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| 1 |
ID:
084818
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| 2 |
ID:
166865
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| Summary/Abstract |
Nuclear deterrence requires not only the reliability of a state’s strategic weapons and the willingness of its leaders to employ them but also an adversary’s appreciation of these conditions. Weapons perceived as failing to hold their targets at risk may lack deterrent value, just as retaliatory threats that are not believable may fail to deter, even if a state’s operational capabilities are robust. Both the technical and political credibility of the US nuclear deterrent may have suffered self-inflicted harm since the end of the Cold War, often as casualties of intemperate policy debates. In particular, doubts have been sowed about the reliability of aging US warheads under a science-based stockpile-stewardship regime meant to substitute for nuclear-explosive testing. Likewise, the credibility of US deterrent threats may have waned as American leaders have spoken ever more stridently about the horrors of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism, underscoring their extreme aversion to the risk of nuclear attack. Diminished credibility in both spheres threatens to compromise US national-security objectives ranging from nuclear nonproliferation to the outcomes of nuclear crises.
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| 3 |
ID:
154471
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The past decade has seen a frontier open up in international development engagement with the entrance of new actors such as celebrity-led organisations. We explore how such organisations earn legitimacy with a focus on Madonna’s Raising Malawi and Ben Affleck’s Eastern Congo Initiative. The study draws from organisational materials, interviews, mainstream news coverage, and the texts of the celebrities themselves to investigate the construction of authenticity, credibility, and accountability. We find these organisations earn legitimacy and flourish rapidly amid supportive elite networks for funding, endorsements, and expertise. We argue that the ways in which celebrity-led organisations establish themselves as legitimate development actors illustrate broader dynamics of the machinery of development.
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| 4 |
ID:
188388
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This article presents a formal model that shows how states can credibly reassure each other simply by maintaining a cooperative outward narrative. The reassurance literature to date has focused largely on costly signaling, whereby benign states must distinguish themselves by taking specific actions that hostile types would not. The mere lack of overtly expressed hostility without costly signals has been considered “cheap talk,” on the assumption that this behavior is costless for hostile states and thus uninformative. In contrast, this paper argues that maintaining a cooperative façade while secretly formulating and executing exploitative policies carries inherent trade-offs, and thus constitutes a credible reassurance signal. Foreign policy planning and implementation requires communication among various individuals, groups, and organizations, which has some probability of being observed and punished by outside actors. Yet efforts to conceal the policymaking process and reduce this probability are costly—they require investments in internal monitoring and restrictions on internal communication that can substantially degrade policy outcomes. Thus, to the extent that a state's foreign policymaking process is transparent—that is, that concealing internal communications is difficult—the absence of positive signals of hostility is a credible signal of its benign intentions. The argument is illustrated with a case study of German reassurance signals during the July Crisis preceding World War I.
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| 5 |
ID:
149130
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| Summary/Abstract |
Financial regulatory networks are a pervasive new type of global governance heralded by some as a flexible answer to globalization dilemmas and dismissed by others as ineffective because of weak enforcement mechanisms. Whether regulatory network agreements provide global public goods or private goods for certain states’ firms is a second debated issue. This article adjudicates among competing perspectives by examining whether Basel III, an international agreement about bank capital minimums negotiated by the bank regulatory network in 2009 and 2010, was viewed as credible and affecting regulated US firms. I use stock returns to measure investors’ perceptions, and an event study methodology to test whether regulated banks’ observed stock returns significantly differ from expected stock returns on days when new information about Basel III becomes available. If the agreement is viewed as credible and affecting firm value, banks’ stock returns will deviate from expectations. The direction of any deviation indicates whether regulations benefit or hurt banks. Although the direction of effects is not uniform across events, I find that the initial stock return reaction and the net effect across all five events are negative, and of a similar magnitude as regulated foreign banks, indicating that US banks were harmed, and did not benefit from, the new international regulations. US banks experienced stock returns that differed from expectations, providing evidence that international regulatory network agreements are viewed as credible and tangibly affect firms independent of domestic implementation.
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| 6 |
ID:
174720
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How does the alliance between a client state and its nuclear ally influence support for proliferation in the client? Conventional wisdom suggests that when nuclear security guarantees are not credible, support for proliferation will be high, since a domestic nuclear capability offers an alternative source of deterrence. I introduce a new theory, which posits that highly credible security guarantees can backfire by causing some individuals to fear their ally might miscalculate—either by using nuclear weapons in an unnecessary preventative attack or by precipitous escalation of a crisis or conflict. Survey experiments conducted among representative samples of South Korean citizens in 2018 and 2019 support this theory, showing that increases in the credibility of the US nuclear security guarantee lead to increased support for nuclear proliferation among South Korean respondents.
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| 7 |
ID:
175820
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As more women attain executive office, it is important to understand how gender dynamics affect international politics. Toward this end, we present the first evidence that gender stereotypes affect leaders’ abilities to generate audience costs. Using survey experiments, we show that female leaders have political incentives to combat gender stereotypes that women are weak by acting “tough” during international military crises. Most prominently, we find evidence that female leaders, and male leaders facing female opponents, pay greater inconsistency costs for backing down from threats than male leaders do against fellow men. These findings point to particular advantages and disadvantages women have in international crises. Namely, female leaders are better able to tie hands—an efficient mechanism for establishing credibility in crises. However, this bargaining advantage means female leaders will also have a harder time backing down from threats. Our findings have critical implications for debates over the effects of greater gender equality in executive offices worldwide.
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| 8 |
ID:
175311
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| Summary/Abstract |
We examine whether changes of government influence compliance with international agreements. We investigate compliance with the NATO two percent target to which all NATO countries committed themselves during the NATO summit in Wales in 2014. The dataset includes the military expenditure by NATO countries over the period 2010–2018. The results suggest that countries that do not (yet) comply with the two percent target have smaller growth rates in military expenditure relative to GDP when they experienced a large change of government, e.g. a change from a rightwing to a leftwing government, than countries that did not experience such a large change of government since the NATO summit in 2014. Countries that experienced a large change of government are, thus, less likely to comply with the two percent target. Future research should examine the credibility problem of national governments in other international agreements too.
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| 9 |
ID:
090521
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
During the cold war deterrence worked better in practice than in theory. IT became an article of faith that great power war was virtually unthinkable because of the consequences, yet this conclusion was reached without ever working through the scenarios. Today, in a world of shrinking great power arsenals and proliferation small arsenals, we may now be moving away from the models which serves us will during the cold war. Lawrence Freedman interrogates the assumptions which underpinned strategic deterrence and casts an eye on a more ambiguous nuclear future
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| 10 |
ID:
178496
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States, governments and leaders often reject one another’s role prescriptions. They stick to enacting their role, what they consider to be their central purpose and main promise within a given international society. By applying the main tenets of role theory, this essay looks at the reasons why actors sometimes reject the prescriptions of others, including attempts at bargaining. Rather than claiming that those prescriptions are rejected on account of the pursuit of self-identity or ontological security, this essay suggests that those positions have more to do with defending the public credibility of one’s master role, the core promise made by an actor to (domestic and/or international) audiences. Master roles have to do with the main promises of an actor in a given social and political order, thereby providing credibility to a domestic and international audience. Without maintaining credibility, the actor is unlikely to be able to fulfil master and auxiliary roles as initially set out. The essay contributes to role theory in three ways: by looking beyond explanations centred on identification and ontological security, by conversely building upon public credibility, and also by showing how audiences and roles matter to illiberal regimes. To illustrate the argument, the essay addresses the government of Uzbekistan’s attempt to keep credibility in the face of Russian altercasting in the 1990s.
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| 11 |
ID:
152377
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| Summary/Abstract |
An institutional perspective on nuclear deterrence cooperation within alliances has the potential to fundamentally reorient how we think about analyzing nuclear and deterrence decision-making between nuclear patrons and non-nuclear clients. It comes at a time when the presidency of Donald Trump is sure to test many of the core claims and assumptions in security studies, especially relating to bargaining and credibility within alliances. This article surveys questions that will be core to the research agenda involving alliance institutions and nuclear weapons during the Trump presidency and beyond.
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| 12 |
ID:
186854
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| Summary/Abstract |
Credibility has been used to explain theories of deterrence and cooperation in international relations. In the peacekeeping environment, for what purposes should credibility be built and how can it be signaled? Despite being listed by the UN as a success factor in peace operations, our understanding of credibility in peacekeeping remains limited and focused on deterrence. This article argues that credibility in peace operations must be built for both deterrence and cooperation purposes. Drawing on the international relations, civil war, and peacekeeping literatures, it conceptualizes credibility in peacekeeping by identifying the purposes for which credibility must be built and signaled: deterrence and cooperativeness. It contends that while a peace operation’s ability to deter is limited, signaling cooperativeness - credibility in cooperation—enables a force to cultivate cooperation with national and subnational audiences. This helps to create a more predictable security environment by enabling the force to function on a daily basis.
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| 13 |
ID:
170753
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| Summary/Abstract |
A small but growing literature has started to analyse the European Union (EU) ‘as an effective peacemaker’. We make a contribution to this field by investigating EU mediation effectiveness in the Russia–Ukraine conflict. The focus is on perceptions of effectiveness. Based on information from semi-structured interviews, we compare EU self-images with Ukrainian evaluations of EU mediation efforts. How effective is the EU, including its Member States, deemed to be? What factors are believed to lie behind perceived (in)effectiveness? We concentrate on four such factors, derived from the mediator literature: perceived (im)partiality, coherence and credibility and, finally, evaluations of the EU’s mediation strategies. Both internal and external views singled out EU member states as the most effective actors in current mediation. The role of EU was seen in ambivalent terms by both sides. All the four determinants of mediation effectiveness are discussed in our material, but differ considerably in the degree of attention given to each of them. While (im)partiality is not a factor that is linked to effectiveness in any straightforward way, EU incoherence is associated with inconsistent and weak policies, notably in the Ukraine material.
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| 14 |
ID:
139788
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| Summary/Abstract |
Despite mixed empirical evidence, in the past two decades central bank independence (CBI) has been on the rise under the assumption that it ensures price stability. Using an encompassing theoretical approach and new yearly data for de jure CBI (seventy-eight countries, 1973–2008), we reexamine this relationship, distinguishing the role of printing less money (discipline) from the public's beliefs about the central bank's likely actions (credibility). Democracies differ from dictatorships in the likelihood of political interference and changes to the law because of the presence of political opposition and the freedom to expose government actions. CBI in democracies should be directly reflected in lower money supply growth. Besides being more disciplinarian, it also ensures a more robust money demand by reducing inflation expectations and, therefore, inflation. Empirical results are robust and support a discipline effect conditioned by political institutions, as well as a credibility effect.
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| 15 |
ID:
168281
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines how interstate signaling processes operate under multiple dimensions of uncertainty. The existing signaling literature largely assumes that states communicate and infer one another’s intentions in a simplified context where they are only uncertain about one component of the other’s preferences. Relaxing this unrealistic assumption, I develop a model of interstate reassurance in which the receiver is uncertain of both the compatibility of the sender’s goals and its time horizons. If a receiving state is unsure of the sending state’s time horizons, it is more difficult to determine the costliness of a given signal, and thus how credible it is as an indicator of the sender’s preferences. I show that under certain conditions, shorter time horizons lead to more credible signaling as states become less willing to incur the short-term costs of misrepresentation. Under other conditions, however, shortened time horizons can incentivize hedging behavior, thus undermining a benign state’s ability to credibly signal its intentions. Finally, the model reveals that multidimensional uncertainty can actually facilitate cooperation across a wider range of conditions than one-dimensional uncertainty. I present two brief case illustrations and discuss the model’s implications for contemporary US–China relations.
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| 16 |
ID:
193175
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Using declassified materials to examine the eleven red lines of the Cuban Missile Crisis, this study qualifies and amends two popular beliefs about them: failing to punish violations damages credibility and deterrence requires declaring unambiguous red lines. I argue, first, that violations of red lines create fleeting ‘windows of credibility’ wherein violators fear retaliation. If declarers move quickly, they can convert non-enforcement into a bargaining chip, exchanging it for concessions while avoiding escalation. Second, rather than wholly embrace clarity or ambiguity, declarers frequently optimize by combining clear demands with ambiguity about the consequences of crossing those lines.
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| 17 |
ID:
179163
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A wave of recent scholarship has breathed new life into the study of reputation and credibility in international politics. In this review article, the authors welcome this development while offering a framework for evaluating collective progress, a series of related critiques, and a set of suggestions for future research. The article details how the books under review represent an important step toward consensus on the importance of reputation in world politics, elucidating scope conditions for when reputational inferences are likely to be most salient. The authors argue that despite the significant accomplishments of recent studies, the scholarly record remains thin on the psychology of the perceiver and is instead focused on situational factors at the expense of dispositional variables and is rather myopically oriented toward reputation for resolve to the exclusion of other important types. Despite its contributions, the new literature still falls short of a full explanation for how actors draw inferences about reputation. These remaining theoretical challenges demand scholarly attention and suggest a role for psychology in filling some of the gaps.
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| 18 |
ID:
085866
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| Publication |
2008.
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| Summary/Abstract |
On 15 April 2008, the Hong Kong government released its preliminary proposals on Copyright Protection in the Digital Environment, which cover the civil and criminal liabilities of online infringers and the role of online service providers (OSPs) in combating internet piracy. The preliminary proposals favor OSPs and users more than copyright owners. The government proposes that the OSPs, the content industries and users should voluntarily create a code of practice which defines the role and scope of OSPs in the fight against online piracy. The OSPs oppose any rules making them liable for copyright infringement and the safe harbor provisions. The content industries, in contrast, insist that, in line with international norms, both OSP liability and safe harbor provisions be written into the code of practice. I argue that, in the absence of any assignment of legal right to any party, the Coase theorem predicts that negotiations will fail. The key issue is which party should bear the transaction costs of copyright enforcement, because there are millions of online infringers; however, if the transaction costs of enforcing copyright in the networked environment are prohibitively high, the credibility of the copyright system will be undermined and online piracy will become commonplace.
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| 19 |
ID:
170991
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The 1975 Mayaguez incident was a missed opportunity to establish a more democratic American foreign policy. President Gerald Ford managed the crisis seeking domestic and international credibility. But his conception of credibility was more fractured than that of his predecessors, who regarded it as synonymous with militarism, presidential primacy, and secrecy. Ford believed the preservation of American power depended upon a renewal of American democracy, and he was determined to preside over a period of national reconciliation after the traumas of Watergate and Vietnam. His sense of credibility therefore pushed him towards diplomacy in addition to militarism, co-operation with Congress in addition to presidential unilateralism, and openness in addition to secrecy. The antinomies within Ford’s sense of credibility were partly a product of his time, which saw an eruption of public scepticism towards American and presidential power, and partly of his temperament and experience endowing him with a reverence for democratic consensus. Throughout the crisis, Ford wrestled with the contradictions embedded within his sense of credibility. Although he ultimately resolved those contradictions in an anti-democratic direction and deepened the imperial presidency, that outcome was not foreordained.
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| 20 |
ID:
157900
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When do states defend their reputations? States sometimes pay high costs to protect their reputations, but other times willingly tarnish them. What accounts for the difference? This article investigates reputation building in the context of coercive diplomacy. In coercive bargaining, giving in to a challenge can harm one’s reputation. I argue, however, that states value their reputations less—and therefore are more willing to capitulate to coercive threats—when they do not expect future challenges. Using a data set of more than 200 coercive threats, empirical tests find support for this logic. Coercers that are constrained in their ability to initiate future challenges exhibit higher rates of coercive success in the status quo. The results shed light on the causes of reputation-building behavior and add an important element to our understanding of the dynamics of coercive diplomacy.
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