Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace

Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and de‹ciency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself the enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency. (Ibn al-Haytham)1

국제정치이론 = Theory of international politics

Nuts and bolts for the social sciences

A Study of War.

The sources of military doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the world wars

This is an Active Citation data project. Active Citation is a precursor approach toAnnotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI). It has now been converted to the ATI format. The assembled project can be viewed at: https://qdr.syr.edu/atipaper/sir-edward-greys-ambiguous-policy Project Summary This project is drawn from a larger study of pivotal deterrence policies – attempts by a third-party power to deter conflict among others while avoiding firm commitments to one side. The book chapter selected for activation focuses on Britain’s pivotal deterrence policy during the July crisis and the effects it had on the behavior of the major European powers—France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. This case was selected because it matched a particular “cell” in a typological framework, embodying a constellation of initial conditions and values on explanatory and control variables. The British July Crisis case is an instance in which the pivotal deterrer was a “peer” (in terms of its power relative to the target’s): it would be constrained in its ability to achieve leverage over the targets of its policy. The pivotal deterrer was also initially a player in the conflict, with secondary interests at stake: when the crisis started, only secondary British interests were at stake in the dispute between Serbia and Austria. These two factors, in some ways, “controlled” the case in the larger study’s comparative research design. In relation to that latter variable, the British case also captured theoretically important longitudinal change. Once the crisis escalated to near-war between Germany and France, then Britain’s vital interests were engaged. As Britain’s interests shifted over time, its approach to (and the effects of) its pivotal deterrence policy would be expected to change in certain ways anticipated by the theory. So the case analysis examines whether the policy changes that occurred were consistent with those expectations. This is also a “hard case” analysis, because the policy was ultimately unsuccessful in preventing war, and the deck was stacked against success by other theoretically important factors pointing toward war. The empirical analysis—using congruence testing and process tracing methods—shows, nevertheless, that the policy had intermediate effects on the other actors’ policies and actions that are consistent with the “isolation avoidance” dynamic posited in the pivotal deterrence theory (even though, in terms of its ultimate effect, it did not deter them from going to war). In short, the theorized causal mechanics of pivotal deterrence are revealed even in this hard case, where failure of the policy was in many ways over-determined. Finally, the case offers a “hoop test” of another component of the theory—the conditioning variable of the targets’ “alignment options”. When the targets of pivotal deterrence have strong alignment options, the theory expects that the pivotal deterrer will have little leverage with which to restrain them. In the British case, Germany and France had very strong alignment options embodied in their continental allies. Accordingly, the case analysis shows that these relationships indeed blunted Britain’s pivotal deterrence policy in ways that conform to the political dynamics pivotal deterrence failure posited in the theory. Data Abstract The data for the case analysis were collected from primary textual sources--published official collections of documents (British and German volumes of correspondence, the latter translated into English) and autobiographies—and secondary sources (synthetic histories, monographs, and articles). The author relied on secondary sources to develop the general narrative elements in the case, and to clarify competing perspectives on matters of controversy and on secondary histories in English based on work in the relevant documents and archives, to extract evidence revealing of internal deliberations in and relevant to decision process tracing of European countries from Great Britain to Russia in the months from July to August 1914. Files Description Data were initially collected from documents via note-taking and photocopying. The present effort to activate the sources involves additionally scanning the documents. The full page (or pages) on which quoted passages, or key evidence for causal process claims, appear are provided so that surrounding context is made transparent; specific passages that pertain to causal process arguments are highlighted by the author. Logic of Annotation and Activation: Which citations were activated and to what degree was based on the following logics: 1. Sourced active citations—at a minimum, for all official documents referenced in the chapter the full source information was provided; 2. Fully active citation—for all official documents and secondary sources from which primary process tracing evidence is quoted or referenced in the chapter. When the connection to the inference is not obvious, an annotated explanation is included. Annotation is also provided when the stipulated causal or historical claim is contested, with references to alternative sources.

Pivotal Deterrence: Third-Party Statecraft and the Pursuit of Peace

States use wedge strategies to prevent hostile alliances from forming or to disperse those that have formed. These strategies can cause power alignments that are otherwise unlikely to occur, and thus have significant consequences for international politics. How do such strategies work and what conditions promote their success? The wedge strategies that are likely to have significant effects use selective accommodation—concessions, compensations, and other inducements—to detach and neutralize potential adversaries. These kinds of strategies play important roles in the statecraft of both defensive and offensive powers. Defenders use selective accommodation to balance against a primary threat by neutralizing lesser ones that might ally with it. Expansionists use selective accommodation to prevent or break up blocking coalitions, which isolates opposing states by inducing potential balancers to buck-pass, bandwagon, or hide. Two cases—Great Britain's defensive attempts to accommodate Italy in the late 1930s a...

Preventing Enemy Coalitions: How Wedge Strategies Shape Power Politics

Does humanitarian military intervention save lives as intended? Or does it perversely embolden rebels and ignite the spiral of violence that it seeks to prevent? Such questions lie at the heart of a new and lively controversy in international politics. "Gambling on Humanitarian Intervention" explores whether the emerging norm of intervention backfires in conflicts such as Kosovo, exacerbating the ethnic cleansing and killing of innocent civilians. Leading academics investigate this problem, including when and where it is most likely to occur, and how to avert the unintended consequences without abandoning intervention. Sceptics weigh in as well, pointing out potential errors in blaming intervention for civil violence, and offering alternative explanations. Several authors conclude with prescriptions to ensure that future interventions mitigate violence, as intended, rather than tragically worsening it. This book was previously published as a special issue of "Ethnopolitics".

Gambling on humanitarian intervention : moral hazard, rebellion and civil war

Debate rages over whether the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) air war against Serbia was a success or failure.1 But one thing is certain: that war resulted from a prior failure of NATO policy. The goal was to prevent the escalation of conflict and to achieve a political settlement that got "Serbia out of Kosovo, not Kosovo out of Serbia," without having to use force.2 As intended, the Kosovo Liberation Army's (KLA) insurgency in Kosovo had provoked Belgrade's ham-fisted repression tactics. The Serb military police (MUP) and the Yugoslav National Army (VJ) killed innocent civilians and loosed a flood of refugees wherever they went: 42,000 by June 1998, 100,000 by August, and over 200,000 by October.3 The Racak massacre in January 1999 captured public attention and triggered a vigorous international response. At the Rambouillet (6-23 February) and Paris (15-19 March) conferences, NATO threatened to bomb Serbia if it did not accept the Contact Group's (composed of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the United States) interim polit-

Pivotal Deterrence and the Kosovo War: Why the Holbrooke Agreement Failed

Intervention may cause as well as calm internal wars. One way it may cause them is captured by the concept of moral hazard, which suggests that domestic groups which would not otherwise resort to political violence may be encouraged to do so by the prospect of outside support. In this piece we unpack and examine the descriptive and causal logic of that concept of moral hazard. First, we explore the links from our concept of moral hazard to more general social science concepts—perverse incentives, negative precedents and unintended consequences. Second, we focus on three key propositions embodied in that concept which explain how intervention may cause internal wars, and indicate empirical patterns which must obtain if the explanations are to be valid. These three are: 1) that the rebels' resort to political violence is induced by incentives created by the intervenor's actions—and not by a change in their underlying motivation; 2) that the result is harmful to the intervenor's goals and interests;...

Timothy W. Crawford

Papers

Pivotal Deterrence: Third-Party Statecraft and the Pursuit of Peace

Preventing Enemy Coalitions: How Wedge Strategies Shape Power Politics

Gambling on humanitarian intervention : moral hazard, rebellion and civil war

Pivotal Deterrence and the Kosovo War: Why the Holbrooke Agreement Failed

Moral hazard, intervention and internal war: A conceptual analysis