Asymmetric Interdependence and Statecraft: Building Knowledge to Explicate Great Power Coercion Dilemmas at the Security-Economy Nexus
Principal Investigator: Adam N. Stulberg, Georgia Institute of Technology
Co-Investigators: Stephan De Spiegeleire - Hague Center for Strategic Studies; and Erica Briscoe - Georgia Tech Research Institute
Years of Award: 2019-2022
Managing Service Agency: Office of Naval Research
Project Description:
Why are economic threats, sanctions, or limited use of force against weaker great power rivals often self-defeating across the spectrum of high intensity to gray zone conflict? Do deep/complex commercial ties between states and firms affect the frequency, intensity, and effectiveness of U.S. deterrence/compellence/escalation strategies across security and economic domains in respective coercive bouts with Russia and China?
This project disaggregates, induces, and validates basic knowledge concerning the conditions and processes of cross-domain great power coercion. It systematically explores and tests-- meshing events and structured data-sets; and employing multilingual big data analytics, interactive visualizations, and qualitative methods-- both extant and emergent patterns, preferences, stakeholders, dispositions, causal pathways, and operative conditions that characterize Russia and China’s approaches to coercion across structural, firm-level, and sectoral dimensions to economic interdependence. By integrating findings into meta-models of strategic interaction, it generates/refines analytical frameworks to assess the modalities, trade-offs, and outcomes of deep and asymmetric interdependence for cross-domain coercion and escalation management.