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Global CyberPolitics

Theory – Lateral Pressure Dynamics

Lateral pressure refers to any tendency (or propensity) of individuals, societies, states, and firms (and other entities) to expand their activities and exert influence and control beyond their established boundaries, whether for economic, political, military, scientific, religious, or other purposes. The strength of a country’s lateral pressure is generally taken to correlate positively with its power as conventionally understood.

The theory is anchored in the dynamics of growth and expansion. It seeks to explain the relationships between state characteristics and patterns of international behavior. The focus is on the sources and consequences of transformation and change in international relations, and provides a basis for identifying and analyzing potential feedback dynamics that may shape and reshape interactions and outcomes.

Assumptions

Lateral pressure theory assumes that each statistic is an indicator of—and consequence of—a discrete decision by an individual human being governed by his or her preferences. The larger the size of the community, the greater the demands, wants, and needs. Population growth, for example, is in fact the outcome of a large number of discrete private decisions (due to volition, coercion, or other) over which policy makers or national governments are not likely to have direct control. Statistics involve descriptions of, and generalizations about, aggregates.

In this connection, if there is any “determinism” in this logic, then it is one driven by individual decision. Indicators of technology, like those of population, are also the observed outcomes of a number of widely dispersed decisions by individual actors such as developers, inventors, scientists, investors, manufacturers, etc. The same holds for resource access and usage.

Causal Dynamics

The causal processes run from internal drivers—population, resources, technology—whose interactions define the profiles of states and, through intervening processes, lead to external behavior). Figure 1.3 presents a formalized view of these processes.

Simplified casual logic of lateral pressure dynamics

SIMPLIFIED CAUSAL LOGIC OF LATERAL PRESSURE DYNAMICS.
Source: Choucri, N., & Agarwal, G. (2017). The theory of lateral pressure: Highlights of quantification and empirical analysis. In W. R. Thompson (Ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Empirical International Relations Theory. Oxford University Press

As states expand their activities outside territorial boundaries, they encounter other states similarly engaged. Expansion may result in intersections among spheres of influence and, set in motion complex interactions, can lead to escalation and conflict—or to cooperation and collaboration—depending on intents and capabilities. (North, 1990; Choucri, 2012).

Empirical analyses of lateral pressure theory have gone through several phases of investigation, with each phase providing grounds for added developments in theory and new challenges for quantitative analysis. Jointly, they have contributed to greater refinement of the theory and its properties.

With the construction of cyberspace, our investigations have taken on new directions, first by focusing on the virtual domain, and then by exploring similarities and differences between the two “spaces” as hosts of lateral pressure and as operational domains for the shift from propensity for expansion to overt manifestations of external activities.

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