Robert Jervis once claimed that “states sometimes fail to deploy threats that would benefit them and on other, probably more numerous, occasions employ threats that provoke rather than deter.”[1] If so, the field of international politics has done a remarkably poor job of accounting for the latter types of threat. For one, provocation has remained…
Tag: Germany
Roundtable 9-9 on Endurance and War: The National Sources of Military Cohesion
The study of military effectiveness in political science has come a long way in a short period of time. When I started graduate school in the mid-1990s, most of the key works on the subject were written by historians and sociologists rather than political scientists.[1] Beginning in the late 1990s, however, military effectiveness began to…
Article Review 60 on “Rage of Honor: Entente Indignation and the Lost Chance for Peace in the First World War.” Security Studies 24:4
Scholars have long studied the causes of World War One. More recently, they have focused on events and processes which occurred after the outbreak of hostilities, including military intervention, war fighting strategies, and especially the war’s duration. In particular, research has explored why the Central Powers and the Entente were unable to reach a peace…
Article Review 50 on “Alliance Coercion and Nuclear Restraint: How the United States Thwarted West Germany’s Nuclear Ambitions.” International Security 39:3
In “Alliance Coercion and Nuclear Restraint,” Gene Gerzhoy offers a novel theory of how alliances can prevent nuclear proliferation. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, which holds that alliances prevent proliferation by reassuring the client state and providing a substitute for an indigenous arsenal, Gerzhoy argues that clients in threatening security environments will nonetheless be interested…
Roundtable 8-9 on Armed State Building: Confronting State Failure
In this important study, which should be of interest to both scholars and policymakers, Paul Miller examines the practice of armed state building by both the United States and the United Nations. While acknowledging that there are some characteristics of armed state building by liberal powers that are similar to the theory and practice of…
Article Review 45 on “The Inscrutable Intentions of Great Powers.”
In his recent article “The Inscrutable Intentions of Great Powers,” Sebastian Rosato argues that it is far more difficult for states to signal their intentions than existing scholarship recognizes. He claims that the various signaling mechanisms proposed in the IR literature — both domestic-level characteristics and international-level behaviors — “at best…allow for marginal reductions in…
Roundtable 7-19 on Knowing the Adversary: Leaders Intelligence and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations
How political leaders and their intelligence agencies assess the long-term intentions of their adversaries in international politics, how their assessments change in response to changes in the adversary’s capabilities or behavior, and the extent to which political leaders rely on their intelligence agencies are old questions in the study of international relations. The assessment of…
Forum 8 on “Special Issue: The Origins of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime.”
Last year, Scott Sagan declared – on H-Diplo – that we are in the midst of a renaissance in nuclear studies, driven by first-rate work by younger scholars.[1] Two qualities in particular mark this scholarship. First, many of these young scholars combine both methodological innovation and rigor while engaging new archival sources. Second, these scholars…
Article Review 36 on “Hans Morgenthau and the Tragedy of the Nation-State”
Since the turn of the millennium, International Relations has been experiencing a revival of realist scholarship. As Konstantinos Kostagiannis writes in his thought-provoking paper on the classical realist Hans J. Morgenthau, part of this revival is due to the establishment of “tragedy as an analytical category and [the discussion of] its contemporary relevance for modern…
Roundtable 7-13 on The Great Powers and the International System Systemic Theory in Empirical Perspective
It is difficult for me to imagine an international relations (IR) scholar not being interested enough in Bear Braumoeller’s The Great Powers and the International System to read this review symposium. I’ll warrant that I’m biased on the matter, having been nurtured on systemic IR theory as an undergraduate and graduate student, liking books that…