Offering the Carrot and Hiding the Stick?

In his address to the UN General Assembly in September 1999, Kofi Annan insisted that ‘state sovereignty … is being redefined by the forces of globalisation and international cooperation. These dev...

يتناول هذا البحث النقاش[1] بين الواقعية الجديدة وبين الليبرالية الجديدة في إطار حقل العلاقات الدولية ويسلط الضوء على أهم طروحات النظريتين، وخاصة فيما يتعلق بوجهات نظرهما حول هيكل العلاقات الدولية وهل يحكمه الفوضى والصراع أم التعاون. كانت، ولا زالت، دراسة الصراع والتعاون في العلاقات الدولية من المهام الرئيسية للبحث والتحليل بالنسبة لمنظري وباحثي العلاقات الدولية، وأصبح هذا الترابط بين الصراع والتعاون القضية الرئيسية في النقاش بين النظريتين السائدتين في العلاقات الدولية. تعتبر تظريتي الواقعية الجديدة والليبرالية الجديدة من أكثر النظريات تأثيرا على العلاقات الدولية، ويعتبر النقاش بين النظريتين من أكبر واهم النقاشات في حقل العلاقات الدولية. يسعى هذا البحث إلى بيان وشرح الاسهامات النظرية لكل من النظريتين فيما يتعلق بالصراع والتعاون في العلاقات الدولية، ومدى مساهمة طروحات الليبرالية الجديدة، خاصة فيما يتعلق بدور المؤسسات الدولية في زيادة التعاون الدولي، وفي التقليل من هيمنة الرؤية الواقعية في العلاقات الدولية وخاصة فيما يتعلق بسيادة الفوضى والصراع من أجل القوة. تناقش هذه الدراسة أن النقاش بين الواقعية الجديدة وبين الليبرالية الجديدة لم يساهم بشكل كبير في تطوير نظرية العلاقات الدولية، حيث لم يساهم هذا النقاش بشكل كبير في التقليل من هيمنة سياسات القوة في العلاقات الدولية وحل المشاكل الدولية الناتجة عنها.
 [1] المقصود ب (النقاش) هنا هو النقاش النظري بين الواقعية الجديدة وبين الليبرالية الجديدة. وهو أحد (النقاشات الكبرى) أو (الحوارات العظمى)، حسب استخدام الباحثين، في العلاقات الدولية والمؤخوذة من الاصل الانكليزي (Great debates)، والتي تركز على النقاشات النظرية في تطور حقل العلاقات الدولية منذ بداية القرن العشرين. وهي تشمل، في الغالب، ثلاثة نقاشات كبرى: النقاش بين الواقعية وبين المثالية-الليبرالية، والنقاش بين الواقعية وبين السلوكية، والنقاش بين الواقعية الجديدة وبين الليبرالية الجديدة. وهناك من يضيف نقاشا رابعا مهما وهو النقاش بين الوضعية وما بعد الوضعية (انظر مثلا، تيم دان وآخرون، ترجمة ديما الخضرا، 2016؛Lake, 2013; Lapid, 1989 ).

The problems of peacekeeping in Somalia, Rwanda and former Yugoslavia marked a turning point for major powers in international military peacekeeping. Major support for a more pro-active UN role in peacekeeping has not been forthcoming and where major power involvement is deemed vital, non-UN peace operations have increasingly become the norm. This valuable volume explores the continuing significance of peacekeeping in international affairs, particularly in terms of its military dimensions, and examines the priorities and perspectives of the major powers in relation to their military participation in international peacekeeping and wider peace operations in the twenty-first century. It is ideal for scholars and students interested in contemporary international politics, international relations, international organizations, security and strategic studies, conflict resolution and foreign policy analysis.

The aim of this paper is to dissect the causal nexus between trust, institutions and cooperation in international relations (IR) and to highlight the theoretical and empirical potential of bringing trust from the periphery to the centre of our debates about international cooperation. My central argument is that the concept of trust allows us to explain particularly risky forms of international cooperation where the costs of being exploited outweigh the potential gains of cooperation, actors have an incentive to defect if others cooperate, and uncertainty about others' preferences and constraints cannot be fully reduced by international institutions. As most institutions in IR remain incomplete, scholars of international cooperation should hence pay more attention to trust-based forms of risk absorption. Moreover, the paper argues that the creation of trust is best conceptualised as a process of costly signalling. In order to test the causal link between trust and cooperation, the paper analyses Germany's consent to give up the Deutschmark and to create a common European currency in 1989. Germany's initial mistrust regarding France's trustworthiness in monetary affairs could be overcome by the exchange of costly signals. I show that the creation of trust was a necessary part of a causal mechanism bridging the analytical gap between Germany's general preferences for monetary cooperation and the actual creation of European Monetary Union under conditions of risk and uncertainty.

PurposeThe purpuse of this study is to answer the following two questions. Do conflict management efforts mitigate the recurrence and severity of civil conflict? If so, how? Do some conflict management strategies fare better than others in these tasks? This study theorizes about the connection between the costliness of a conflict management strategy – with respect to both the disputants and third parties – and civil conflict outcomes. This theory produces two contradictory predictions: that more costly strategies either increase or decrease violence. This study not only adjudicates between these two possibilities but also incorporates the role of timing. The early use of more costly strategies, for example, may encourage disputants to reduce violence in civil conflicts.Design/methodology/approachTo evaluate the predications that the authors derive from their theoretical argument, the authors quantitatively analyze the effect of conflict management strategies’ relative cost on various measures of civil conflict recurrence and severity. The authors first identify the set of international–civil militarized conflicts (I-CMCs) during the period 1946–2010. I-CMCs contain two dimensions – interstate and intrastate – making them the most complex and dangerous form of militarized conflict. To each I-CMC, the authors then link all third-party attempts to manage the I-CMC’s civil conflict dimension. Finally, after developing quantitative indicators, a series of regression equations explore the relationships of primary interest.FindingsTwo main findings emerge. First, when third parties use a relatively more costly conflict management strategy to manage a civil conflict (e.g. a peace operation or military intervention, as opposed to mediation), the severity of the conflict increases, while conflict recurrence rates remain unchanged. Second, this study uncovers a trade-off. The early use of a relatively more costly management strategy lowers a civil conflict’s severity in the short-term. It also, however, increases the likelihood – and speed with which – civil conflict recurs. The timing of certain conflict management strategies matters.Originality/valueScholars typically isolate conflict management strategies in number (i.e. consider efforts as independent of one another, even those within the same conflict) and kind (i.e. examine mediation but not peace operations). This study, in contrast, includes the following: the full menu of conflict management strategies available to third parties – negotiation, mediation, adjudication/arbitration, peace operations, sanctions and military intervention – over a lengthy time period (1946–2010); theorizes about the relative merits of these strategies; and considers the timing of certain conflict management efforts. In so doing, it highlights a policy trade-off and proposes promising areas for future research.

Peace Operations and Global Order. Edited by Alex J. Bellamy and Paul Williams. New York: Routledge, 2005. 242p. $115.00. The literature on peace operations has been dominated by case studies and by efforts to glean policy-relevant lessons in order to improve ongoing or future peacekeeping operations. More explicitly theoretical studies that seek to embed such interventions within the broader debates in international relations or comparative politics are more recent and less developed. Peace Operations and Global Order contributes to these debates by bringing insights from critical theory that raise new questions about how peace operations and the post–Cold War international system shape one another.

While most UN peace operations have become large and multidimensional, UN support to postwar Nepal, the UN in Nepal (UNMIN), was authorized as a focused mission of limited duration. Its lightness notwithstanding, the mission made a significant contribution by monitoring the cantonment process, assisting with the elections, and being an active watchdog of implementation as stipulated in the 2006 peace agreement. The case study casts doubt on the assumption that international assistance to peacebuilding can compensate for lack of capacity. Nepal did not meet conventional criteria for local capacity for postwar peacebuilding (as, e.g., used by Michael W. Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis 2006), but a more prominent international role would likely have been counterproductive by courting Nepalese nationalist reactions and Indian opposition. A mission carefully calibrated to take account of these concerns helped keep the peace process on track. KEYWORDS: United Nations, peace operations, Nepal. FOR THE PAST TWO DECADES, UN PEACE OPERATIONS TO ASSIST COUNTRIES emerging from civil war have steadily become more expansive and multidimensional, with broad peacebuilding mandates added to peacekeeping. This development has been supported by a scholarly literature that emphasizes the importance of international assistance to consolidate peace in contemporary postwar settings. While the nature of the assistance varies--some writers emphasize military peacekeeping commitments while others focus on postwar economic management--the premise is that international assistance is critically important. (1) In some cases, however, the UN has mounted much more modest operations that nevertheless have contributed significantly to the transition from war to peace. Little attention has been paid to these cases in either the scholarly literature or the policy discourse even though they raise intriguing questions about the possible virtues of minimalism in international peace operations. What are the contributions, constraints, and dilemmas of such operations? Are they only relevant in easy transitions from war to peace when conditions for peacebuilding are quite favorable? If so, what are the parameters of these situations? In this article, I explore these questions with respect to the UN in Nepal (UNMIN). In some respects, the conditions for war-to-peace transition in Nepal were not easy, and the postwar environment remained troubled and uncertain. Nevertheless, the peace agreement signed in 2006 between the Maoists and the government was roughly speaking on track some four years later, and renewed warfare between the parties seemed unlikely. The UN played an important--possibly critical--role in the transition. Yet the mission had an extraordinarily narrow mandate and no armed peacekeepers. As such, UNMIN belongs to a small category of UN peace operations. Out of slightly more than fifty operations in 2008, only perhaps half a dozen, mostly political missions were similarly minimalistic. (2) The Rationale for a Focused Mission In some respects, postwar Nepal was not a prima facie case for a light mission. The civil war had lasted for ten years when the Nepalese Maoists and the government signed a comprehensive peace agreement (CPA) in 2006. The fighting had left deep social and political wounds. Some 15,000 persons had been killed or made to disappear, and many more thousands had been forced to leave their homes. The deep-seated social, political, and economic divisions that had fueled the civil war remained. Although aggregate indicators of poverty in the country as a whole had decreased during the war, one-third of the population was still living in poverty by 2003. (3) In contested areas, development projects had come to a near standstill. Complicating the peacebuilding process was a sense that the country was on the threshold of significant social transitions that could be difficult to manage. …

This book offers a new perspective on peace missions in intra-state wars, based on comparative field research. In theoretical terms, this book proposes a new definition of peace operation success based on two crucial elements: the (re)establishment of order and the accomplishment of the mandate. The work presents a new typology for assessing peace operations as failures, partial failures, partial successes, or successes. This focus on ‘blurry’ outcomes provides a clearer theoretical framework to understand what constitutes successful peace operations. It explains the different outcomes of peace operations (based on the type of success/failure) by outlining the effect(s) of the combination of the key ingredients-strategy and the type of interveners. Empirically, this book tests the saliency of the theoretical framework by examining the peace operations which took place in Somalia, Sierra Leone and Liberia. This book refutes the classification of these three cases as the ‘worst’ context for ‘transitional politics’, and demonstrates that peace operations may succeed, partially of totally, in challenging contexts, and that the diverse outcomes are better explained by the type of intervener and the strategy employed than by the type of context. This work shows that, for a peace operation in an intra-state war, the adoption of a deterrence strategy works best for re-establishing order while the involvement of a great power facilitates the accomplishment of the mandate. This book will be of much interest to students of peacekeeping, conflict resolution, civil wars, security studies and IR in general.

Since the 1990s, insurgencies in African states such as Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo, Somalia and Sudan have attracted attention from scholars and policy-makers as evidence of a new generation of warfare. Rather than fighting to replace existing states with more efficient alternatives, insurgents in these wars disrupt political order and hollow out states rather than fighting to replace or reform them. Their leaderships often lack cohesion. Their styles of fighting reflect this fragmented structure, an amalgam of ethnic militias, local gangs, defecting army units and criminal bands. They advertise no core ideology or comprehensive political programmes. In a marked contrast to Africa's Maoist-style anti-colonial and anti-apartheid insurgents of the 1960s to the 1980s that devoted great effort to set up liberated zones and to mobilize and administer populations, these new insurgents neither claim that they represent large segments of the population nor put significant effort into seeking popular support for their objectives. Their actions are geared instead towards protecting and enriching their own members, usually at the expense of the security and material well-being of the people among whom they fight.

Peace operations are the main instrument of the United Nations (UN) to maintain international peace and security. This special issue analyzes how recent changes in world politics, in terms of increased geopolitical competition and contestation of the liberal international order, have influenced UN peace operations. It combines International Relations (IR) theory and peace research by calling for a macro-level analysis of UN peace operations. It thereby contributes to core debates in IR about the changing global order and its manifestations, as well as to peace research by analyzing how structural factors influence the UN’s role in promoting peace. Overall, the special issue further promotes a macro turn in peace research, which we argue is urgently needed at a time when the UN’s role in maintaining international peace and security is questioned by major and emerging powers and by host states.

Costly Dividends: The Price of Peace Patrick Cronin (bio) Blue Helmets: The Strategy of UN Military Operations. By John Hillen. London, England: Brassey’s, 1998. 320 pp. $26.95 Cloth. Coercive Inducement and the Containment of International Crises. By Donald C.F. Daniel, Bradd C. Hayes, and Chantal De Jonge Oudraat. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1998. 288 pp.* Policing the New World Order: Peace Operations and Public Security. Robert B. Oakley, Michael J. Dziedzic, and Eliot M. Goldberg, editors. Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1998. 573 pp.* When Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was asked his assessment of the French Revolution, he sagaciously replied: “It’s too soon to tell.” Not even a decade into a new world order, replete with a peace dividend, it may be premature to draw any cosmic conclusions about peace and security in the post-bipolar world. But it is not too early to begin debating the possible solutions. Given the spate of volumes on peacekeeping and peace operations published in this decade, there is clearly a dearth of such caution within the present realm of international relations. Indeed, just as soon as peace operations are mounted - in Haiti and Somalia, in Cambodia and Bosnia - there is a panoply of studies describing these inchoate events. [End Page 208] Evidence of this compulsion with instantaneous analysis is apparent in the bibliographies of the Hillen and Daniel et al. books, or simply by logging on to Amazon.com and searching for the titles of the most recent 100 books about peace operations. It’s an astonishing surfeit of apparently desultory data. International relations theory, and to a large degree the study of history, are conveniently circumvented by these urgent intellectual contributions. Thus it is scarcely a surprise that these utilitarian studies are often scribed by practitioners (ambassadors and soldiers) and those in the employ of practitioners (such as professors at professional military education institutions). Such is certainly the case with all three volumes under review in this essay. John Hillen is a heroic young soldier who fought in Desert Storm and now, perched on the Council on Foreign Relations, is distinguishing himself on the battlefield of inside-the-beltway punditry. Ambassador Robert B. Oakley (Ret.) is one of the finest diplomatists and a principal player in the peacekeeping operation in Somalia; Colonel Michael J. Dziedzic is an Air Force officer and able academic. Both Oakley and Dziedzic, as well as their research assistant Eliot Goldberg, conducted their studies at the National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies. Donald Daniel and Bradd Hayes are both well-established experts of international peace and security issues with the United States Naval War College and their co-author Chantal de Jonge Oudraat is an experienced United Nations hand. In short, they are a worldly group of writers. Despite the aforementioned skepticism by this author, however, these three books stand out from the rest of the pack. They are not simply descriptive but also incisive, not simply practical but also conceptual, not simply immediate but also visionary. A careful reader will emerge from this trio of volumes having learned both detailed and general knowledge. Before delving into the specifics of each volume, it is possible to make three broad observations that are applicable to them as a set. First, all three books evince the complexity of the international system at the close of the millennium. If the evolution of the system is analogous to a journey by train, our last known destination was the Cold War; at that point we traded our bullet express for a local milk run whose eventual terminus point is not soon to be ascertained. The messiness of the international system, whether non-polar, multi-polar or multi-leveled, seems a durable fixture for the foreseeable future. As John Hillen observes, the concept of “victory” does not apply to the [End Page 209] realm of peace operations, so instead one must rely on less precise measures of effectiveness such as the ability to “limit armed conflict” and “facilitate conflict resolution.” At the same time, the central actors in this systemically tranquil yet locally disturbed system - nation-states - are increasingly encroached upon by...

Somalia has been the site of two of the world’s largest peace operations and home to some of the greatest setbacks and frustrations in international peacekeeping. The country’s political economy constitutes a non-permissive environment that creates significant challenges for peace operations. Peace operations in Somalia have quickly become a central economic asset over which local groups compete and sometimes fight and have contributed to the rise of a business class that is dependent on contracts and outsourcing from the peacekeepers and international stabilisation and state-building work of which they are a part. Powerful Somali constituencies have developed an interest in perpetuating the status quo – continued state weakness, corruption, lack of effective rule of law, and insecurity – as a preferred environment in which they have learnt to profit. In consequence, peace operations have had to work with weak and sometimes unreliable local partners who view state-building and peacebuilding as lucrative projects to perpetuate but not as objectives to achieve.

An examination of the ways cyberspace is changing both the theory and the practice of international relations. Cyberspace is widely acknowledged as a fundamental fact of daily life in today's world. Until recently, its political impact was thought to be a matter of low politics—background conditions and routine processes and decisions. Now, however, experts have begun to recognize its effect on high politics—national security, core institutions, and critical decision processes. In this book, Nazli Choucri investigates the implications of this new cyberpolitical reality for international relations theory, policy, and practice. The ubiquity, fluidity, and anonymity of cyberspace have already challenged such concepts as leverage and influence, national security and diplomacy, and borders and boundaries in the traditionally state-centric arena of international relations. Choucri grapples with fundamental questions of how we can take explicit account of cyberspace in the analysis of world politics and how we can integrate the traditional international system with its cyber venues. After establishing the theoretical and empirical terrain, Choucri examines modes of cyber conflict and cyber cooperation in international relations; the potential for the gradual convergence of cyberspace and sustainability, in both substantive and policy terms; and the emergent synergy of cyberspace and international efforts toward sustainable development. Choucri's discussion is theoretically driven and empirically grounded, drawing on recent data and analyzing the dynamics of cyberpolitics at individual, state, international, and global levels.

This article is a re-examination of cooperation in international relations through the example of Franco-Syrian relations between 2001 and 2004. I explore how cooperation fulfils – or not – a function of recognition, especially in the case of countries under unequal terms. Based on archival research and interviews, the article analyses three concrete moments of cooperation between Syria and France during this time. While traditional Franco-Syrian cooperation, prior to 2000, was based on a mutual recognition of partners, in the aftermath of presidential change in Syria in 2000 and within the shifting regional context, the Franco-Syrian relationship seemed to be marked by an inequality. Therefore, the article aims to capture the symbols of this recognition between France and Syria, and to study the role of cooperation not only in deepening a bilateral relationship, but – in a new perspective in international relations – in undermining it.

The question addressed in this analysis is whether endowing agents with various forms of asymmetric power makes cooperation more likely across a variety of structural settings of conflict and cooperation present in international relations. To address this question, an agent-based model incorporating asymmetric power among agents in a set of (2×2) games that represent different forms of conflict and cooperation prevalent in international relations (Chicken, Stag, Assurance, Deadlock, and Prisoner's Dilemma) is developed and analyzed via simulation. Simulation results indicate that the introduction of asymmetric power substantially increases the chances that both cooperative agents survive and cooperative worlds evolve. This is particularly the case when agents are endowed with the ability to selectively interact with other agents. Also, anticipated variations in outcomes across the game structures regarding the likelihood of cooperation are supported.