Dan Altman’s research on the fait accompli in terrestrial disputes notes that James D. Fearon, in reviewing the literature on strategic interaction during crises, drew a basic distinction between ...

Good scholarship doesn’t need to fit within a 2×2 matrix, but it sure helps make sense of things when it does. It’s in this spirit of conceptual clarity that I developed the diagram below depicting ...

States that seek to expand their territories have three basic options: (i) brute force, (ii) coercion, or (iii) fait accompli. In a brute force scenario, the aggressor first defeats the target state ...

Although the outcome of Russia’s rapid military deployment in the Crimea is not yet certain, this incident and Russian military action against Georgia in 2008 may offer non-Western powers a potential ...