout the decade, even towards the end, when you get things like the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea kills 100,000 people or the Kargil war that I mentioned a minute ago, both happening in the late 90s 90s. Start with the Gulf War, right. There's a lot. And then throughout the Cold War, Arab, Israeli wars and India, Pakistan and all these other conflicts are going on. So if you just think about it from the perspective of sort of our recent experiences, the last 20ish years, 25 years, it feels worse. If you look at it a little bit more broadly, it feels a little more like a return to normal, unfortunately. And we'll see what the trend lines are. Maybe it will continue to get worse and worse and the world is heading off a cliff. Or maybe we're back to sort of where we were 30, 40 years ago.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

Well, we were. No, but I understand, I think I understand your point. You're pessimistic. So pessimistic. You started the answer by saying I'm pessimistic, but then perhaps you're less pessimistic than those of us that don't look at this long term trend. Do I hear you correctly?

[Professor Dan Altman]

No, I think that's fair. I'm pessimistic to a limited extent, moderately pessimistic. Not setting off alarm bells in panic quite yet.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

If our listeners could take away just one core idea from your book, what would that idea be?

[Professor Dan Altman]

Well, if you want it in a sentence, I would say conquest has not gone away, but they have gotten smaller. I could continue from there, but that's the very basic point. And just understanding that and that that is this big problem that countries in many parts of the world have to confront and will continue to have to confront. I think it's just important for all sorts of planning purposes, both for deterring these, these call them land grabs, these conquest attempts, and for responding to them where they do have.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

Well, that's the perfect one sentence. Conquest has not gone away, but it's gotten smaller. Professor Altman, we've taken enough of your time today. We always conclude with one question. What are you working on right now?

[Professor Dan Altman]

Yeah, thank you. So I have one project that is continuing on from some of the puzzles in this one that I'm working on with Kathleen Powers at Dartmouth and we're Interested in this question of, like, why are states so often, you know, seizing, claiming, even going to war over, like, small territories that you can't quite call worthless, but are closer than one might have expected? And obviously the book has a lot of information and answers on that, but we wanted to sort of approach this in a different way. And in particular, what we're curious about is do people really care, like, value these little territories, places like the Senkaku Islands, small uninhabited islands in the East China Sea? Do they really value them?

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[Professor Dan Altman]

Because they're part of their homeland. Maybe for some other reason. Maybe they really think there's a lot of oil and gas in the waters around them. Whatever the reason is, do they really value them? Or is this really more about competition with China and not wanting to sort of take an L to take such a visible public loss to China than it is about the islands themselves? And so to get at that, we're doing something that is maybe clever, maybe a little bit crazy, which is we're doing a survey experiment in Japan where we're comparing Japanese reactions to losing the islands in different ways, including losing them to China, including losing them to Taiwan, which also claims them. But the really interesting part is that, and everything is based on this, is we also have a treatment condition where they lose them to a geological event. They just sink, right? Due to what we call subsidence, they just sink. And what we want to know is, are people even upset, right? If these islands just sank, would people even be upset? Would they view that as worse than the status quo? It's even possible they might think it's better because now they don't have to worry about fighting with China over them and, you know, problem solved. That tells us something about whether they value them. But also, would they be much more upset losing them to China than losing them to a geological event? Which is what we expect because this is maybe more about competition with China. So that's one thing I'm working on. I'll tell you about one other paper, so I'm really. And this is related to this project as well. I'm really interested in this fundamental question of how states get what they want in conflicts. And I think there are two basic options. One is you, and this is the one that is much better studied, is you make threats, right? You use coercion or coercive diplomacy, bargaining, crisis bargaining, whatever you want to call it. You make threats. You demand something like, say, a piece of territory. And if your threats are credible and the costs are high enough, they give in I think, and I've shown in some research, this just hardly ever actually happens. It's really hard to get countries to give into threats for a mix of strategic, psychological and domestic political reasons. Most of the time this is the key point. Most of the time, I believe if you want something the other side doesn't want to give up, you either take it or you don't get it right. So imposition is really the strategy through which gains are made, with conquest being a major example of that, not coercion. So I'm trying to both theorize sort of why this is true and show that it's true in the conquest area, but also with foreign imposed regime change. If you want to change foreign regimes, you tend to do it by invading the country, not with threats. Recent bizarre events with airstrikes and special forces raids kidnapping leaders be notwithstanding, since those are basically ends of one. But typically you do it by invasion, much like U of Wire territory. So that sort of coercion versus imposition paper is where I'll leave you here.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

That sounds like a great paper. And if there's a book coming out of it at some point, you must come back and tell us all about it.

[Professor Dan Altman]

Thank you.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

Thank you, Professor Altman. My guest has been Professor Dan Altman, who is an Associate professor of Political science at Georgia State University. His new book is called Taking the Persistence of conquest since 1945. It was published in 2026 by Cornell University Press. I'm your host, Eleonora Matiacci.

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