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About the Event: When and how do nationalist protests at home affect crisis bargaining at the international level? Though plausible, the overall effect and the scope conditions for nationalist protests to influence international crisis bargaining remain unspecified, particularly due to two uncertainties: the host government, which is uncertain whether a protest will escalate into an anti-government mobilization, and the foreign government, which is uncertain whether the observed protest constitutes a genuinely credible constraint or just a strategic misrepresentation of the host government’s preference over the disputed issue. The lack of ex-ante theoretical expectations has led to the proliferation of ad hoc ex-post justifications for nationalist protests’ determinant or indeterminate roles during international crises. Using a two-step modeling approach, this paper shows that the threat to the host government posed by the nationalist protests is a prerequisite for them to exert influence on international crisis bargaining. Moreover, the relationship between the threats to the host government from nationalist protests and the likelihood of bargaining failure is non-monotonic - that is, first decreasing and then increasing in the magnitude of the threat. This result is tested with an in-depth case study of the (in)effective signaling with the 2014 anti-China protest in Vietnam.

About the Speaker: Xinru Ma is an inaugural research scholar at the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab within the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, where she leads the research track on U.S.-Asia relations. Her work primarily examines nationalism, great power politics, and East Asian security, with a methodological focus on formal and computational methods.

More broadly, Xinru’s research encompasses three main objectives: Substantively, she aims to better theorize and enhance cross-country perspectives on critical phenomena such as nationalism and its impact on international security; Methodologically, she strives to improve measurement and causal inference based on careful methodologies, including formal modeling and computational methods; Empirically, she challenges prevailing assumptions that inflate the perceived risk of militarized conflicts in East Asia, by providing original data and analysis rooted in local knowledge and regional perceptions.

Her work is published in the Journal of East Asian Studies, The Washington Quarterly, Journal of Global Security Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, and edited volumes by Palgrave. Her co-authored book, Beyond Power Transition, is published by Columbia University Press.

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