First Advisor

David Kinsella

Term of Graduation

Spring 2022

Date of Publication

6-14-2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (M.S.) in Political Science

Department

Political Science

Language

English

Subjects

China -- Foreign relations, United States -- Foreign relations, China -- Foreign economic relations, United States -- Foreign economic relations, World politics

DOI

10.15760/etd.7873

Physical Description

1 online resource (vi, 93 pages)

Abstract

For centuries, "Great Powers" competed for global hegemony not only through building up military strength and amassing wealth, but through the formal acquisition of distant lands, conquered and folded into their borders. Today, core states continue to vie for global power, but no longer exert formal control or sovereignty over less powerful states. So how has the nature of great power competition in peripheral states changed? Most scholars studying great power competition measure power in terms of military and economic resources, often failing to account for a third, crucial dimension in international power politics: the impact of distributed networks of geographical control on a state's ability to wage war, expand economically, and fully utilize the coercive and co-optive potential of economic and military clout. Tracing this pattern of distributed geographical control through historical case studies and using a unique combination of data sets cataloguing the United States' global network of military bases and China's growing global network of infrastructure investments and loans, this thesis demonstrates that "pointillist imperialism" is the latest mechanism by which great and rising powers establish and grow their real and potential power across the globe. Much scholarship has been devoted to analyzing the United States' basing network and China's growing web of strategic global investments, but no one has previously looked at these two, separate power acquisition strategies as twin, parallel branches of the same process. Pointillism, distributed geographical control, serves as the connective tissue between the two. Both the U.S. and the China are playing the same old "great power" games, but they employ distinctly different strategies in their quests for global hegemony.

Rights

© 2022 Andrew Jesse Shaughnessy

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/37916

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