Nobody's Land: The Dispute over a Chain of Uninhabited Islands and Maritime Security in the East China Sea

The territorial dispute over the sovereignty of the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in the East China Sea has been a contentious aspect in Chinese-Japanese relations since the 1970s. The purpose of this thesis is to see if either the postulated causes/motivations of the dispute (natural resources or nationalism) are shown to have more significance in China and Japan at certain points in time. For methodology I am using a plausibility probe and analytical narrative with three points in time as my individual case studies – the 1970s, the 1990s-2000s, and the 2010s.