Sang-Hyun Chi

Conceptualizing ConflictSpace: Toward a Geography of Relational Power and Embeddedness in the Analysis of Interstate Conflict

The concept of ConflictSpace facilitates the systematic analysis of interstate conflict data. Building on relational theories of power, we identify the spatiality of conflict as a combination of territorial and network embeddedness. The former is modeled through spatial analysis and the latter by social network analysis. A brief empirical example of the spread of World War I illustrates how the position of states within physical and network spaces explains their roles within a broader geography of territorial settings and network relations.

Mapping the Dynamism of the United States' Geopolitical Code: The Geography of the State of the Union Speeches, 1988–2008

The changing geographical foci of the geopolitical code of the United States are examined by a content analysis of the presidential State of the Union Speeches between 1988 and 2008, the last year of President Reagans term through the presidency of George W. Bush. The State of the Union speeches are interpreted as geopolitical discourse within a structural setting, using seven foreign-policy paradigms as an organising framework. The empirical findings illustrate an increase over time in the number of regions and countries mentioned in the speeches. Also, notable differences between administrations in terms of their advocacy of globalist or regionalist policies and emphasis upon allies or adversaries are found.

A Relational Geography of War: Actor–Context Interaction and the Spread of World War I

Claims by geographers that the geopolitical context of international politics matters requires that context be defined and operationalized in a way that enables analyses illustrating that actors’ behavior varies across different contextual settings. A geographic understanding of embeddedness and relational power is meshed with a well-established contextual theory of international politics to create an operationalization of context that helps to explain the diffusion of war. Using the case of World War I, we investigate the expansion of the war from a localized political crisis in Austria–Hungary to a disastrous global scale conflict involving dozens of states. We integrate contemporary geographic thinking on context with the foundational texts of the war diffusion literature to hypothesize that war-joining behavior is explained by a political entitys relative position in a simultaneously spatial and social network context. Using social network analysis-based methodologies to develop measures of context and evaluate our hypothesis, we find that context had an important impact on states’ war-joining behavior during World War I. An understanding of context that fuses simultaneous embeddedness in network and geographic space with relational power and the methodology of blockmodeling can be used to explore the diffusion of other wars and even other phenomena across geographically situated actors.

Collective Action That Influences Tourism: Social Structural Approach to Community Involvement

The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of the relational structure of a community on tourism-related community collective action. Employing social network analysis and interviews, the network structure and community collective actions were examined at two communities on Jeju Island, South Korea. The research results demonstrate positive associations between successful collective action involvement and features from the relational network structure in communities, such as network density and social pressure related to social roles. The findings can be used to identify specific types of community network structure that facilitates an individual’s tourism related collective action involvement.