| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 政治學所 === 93 === This thesis mainly discussed the phenomena of crisis escalation and its influential factors in the international politics. It distinguished the overall processes of crisis escalation into three stages: nonviolent and militant crisis, limited militant conflicts, and wars that cause huge amount of casualties. Furthermore, a basic model of crisis escalation in which the interactions between two major states determined the final results of crisis escalation was established from reviews of related literatures.
Furthermore, the previous academic works that focused on reasons of war, conflict resolutions, the functions of mediators…etc. has helped to reveal the elements that could overwhelm the final outcomes of crisis, from peaceful resolving to war waging. Overall speaking, it discussed the different influences of the polarity in international system, third-party intermediate, democratic peace, and deterrence from military alliance and mutual nuke capacity which have been empirically verified to be able to affect the processes of crisis.
As for the research methods, it applied both qualitative and quantitative methods to ensure the depth and width of research results. With the datasets from International Crisis Behavior Project (ICB project), the statistical model of continuation ratio model was applied to disclose coefficiences of different factors. Furthermore, by studying the cases of three Taiwan Strait crises (1954, 1958, 1995), it told more about the hidden factors from U.S. Intervention.
As conclusions, the research results presented that unipolarity and joint-democratic regime could prevent crisis escalating into more serious stage. However, the deterrence effects formed from military alliance and mutual nuke capacity could even increase the chances for crisis escalation. As for the third party intervention, they would take actions to end the wars sooner and prevent further increases of casualties. With in-depth case studies of three Taiwan Strait crises, it was learned that changes of international system from bipolarity to unipolarity, the military cooperative relations between Taiwan and U.S., and Taiwan democratic transformation made the third crisis that stopped escalating into war different from the previous two crisis.
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