Constructing Multilateral Military Coalitions

This chapter examines how countries build multilateral military coalitions. Diplomatic networks provide critical underpinnings for multilateral coalition-building efforts. States that are most interested in seeing a given coalition deploy will develop operational plans of how the mission should look and instrumentalize existing bilateral and multilateral connections to recruit fitting coalition contributors. The trust, information, and facility to construct issue linkages and side payments embedded in these networks help these states in their coalition-building endeavor. Moreover, these states ask common institutional contacts to serve as cooperation brokers and use institutional venues as coalition negotiation fora. In short, diplomatic embeddedness serves as a resource, a strategic capability that states use to bargain third parties into joining a coalition.

Guns or Money? Defense Co-operation and Bilateral Lending as Coevolving Networks

How are defense co-operation and economic co-operation related? To answer this question, this article analyzes the coevolution of defense co-operation agreements (DCAs) and government-to-government loans. It argues that governments pursue two distinct sets of interests. At the bilateral level, governments use issue linkages and side payments to encourage spillover from defense co-operation to economic co-operation, and vice versa. That is, governments’ bilateral interests in DCAs and loans are largely complementary. However, at the network level, interests may diverge. Specifically, governments use DCAs to build clubs of like-minded defense collaborators or ‘security communities’, while they use loans to impose asymmetric forms of political authority or ‘hierarchies’. In some contexts, these network-level interests are, like bilateral interests, complementary. For example, defense partners rely on loans to co-ordinate their foreign policies and better respond to security threats, and debtors rely on lending patterns to identify suitable defense partners. In other cases, however, these interests strongly conflict. For example, governments that are highly active in the loan network are especially likely to rely on asymmetric exercises of political authority, which is incompatible with the network-level goal of using DCAs to establish communities of defense collaborators. Similarly, governments that are highly active in the DCA network are, due to their complex multilateral political commitments, less vulnerable to the asymmetric influences that loans enable. To empirically test these claims, the study develops a longitudinal model of multiplex network coevolution. Overall, the results show that while economic and defense co-operation often reinforce one another, they sometimes conflict in unexpected ways.

Issue linkages will undermine Russia-US arms control

Headline RUSSIA/US: Issue linkages will undermine arms control

The Breakdown of International Negotiations: Social Conflicts, Audience Costs, and Reputation in Two-Level Games

This article examines whether the two-level game can theoretically explain negotiation breakdowns without referring to uncertainty alone. For this purpose, social conflicts are integrated in the two-level game. In this light, the classical hypothesis that smaller win-sets increase the risk of a negotiation breakdown can no longer be maintained. Instead, conflict intensity – and thereby the risk of breakdown – correlates with the intersection of the win-sets in the form of an inverted U-curve. It follows that negotiations are most likely to break down when the intersection of the win-sets is perceived as medium-sized, because the bargaining space and thereby the potential of conflict intensity is largest/highest. Furthermore, the insertion of social conflicts into the equation runs counter to the hypothesis that issue linkages facilitate international cooperation. On the contrary, issue linkages increase the risk that goal conflicts, in particular, intensify each other by spreading from one issue to another.