External Intervention and the Politics of State Formation

Ja Ian Chong is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He received his PhD in politics from Princeton University in 2008 and was a 2008–9 Research Associate with the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program. His research has received support from the Chiang Ching-kuo International Foundation for Scholarly Exchange, the Woodrow Wilson Society of Fellows, the Bradley Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies and the Princeton East Asian Studies Program. He has worked in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, as well as the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies and the East Asian Institute in Singapore. He has previously taught at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His work has appeared in Twentieth-Century China and Security Studies.

1. Molding the institutions of governance: theories of state formation and the contingency of sovereignty in fragile polities; 2. Imposing states: foreign rivalries, local collaboration, and state form in peripheral polities; 3. Feudalizing the Chinese polity, 1893–1922: assessing the adequacy of alternative takes on state reorganization; 4. External influence and China's feudalization, 1893–1922: opportunity costs and patterns of foreign intervention; 5. The evolution of foreign involvement in China, 1923–52: rising opportunity costs and convergent approaches to intervention; 6. How intervention remade the Chinese state, 1923–52: foreign sponsorship and the building of sovereign China; 7. Creating Indonesia, 1893–1952: major power rivalry and the making of sovereign statehood; 8. Siam stands apart, 1893–1952: external intervention and rise of a sovereign Thai state; 9. Domesticating international relations, externalizing comparative politics: foreign intervention and the state in world politics.