Minor Powers Militarily Challenging Major Powers: Pathways...
Minor Powers Militarily Challenging Major Powers: Pathways Combining International, Domestic, and Individual Level Conditions.
One of the scholarly assumptions, particularly from the realist school of thought, is that major powers shape the international sphere according to their will. Minor and weaker powers have been observed to usually prefer cooperation and collective security. However, under certain circumstances minor powers may prefer war. Several conditions shaping this preference, namely regime stability, window of opportunity, foreign support, domestic crisis, and anomalous beliefs.
This research aims to empirically trace how these conditions interact, forming different configurations (pathways). Three comparative case studies are utilized to grasp social complexity, namely how different conditions interact. Moldova resisted Russian backed forces in 1992, Serbia resisted NATO in 1999, and Iraq resisted the US-led coalition in the 1991. All three lost. The empirical evidence in this study shows that minor powers are more likely to make such a risky gamble when facing a domestic crisis. While a domestic crisis is a necessary condition, it is required that domestic crisis is supplemented by anomalous beliefs, or regime stability with either foreign support or a window of opportunity.
Discovering how different configurations produce an outcome enables researchers to grasp greater complexity while retaining parsimony at the same time. The purpose of this research is therefore not only to reconsider under what conditions minor powers choose war when dealing with major powers, but to highlight the limitations of prominent theoretical insights that emphasize the importance of individual variables. By setting these limitations, this research highlights a narrower applicability and generalizability of previous studies on asymmetric conflict.