All of it Flashcards
What are national interests?
Interests attributed to the state itself, usually security and power.
When is an action strategic?
When it’s influenced by expected actions of others.
What is a (political) interest?
What actors want to achieve through political action –> preferences over outcomes that might result from their political choices.
Rational actor approaches of decision making
Actors adopt strategies to obtain desired outcomes given what they believe to be the interests and likely actions of others.
How may we understand an actor’s positions and choices?
By adopting their mindset to understand their goals, interests, and constraints. (=Einschränkungen)
What’s cooperation
Two or more actors choose a policy that makes at least one better off relative to the status quo whithout making the others worse off.
What’s coercion? (= Nötigung)
Threat or imposition of costs to get an actor to do something it does not want to do.
What’s compellence? (=Zwang)
An effort to change the status quo through the threat of force.
What’s deterrence?
(Definition, not Dr Strangelove)
An effort to preserve the status quo by threatening the other side with unacceptable costs if it seeks to alter the current relationship.
(2) Types of deterrence
- Deterrence by denial (ex ante): lowering the likelihood that an adversary will achieve its aims. (e.g. build a wall)
- Deterrence by punishment (ex post): imposing costs on the adversary in the event of an attack. (e.g. ICJ persecution for…)
Interplay of defense and deterrence
Defense: defending when attack has begun
Defense capabilities play into the deterrence equation.
Two core questions of nuclear deterrence theory for the US during the Cold War
- How to prevent attacks on the US and its allies abroad?
- How to wield (=eingesetzt werden) nuclear threats to gain bargaining advantages over the Soviet Union?
Definition of deterrence
Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack. (Dr. Strangelove)
Three key komponents of nuclear deterrence
- Rationality
- Credibility
- Means, perception, communication (deterrence only works if threats are communicated to the adversary)
Paradoxes of MAD (mutually assured distruction)
+ solution
Under MAD, the threat of nuclear retaliation implies suicide and is therefore hardly credible, i.e. not a straightforward deterrent.
Nuclear war must be made more likely for it to become less likely.
Solution: Doomsday machine, burning bridges
Why do individuals rebel?
Dissatisfaction with the status quo
Rebels usually claim public goods as their goods. How is a public good defined?
- non-rivalry
- non-excludable
The rebel’s dilemma
For a rebellion to succeed, individuals have to participate. Participation is costly/ risky –> free-riding problem, cause even those who don’t participate profit from potential gains
Solutions to rebel’s dilemma
- Changing material incentives to participate
- Ideology
- Rebel institutions/ self-government
- Introducing hierarchy
When is the rebel’s dilemma valid?
(obvious)
If collective action is risky relative to nonparticipation
Parkinson (2013): the role of organizational and social context (to a rebellion)
- social networks are the backbone of a rebellion
- not all rebels fight at the frontlines
- everyday social networks are central to mobilization, organization and growth of rebellion
Shesterinina (2016): The role of social structures and threat perception (to a rebellion)
- how do individuals form their threat perception in civil war?
- social structures and networks filter information and lead to collective threat framing
Types of conflicts and their goals
Territorial conflicts:
- separatist conflicts: Non-state actor want to seperate a territory to form an independent state
- Irredentist conflicts: Non-state actor wants to detach a territory from one country and ‘reunite’ it with another
Conflicts about the government:
- Non-state actors try to seize control of the government
Types of Warfare
- Conventional warfare: Symmetric military technologies between adversaries. They can directly confront each other.
- Irregular warfare: Asymmetric military capabilities that priviledge the state. Non-state actors can challenge and harass the state, but lack the capacity to confront in a direct and frontal way.
- Symmetric, non-conventional warfare: Both sides lack advanced military capabilities
Types of conflict: Number of actors
Conventional two actor conflicts with one non-state armed group challenging the state
Multi-actor conflicts
- External supporters
- Tend to last longer
- Veto players make solutions harder
Which factors favor the occurence of a civil conflict?
- Collier & Hoeffler: Opportunity structure favorable to greedy bandit rebellion
- Fearon & Laitin: State weakness, large population, instability
Definition of nationalism
Collective action designed to bring in accordance the national boundaries with those of its government.
- Distinction between included and excluded groups
What’s a necessary condition for a conflict?
Dissatisfaction with the status quo
What does conflict prediction do?
Aims to build models that will help assess the probability of civil conflict. May aim at predicting conflict onset, escalation, continuation
What’s coercion?
Attempting to influence outcome of a dispute by threatening the use of force: “Do what I ask or else!”
What is bargaining?
Bargaining is about deciding how to divide the object of a dispute between two players.
Why do people fight, if war is not the preferred manner of sorting out problems?
- War is a substitute for diplomacy
Why is there a bargaining range between two players?
Because war is ex-post inefficient!
The existence of a bargaining range implies that both players should always have incentives to locate peaceful settlements that avoid the cost of war.
what is the puzzle of war?
+ Three logically consistent solutions to the puzzle (!)
Both sides would be better off if they agreed to divide up the contested good rather than fighting a costly war.
- Incomplete information
- Commitment problems
- Indivisibility (war occurs when both sides prefer war to getting nothing)
Bargaining theory:
Name a theoretical example for commitment problems
Prisoners dilemma
Bargaining theory:
By what are commitment problems caused?
Actors expect a power-shift in the future.
Bargaining theory:
Variants of commitment problems
- Bargaining over objects that are a source of future bargaining power (e.g. strategic territory)
- Prevention: war in response to changing power
- Preemption: War in response to first-strike advantages
Criticism of bargaining model
- Focus on process up to war, what comes after war is missing
- Two-player action
- Information failure due to cognitive biases
