Publication |
2005.
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Summary/Abstract |
Despite a scholarly consensus that hegemony is exercised primarily through the use of coercion and positive inducements, scholars of international relations have devoted little attention to how dominant states choose between these influence tools to impose their desired international order on weak but recalcitrant states. This article presents an analytical framework to examine the determinants of such choices. In doing so, it develops three alternative theoretical models of international order enforcement from extant international relations literature and offers a preliminary assessment of their relative merits by way of a comparative study of two cases drawn from the nineteenth-century Pax Britannica. This plausibility probe shows that social conventions can play an important role in the choice of enforcement strategies and that neither realist nor domestic-politics explanations offer useful general models of the enforcement of international order.
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