World states Border disputes reality
Channel: World Peoples Voice
Date: 2020-06-30

The whole world states today are using the “Diversionary Theory of War”. According to the diversionary theory of war, unpopular world leaders generate foreign policy crises to both divert the public’s attention away from the discontent with their rule and bolster their political fortunes through a rally around the flag effect. 

I argue that the puzzling lack of clear empirical support for the theory may be due to the underspecification of the theoretical mechanism through which the public reacts to the particular issue at the center of the diversionary “crisis.” Because people tend to react to territorial issues intensely, the embattled leader could attempt to manipulate and exploit this proclivity by launching specifically a territorial conflict. 

By linking government unpopularity with the initiation of militarized territorial conflicts and crises in a global sample of countries, this territorial diversion argument receives strong empirical support. The initiation of fatal militarized disputes over territory is, in addition, linked to economic underperformance.

What causes war? Among others, domestic unrest has been regarded as one of the factors contributing to interstate war. Many scholars, pundits, and policymakers have emphasized internal troubles to account for the occurrence of international wars, including the Falklands War, World Wars I and II, the Russo-Japanese War, and the Imjin War (Japan’s invasion of Korea in the late 16th century). Especially since the end of the Cold War, following the theoretical and methodological suggestions in Levy 1989 (cited under General Overviews), international relations scholars have paid increasingly more attention to domestic unrest and its interaction with other factors such as regime type and strategic rivalry to explain interstate and intrastate conflict.

By taking different methodologies, such as quantitative statistical analysis, in-depth case study, and formal modeling, they build causal processes linking domestic unrest to international conflict, identify various factors at the levels of the individual, state, and dyad affecting the onset of a diversionary conflict, and provide empirical evidence supporting or disproving their theories.

General Overviews
The main idea underpinning the diversionary theory of war is that domestic unrest is one of the major causes of war. When faced with domestic challenges to their leadership, political leaders tend to initiate interstate conflict, diverting domestic attention to foreign affairs and staying in power. How does this work? As Haynes 2017 suggests, at least two rationales can be identified for the embattled leaders’ choice of diversionary conflict to ensure political survival. The first derives from the rally-round-the-flag effect. 

Many social psychologists have insisted that an individual favors in-group members to out-group members irrespective of prior interaction and that an external threat strengthens the in-group/out-group bias. Indeed, Theiler 2018 shows that political leaders’ domestic popularity increases as the imminence of foreign threat and international conflict rises. The second rationale highlights the political opportunity to prove leadership competence. Richards, et al. 1993 points out that that leaders who lose domestic support due to their policy failures or unjust behaviors need an opportunity to prove their leadership capability. Winning an international conflict offers such an opportunity to restore domestic support and save their political lives.

A diversionary foreign policy, or a diversionary war, is an international relations term that identifies a war instigated by a country's leader in order to distract its population from their own domestic strife. The concept stems from the Diversionary War Theory, which states that leaders who are threatened by domestic turmoil occasionally initiate an international conflict in order to shift the nation's attention away from internal troubles. As a result, this external threat would counter the domestic strife and ensure the leader's position in power. 

Essentially, a diversionary use of force is a manipulation of the Rally Round the Flag Syndrome effect, causing an increase of national fervor from the general public.