• Strategy21
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• s.45
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• pp.91-115
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• 2019

When compared to land territorial claims, maritime claims have not attracted as much attention from the public as well as the academia. However, after the ICOW (Issue Correlates of War) data was published and was expanded to include maritime and river claims, there have been many quantitative studies that analyze maritime claims or separate different types of territorial claims to explain various mechanisms over different types of territorial claims. These quantitative studies have provided valuable explanations about the onset and the management of maritime claims. This research tries to review these quantitative research. Most studies about maritime claims, especially regarding the management of claims, analyze maritime claims based on two different levels of factors. First, from the perspective of systemic level, several studies focus on the role of international institutions and systemic level of democracy to explain the management of maritime claims. Second, at the dyadic level, many studies explain how the issue salience, past experience, the presence of resources, joint democracy, and relative power influence the occurrence of peaceful settlement attempts or conflictual behaviors over maritime claims. Based on the review of these literature, this research tries to identify several factors to explain the Dokdo issue and to encourage peaceful settlement attempts over the Dokdo issue.

• Strategy21
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• s.44
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• pp.103-141
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• 2018

As the South China Sea maritime dispute illustrates, when considering the place where maritime claims occur, states do not have many choices to respond to maritime claims in which disputed areas are located far away from the land and are surrounded by the sea. As Mearsheimer (2014) points out, the sea stops power projection. Therefore, in order to adopt coercive as well as peaceful settlement policies to deal with maritime claims, states need to overcome obstacles (the sea) to project power. It means that if states want to conduct a specific foreign policy action, such as negotiating maritime borderlines or arguing sovereignty on islands, they need a tool (naval power) to coerce or to persuade the opponent. However, there are lack of research that studies maritime claims from the perspective of naval power. This research project fills this gap based on naval power. How do relative levels of naval power and (dis) parities of naval power influence the occurrence of MIDs over maritime claims? Naval power is a constitutive element during maritime claims. If disputants over maritime claims have required naval power to project their capability, it means that they have the capability to apply various ways, such as aggressive options including MIDs, to accomplish their goals. So, I argue that when two claimants have enough naval power to project their capabilities, the likelihood of MIDs over maritime claims increases. Given that one or both states have a certain level of naval power, how does relative naval power between two claimants influence the management of maritime claims? Based on the power transition theory, I argue that when the disparities of relative naval power between claimants becomes distinctive, militarized conflicts surrounding maritime territory are less probable. Based on the ICOW project which codes maritime claims from 1900 to 2001, the empirical results of the Poisson models show if both claimants have projectable naval power, the occurrence of MIDs over maritime claims increases. In addition, the result shows that when disputants maintain similar relative naval powers, they are more likely to initiate MIDs over maritime claims. To put it differently, if naval capabilities' gap between two claimants becomes larger, the probability of the occurrence of MIDs decreases.