| The current U.S. occupation of Iraq highlights a general problem in international relations: states that demand territory from, or attempt to impose a new regime in, another state must consider the aftermath of directly or indirectly governing the population who lives there. To impose their desired policies, revisionist states must monitor compliance with, reward obedience to, and sanction deviations from those policies. These governance costs make new territory less profitable, and thus affect the incentives to initiate conflict. Because states are rational actors, when revisionist states evaluate a target population and determine that its ability to impose governance costs is high, they are less likely to annex it or overthrow its government.; A game with three players---the aggressive state, the defending state, and the population of the defending state---formally shows that when the population is both able to impose governance costs on the aggressor and when its preferences deviate from the aggressor's, the aggressive state will either offer the population a bargain or be deterred from initiating interstate conflict entirely. If the aggressor misjudges the population's preferences, it may offer an unsatisfactory bargain, provoking popular resistance, and either withdrawing in failure or crushing the insurgency.; Two major variables predict the ability of populations to impose governance costs. Democracy means that people have political experience and a pre-existing network of associations that can be turned to resistance in times of occupation. Literacy both links together a people in a national language community, giving them a nationalist incentive to resist, and gives them a means of communication that connects small local acts of resistance into a national insurgency.; Empirical tests including all recognized states from 1815-2000 show that states with higher literacy rates and higher levels of political participation are significantly less likely to lose territory to other states. From 1816-2001, states in the Americas with higher levels of primary school enrollment (an alternate measure for literacy) and political participation are significantly less likely to face challenges to their regimes. |
