Drawing upon philosophy and social theory, Social Theory of International Politics develops a theory of the international system as a social construction. Alexander Wendt clarifies the central claims of the constructivist approach, presenting a structural and idealist worldview which contrasts with the individualism and materialism which underpins much mainstream international relations theory. He builds a cultural theory of international politics, which takes whether states view each other as enemies, rivals or friends as a fundamental determinant. Wendt characterises these roles as 'cultures of anarchy', described as Hobbesian, Lockean and Kantian respectively. These cultures are shared ideas which help shape state interests and capabilities, and generate tendencies in the international system. The book describes four factors which can drive structural change from one culture to another - interdependence, common fate, homogenization, and self-restraint - and examines the effects of capitalism and democracy in the emergence of a Kantian culture in the West.

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Social Theory of International Politics

Realist and other scholars commonly hold that rationally led states can and sometimes do fight when no peaceful bargains exist that both would prefer to war. Against this view, I show that under very broad conditions there will exist negotiated settlements that genuinely rational states would mutually prefer to a risky and costly fight. Popular rationalist and realist explanations for war fail either to address or to explain adequately what would prevent leaders from locating a less costly bargain. Essentially just two mechanisms can resolve this puzzle on strictly rationalist terms. The first turns on the fact that states have both private information about capabilities and resolve and the incentive to misrepresent it. The second turns on the fact that in specific strategic contexts states may be unable credibly to commit to uphold a mutually preferable bargain. Historical examples suggest that both mechanisms are empirically plausible.

https://web.stanford.edu/group/fearon-research/cgi-bin/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Rationalist-Explanations-for-War.pdf

Rationalist explanations for war

A collection of seven essays that serves as an introductory text on complexity theory and computer modelling in the social sciences, and as an overview of the current state of the art in this field. The articles move beyond the basic paradigm of the "Prisoner's Dilemma" to study a rich set of issues, including how to cope with errors in perception or implementation, how norms emerge, and how political actors and regions of shared culture can develop. They use the shared methodology of agent-based modelling, a technique that specifies the rules of interaction between individuals and uses computer simulation to discover emergent properties of the social system.

The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration

This article reformulates liberal international relations (IR) theory in a nonideological and nonutopian form appropriate to empirical social science. Liberal IR theory elaborates the insight that state-society relations—the relationship of states to the domestic and transnational social context in which they are embedded—have a fundamental impact on state behavior in world politics. Societal ideas, interests, and institutions influence state behavior by shaping state preferences, that is, the fundamental social purposes underlying the strategic calculations of governments. For liberals, the configuration of state preferences matters most in world politics—not, as realists argue, the configuration of capabilities and not, as institutionalists (that is, functional regime theorists) maintain, the configuration of information and institutions. This article codifies this basic liberal insight in the form of three core theoretical assumptions, derives from them three variants of liberal theory, and demonstrates that the existence of a coherent liberal theory has significant theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications. Restated in this way, liberal theory deserves to be treated as a paradigmatic alternative empirically coequal with and analytically more fundamental than the two dominant theories in contemporary IR scholarship: realism and institutionalism.

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Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics

The history of international political orders is written in terms of continuity and change in domestic and international political relations. As a step toward understanding such continuity and change, we explore some ideas drawn from an institutional perspective. An institutional perspective is characterized in terms of two grand issues that divide students of international relations and other organized systems. The first issue concerns the basic logic of action by which human behavior is shaped. On the one side are those who see action as driven by a logic of anticipated consequences and prior preferences. On the other side are those who see action as driven by a logic of appropriateness and a sense of identity. The second issue concerns the efficiency of history. On the one side are those who see history as efficient in the sense that it follows a course leading to a unique equilibrium dictated by exogenously determined interests, identities, and resources. On the other side are those who see history as inefficient in the sense that it follows a meandering, path-dependent course distinguished by multiple equilibria and endogenous transformations of interests, identities, and resources. We argue that the tendency of students of international political order to emphasize efficient histories and consequential bases for action leads them to underestimate the significance of rule- and identity-based action and inefficient histories. We illustrate such an institutional perspective by considering some features of the coevolution of politics and institutions, particularly the ways in which engagement in political activities affects the definition and elaboration of political identities and the development of competence in politics and the capabilities of political institutions.

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The Institutional Dynamics of International Political Orders

Although formal work on war generally sees war as a kind of bargaining breakdown resulting from asymmetric information, bargaining indivisibilities, or commitment problems, most analyses have focused on informational issues. But informational explanations and the models underlying them have at least two major limitations: they often provide a poor account of prolonged conflict, and they give an odd reading of the history of some cases. This article describes these limitations and argues that bargaining indivisibilities should really be seen as commitment problems. The present analysis then shows that a common mechanism links three important kinds of commitment problem: (1) preventive war, (2) preemptive attacks arising from first-strike or offensive advantages, and (3) conflicts resulting from bargaining over issues that affect future bargaining power. In each case, large, rapid shifts in the distribution of power can lead to war. Finally, the analysis elaborates a distinctly different mechanism based on a comparison of the cost of deterring an attack on the status quo with the expected cost of trying to eliminate the threat to the status quo.For helpful comments and criticisms, I thank James Fearon, Hein Goemans, Lisa Martin, Sebastian Mazzuca, Branislav Slantchev, and seminar participants at the University of Montreal–McGill Research Group in International Security, the Institute in Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, University of California, Irvine, and University of California, Santa Barbara. I also gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (SES-0315037).

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War as a Commitment Problem

The problem of absolute and relative gains divides neoliberal institutionalism and structural realism. The former assumes states focus primarily on their absolute gains and emphasizes the prospects for cooperation. The latter supposes states are largely concerned with relative gains and emphasizes the prospects for conflict. Existing work in international relations theory generally traces the differences between these two theories to different assumptions about states' preferences. Using a simple game-theoretic model, this essay offers a reformulation of the problem of absolute and relative gains that links changes in the states' behavior, the feasibility of cooperation, and especially the states' concern for relative versus absolute gains explicitly to changes in the constraints facing the states. Many of the differences between neoliberal institutionalism and structural realism appear as special cases of the model.

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Absolute and Relative Gains in International Relations Theory

▪ Abstract International relations theory has long seen the origins, conduct, and termination of war as a bargaining process. Recent formal work on these issues draws very heavily on Rubinstein's (1982) seminal analysis of the bargaining problem and the research that flowed from it. There is now what might be called a standard or canonical model of the origins of war that sees this outcome as a bargaining breakdown. This essay reviews this standard model and current efforts to extend it to the areas of (a) multilateral bargaining, which is at the heart of old issues such as balancing and bandwagoning as well as newer ones such as the role of third-party mediation; (b) the effects of domestic politics on international outcomes; (c) efforts to explicitly model intra-war bargaining; and (d) dynamic commitment problems.

Bargaining theory and international conflict

Robert Powell argues persuasively and elegantly for the usefulness of formal models in studying international conflict and for the necessity of greater dialogue between modeling and empirical analysis. Powell makes it clear that many widely made arguments about the way states act under threat do not hold when subjected to the rigors of modeling. In doing so, he provides a more secure foundation for the future of international relations theory. Powell argues that, in the Hobbesian environment in which states exist, a state can respond to a threat in at least three ways: (1) it can reallocate resources already under its control; (2) it can try to defuse the threat through bargaining and compromise; (3) it can try to draw on the resources of other states by allying with them. Powell carefully outlines these three responses and uses a series of game theoretic models to examine each of them, showing that the models make the analysis of these responses more precise than would otherwise be possible. The advantages of the modeling-oriented approach, Powell contends, have been evident in the number of new insights they have made possible in international relations theory. Some argue that these advances could have originated in ordinary-language models, but as Powell notes, they did not in practice do so. The book focuses on the insights and intuitions that emerge during modeling, rather than on technical analysis, making it accessible to readers with only a general background in international relations theory.

In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies in International Politics

Two of the most influential contemporary approaches to international relations theory are neorealism and neoliberalism. The debate between these two approaches has dominated much of international relations theory for the last decade. It is now commonplace for an article about some aspect of international relations theory to begin by locating itself in terms of this debate. These two approaches and the debate between them have failed to contribute as much as they might have to international relations theory. These approaches suffer from serious internal weaknesses and limitations that the neorealistneoliberal debate often has tended to obscure rather than to clarify. Once we have exposed and clarified these weaknesses and limitations, we will be able to see several important directions for future theoretical work. Two books, Neorealism and Its Critics and Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate, make significant contributions to this debate. The former offered a wide-ranging critique of neorealism when it was published in 1986. The latter, which has just been published, is more narrowly focused. It takes up where some of the critiques in Neorealism and Its Critics left off. A review of these two complementary volumes affords an excellent opportunity to begin to identify some of the weaknesses and limitations that the neorealist-neoliberal debate frequently has obscured.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0020818300028204

Robert Powell

Papers

War as a Commitment Problem

Absolute and Relative Gains in International Relations Theory

Bargaining theory and international conflict

In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies in International Politics

Anarchy in international relations theory: the neorealist-neoliberal debate