Abstract
The territory contested in island disputes is often of low intrinsic value from the national security and economic perspectives. This generally implies a stable status quo where both sides prefer peace to war. Yet island disputes commonly produce a variation whereby states engage in some degree of ‘hawk-talk’—more or less confrontational rhetoric and related, symbolically important policies. Theoretically, hawk-talk should be more likely when the disputing countries have a strong, nationalistically salient history of conflict and less likely when they have high levels of cooperation in other national security areas or economic relations. Hawk-talk is expected to beget more hawk-talk, thus to increase the ideological and diversionary political value of assertiveness in island disputes, and to limit or reduce cooperation. Nationalistically salient histories of conflict amplified by hawk-talk can most easily be shown to raise the stakes and risks in low intrinsic value disputes. Yet such histories are expected to have an even greater potential impact on high intrinsic value disputes. We illustrate this logic by analysing the low-intrinsic-value dispute between Korea and Japan over the Dokdo/Takeshima Islands. Both the theory and the case study imply that cooperation in other areas does not constitute a reliable antidote to hawk-talk–driven dispute escalation. Countervailing national interest ideologies, which emphasise other objectives imperilled by dispute escalation, are the most promising complement to increased cooperation.
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