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Podcast: New Books in Political Science
Episode: Nicholas D. Anderson, "Inadvertent Expansion: How Peripheral Agents Shape World Politics" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Description: Territorial expansion is typically understood as a centrally driven and often strategic activity. But Nicholas D. Anderson’s new book, Inadvertent Expansion (Cornell University Press, 2025), shows that nearly a quarter of great power coercive territorial acquisitions since the nineteenth century have in fact been instances of what the author calls “inadvertent expansion.”
A two-step process, inadvertent expansion first involves agents on the periphery of a state or empire acquiring territory without the authorization or knowledge of higher-ups. Leaders in the capital must then decide whether to accept or reject the already-acquired territory.
Through cases ranging from tho...