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 ...