Alliance Ties Research Articles

The Determinants of Terrorist Listing

Terrorist designation has increasingly become an important counterterrorism tool used by intergovernmental organizations and state governments. This article examines the determinants of terrorist listing and argues that terrorist listing is driven by security as well as political concerns. While countries tend to designate groups that pose a greater security threat, terrorist listing can also be influenced by interstate relationships including alliance ties and state rivalry. We test these arguments using a dataset on 35 countries that currently maintain their own lists of designated terrorist organizations. Our findings show that governments are more likely to list groups that have a record of attacking their domestic interests. Domestic groups are more likely to be designated than foreign groups. Moreover, countries are more likely to designate groups that are designated by their allies, even when these groups do not pose a direct threat. Our study contributes to the literature on terrorism and more broadly international security by systematically examining the determinants of terrorist designation and explaining the heterogeneity of terrorist lists across countries.

The Primacy of Politics? Arms Imports and Political Relations of the Visegrád Countries 1999–2020

International commerce can be determined by the political climate between the exporter and the importer. Arms transfers are a much complex process, where beyond economic factors, alliance ties, security perception and defence planning are also considered. Still, they might not be independent of political relations. This paper aims to capture the arms supplier–recipient relations between the Visegrád countries and Russia, the United States and Germany from 1999 to 2020. More specifically, how do the two factors affect each other: are good political relations necessary for arms deals? Or do arms deals facilitate a friendly political climate? Our conclusion is as follows. On the one hand, a cooperative political climate increases the probability of arms deals, but they are not a necessity, as mutual benefits and security perceptions can override the current political climate. On the other hand, however, arms transfers can deepen cooperation or alleviate the existing differences between the parties.

The Primacy of Politics? Arms Imports and Political Relations of the Visegrád Countries 1999–2020

International commerce can be determined by the political climate between the exporter and the importer. Arms transfers are a much complex process, where beyond economic factors, alliance ties, security perception and defence planning are also considered. Still, they might not be independent of political relations. This paper aims to capture the arms supplier–recipient relations between the Visegrád countries and Russia, the United States and Germany from 1999 to 2020. More specifically, how do the two factors affect each other: are good political relations necessary for arms deals? Or do arms deals facilitate a friendly political climate? Our conclusion is as follows. On the one hand, a cooperative political climate increases the probability of arms deals, but they are not a necessity, as mutual benefits and security perceptions can override the current political climate. On the other hand, however, arms transfers can deepen cooperation or alleviate the existing differences between the parties.

The Effect of Competition among a Firm’s Partners on its Knowledge Production Structure and Outcome

A large body of research suggests that firms benefit from alliances by recombining knowledge obtained from different alliance partners. However, this strategy is premised on the ability of the firm to cross-pollinate knowledge by sharing information freely within its boundaries. But such unrestricted knowledge flows can create leakage concerns for the firm’s alliance partners when the firm’s portfolio of alliance ties includes partners who compete with each other. Even inadvertently, interactions and communications among the firm’s knowledge workers can create a conduit for spillovers to competing partners. This opens up the possibility that to address its partners’ concerns, the firm might segregate its knowledge workers, in effect establishing structural safeguards. Using a sample of public bio-pharmaceutical firms, we demonstrate how competition among a firm’s alliance partners leads to such segregation among its knowledge workers, and show that the effect of such segregation is to undermine the very benefits of recombination by reducing the firm’s overall inventiveness. In doing so, our study contributes to the literature at the intersection of corporate strategy, organization design, and innovation.

How do public organizations communicate their alliances on Facebook and how does the public react? A longitudinal analysis

Organizations have adopted social media to communicate their alliances to the public, that is, engage in representational networks. Yet a comprehensive examination of what is communicated in representational networks and how public reactions are associated with these networks is relatively scarce. This study builds on the Symbiotic Sustainability Model (SSM) to examine the content of messages passed in representational networks on social media and their related public reactions. Based on a panel analysis of one year of Facebook data generated by 605 public organizations in Taiwan, this study reveals that referencing certain topics such as economic and technological development and employing linguistic features demonstrating efficacy, formality, and empathetic concern in Facebook messages was associated with an increased diversity of alliance ties reported by public organizations. Moreover, the relationship between communicating diverse alliance ties and positive public reactions in the form of likes went both ways. Integrating automated topic modeling, linguistic analysis, and panel analysis, this study provides a process-based and communication-centered view of the mechanisms and disparities underlying organizations’ strategic network management on social media.

Ties That Bias in International Conflict: A Spatial Approach to Dyadic Dependence from Alliance Ties and Inbetweenness

Abstract Much of international behavior is linked spatially and temporally. Yet, analyses of interstate interactions generally either assume independence among units or resort to technical solutions to dependence that “throw away” relevant information. We detail a more informative and satisfying approach to modeling spatial dependence from extra-dyadic linkages in alliance ties and geographical proximity as specific pathways of conflict contagion. Beyond deterrence, the purpose of alliances is to draw other parties into dyadic contests, but most existing research on conflict onset generally only considers alliance ties within an individual dyad or external intervention in the same dispute. We develop new measures on third- and fourth-party alliance ties, demonstrating direct and indirect spatial effects of alliances on conflict onset. Similarly, ongoing contests can spread geographically, but dyads in some locations are much more at risk for conflict onset than others. We provide a new theory of geographic “inbetweenness” in conflict and show that dyads involving specific locations and ties to the ongoing conflict are much more likely to see dispute onset, even accounting for other purely dyadic factors. Beyond the intrinsic interest in the impacts of extra-dyadic position and alliances on conflict, our spatial approach can be applied more broadly to other extra-dyadic ties.

A Portfolio Approach to Understanding Performance Implications of Repeated Alliance Ties

Prior studies have been largely split on the link between repeated alliance ties with the same partner and subsequent firm performance. Some studies suggest that repeated ties merely result in redundant learning and knowledge convergence, while others focus on the establishment of inter-firm routines that facilitate knowledge exchange. To reconcile these perspectives, we focus on the relative characteristics of a partner vis-à-vis other partners within the firm’s alliance portfolio. We argue that repeated ties with a relatively unique and capable partner can provide non-redundant learning and motivate the focal firm to allocate more resources to build effective knowledge-sharing routines. Conversely, repeated ties with a relatively less unique and less capable partner can have the opposite effect, thereby dampening subsequent firm performance. Using data on repeated technology alliance ties formed between U.S. firms from 1990-2000, we find support for our arguments that the link between repeated ties and the firm’s post-alliance innovative performance hinges on the relative technological uniqueness and capability of the partner. This study has implications for research on repeated ties and alliance portfolios.

Rigid boundaries between Turkey and China: is political mobility possible?

ABSTRACT This article examines the rigid boundaries in relations between China and Turkey by applying social identity theory to international relations. It evaluates different networks of political alliance and external cultural-ethnic ties as rigid boundaries between the two countries. Turkey-China relations have been shaped by both inter-systemic and inter-state dynamics. Therefore, to show how social context and the permeability of social structure have affected the nature of bilateral relations, this article divides relations into two historical contexts of Cold War and post-Cold War periods. It concludes that it will be hard to go beyond rigid boundaries as long as each side has its own solutions to problems between the two countries.

Japan – U.S. Relations under the Abe Doctrine: Shifting Policy in East Asia Regional Stability

Reelection of Shinzo Abe as Prime Minister provides a favorable climate for both Donald Trump’s first presidential visit to Japan and an improvement of Chinese-Japanese-U.S. bilateral relations. In the 22 October 2017 ballot, Abe’s dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its coalition partner Komeito, secured a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives, the lower house of Japan’s bicameral legislature. The coalition already holds a supermajority, required for amending the constitution, in the upper house. It justified Abe for calling the national elections a year earlier than needed to secure a public mandate for addressing the growing North Korean threat and to validate popular support for deepening national economic reforms, which have had recent success in boosting Japan’s growth rate and the stock market. Still the outcome gave Abe a mandate for his policies. However, his stewardship was unclear as several other factors contributed to LDP’s overwhelming victory. At the structural level, Japan’s first past the post-electoral system tends to amplify electoral wins in comparison to proportional representation systems. Abe’s foreign and security policies highly charged with ideological revisionism contain the potential to shift Japan onto a new international trajectory in East Asia. Its degree of articulation and energy makes for a doctrine capable of displacing the Yoshida Doctrine that has been Japan’s dominant grand strategy in the post-war period. Abe will remain pragmatic and not challenge the status quo. However, Abe has already begun to introduce radical policies that appear to transform national security, US-Japan alliance ties and relations with China and East Asia. The Abe Doctrine is dynamic but high risk. Abe’s revisionism contains fundamental contradictions that may ultimately limit national effectiveness.

Regional Alliance Structure and International Conflict

Abstract Why are some regions more peaceful than others? Some regions are particularly plagued by traditional power politics and political tensions, while the danger of war between major actors has significantly declined in other regions. The conventional literature would answer the question from a dyadic perspective—a region with many states with certain set of traits, such as democracy, should be peaceful. However, it is ultimately an empirical question whether the prevalence of power politics and conflict can be solely explained by the type of states and dyads in a region. I argue that the nature of international interactions is shaped by regional-level environment. Due to local security externalities, dyadic politics and conflict is dependent on conditions in a local neighborhood. More specifically, this study focuses on the role of regional-level alliance structure. A region can be situated in various types of alliance configuration depending on global geopolitical climate. I argue that conflict is unlikely in a region in which a global power establishes hegemonic domination through alliance ties with local states. The presence of an external global power dominating a region provides a local enforcement mechanism and reassurance for local states, which in turn reduces hostile interactions among local states. To examine how the regional-level conditions influence dyadic-level politics among local states, this paper empirically analyzes political events data (Integrated Data for Events Analysis) applying multilevel modeling, aiming at contributing the literature by explicitly modeling the influence of regional-level variables on local politics beyond militarized disputes. Empirical analysis revealed that a regionally shared “patron” can promote peace between local states. However, the effect of regional hierarchy turned out to be indirect. Regional dominance structured by an external global power does not exert an overarching influence over an entire region by shifting the region-specific intercept. Rather, the regional-level global power domination in terms of defense pacts particularly influences powerful states in a region while not quite reducing hostility among “minor” local states. Thus, international conflict and hostility is indirectly constrained in a region under hegemonic domination by a global power. This study has empirically explored an argument that it is fruitful to go beyond a purely dyadic analysis of international conflict. The independent effect of a spatial environment means that even similar dyads may behave differently depending on the conditions surrounding them. It shows a need to reexamine some of the important findings about international conflict from a spatial perspective, taking into account macro-regional contexts within which states operate. Moreover, the introduction of regional contexts potentially bridges a gap between quantitative studies of international conflict and more area-specific studies.

Secrecy among Friends: Covert Military Alliances and Portfolio Consistency

Scholars think that friendly nations adopt secrecy to avoid domestic costs and facilitate cooperation. But this article uncovers a historical puzzle. Between 1870 and 1916, over 80 percent of alliance ties were partially or completely covert. Otherwise, hidden pacts are rare. Why was secrecy prevalent in this particular period and not others? This article presents a theory of “portfolio consistency.” Public agreements undermine the rank of hidden alliances. A partner willing to openly commit to another country but not to you signals the increased importance of this other relationship. States pressure their covert partners to avoid subsequent public pacts. This creates a network effect: the more secret partners a state has, the greater the incentives to maintain secrecy in later military agreements. Covert alliances have a cumulative effect. In seeking the flexibility of hidden partnerships, states can lock themselves into a rigid adherence to secrecy.

The Trump effect downunder: U.S. allies, Australian strategic culture, and the politics of path dependence

ABSTRACTDonald Trump’s election precipitated a debate in Australia about the value of retaining close alliance ties with the United States. Similar dynamics are discernible in other U.S. allies as the negative impact of Trump administration policies becomes clearer. Yet despite this “Trump effect,” we argue Australia is unlikely to distance itself from the United States because at the core of Australia’s strategic culture is a very positive “cultural orientation” toward the United States that is highly institutionalized in treaties, formal bilateral ties, Track 2 diplomacy, and public opinion. Such institutionalized ties have powerful path dependent effects. Accordingly, we conclude that the Trump effect does not constitute a powerful enough “exogenous shock” to move Australia off its well-worn grand-strategic path. But this alliance relationship is marked by both high cultural affinity and high institutionalization: American policy-makers should seriously consider whether other U.S. allies can tolerate similar levels of “stress.”

What Is the Relationship Between Alliance and Militarized Conflict? Analysis of Reciprocal Causation

Despite the importance of alliances in international politics, little is known about how they theoretically and empirically affect militarized conflicts and vice versa. This study aims to examine the reciprocal relationship between alliances and militarized conflicts. The literature has focused only on the effects of alliances on militarized conflicts without paying much attention to the simultaneous causation between them. Thus, previous studies have not consistently revealed a relationship between alliances and conflict. Moreover, they are limited due to the use of dichotomous measures of shared alliance ties. Using a continuous measure of alliance ties, this study clearly demonstrates that shared alliance ties can be effective in reducing the likelihood of militarized conflicts. In addition, this study finds that there is a reciprocal relationship between shared alliances and militarized conflicts. It finds that militarized conflicts tend to decrease the level of shared alliance ties. Then, this study argues that alliance might be added to the next element behind the Kantian tripod as a salient factor that reduces militarized conflict. Finally, this study points to insights to be gained from the findings and suggests some policy implications.

Hegemonic blackmail: entrapment in civil war intervention

ABSTRACTHow do alliance ties impact intervention decision-making? In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the interventionist mantle was adopted by many of America’s allies, from the French- and British-led intervention in Libya, to the heavy involvement of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar in Syria. In both cases, the United States was eventually drawn into the intervention. This article lays the theoretical foundations for the logic of civil war entrapment, illustrating that alliance ties can be used by smaller states to induce their more militarily capable allies to join an intervention. This pressure – whether exercised through diplomatic pressure, manipulation of media narratives and public opinion, or through tactical manipulation of the war – constitutes a crude form of “hegemonic blackmail,” allowing small states to entangle their more powerful allies in intervention.

The impact of context and model choice on the determinants of strategic alliance formation: Evidence from a staged replication study

Research summary: Endogenous characteristics of alliance network structure have repeatedly been shown to predict future alliance ties in the strategic management literature. Specifically, the concepts and measures of relational, structural, and positional embeddedness (per Gulati and Gargiulo, 1999), as well as interdependence, are foundational for many studies. We explore these determinants of alliance formation by replicating the baseline analyses of Ahuja, Polidoro, and Mitchell's, 2009 SMJ article. We examine the impact of empirical choices with respect to time period, underlying data generating model, and industry by isolating each effect in turn. We demonstrate that while geographic similarity and product‐market similarity each robustly predict the interdependence effect, the effects of both technological similarity as well as the embeddedness predictors are sensitive to context and/or method.Managerial summary: Our examination of alliance formation in the chemical and semiconductor industries during the 1990s demonstrates how new alliances may be predicted by both the technical, geographic, and product‐market fit of potential partners as well as characteristics of each partner's previous network participation. Comparing our results to an earlier study, we find that geographic and product‐market similarity predict alliance formation across both industries and time frames while prior ties between partners predict alliance formation only when these industries are less mature. Other network participation indicators generate nuanced effects, which underscore the importance of quasi‐replications of alliance formation across industries and time periods in building evidence‐based management theories. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Alliances as a Necessary Condition of Multiparty Wars

The scientific study of war has largely ignored necessary conditions for war onset. Conflict scholars have previously identified alliances as a mechanism that brings about the initial expansion of war but have not examined whether it is a prerequisite for large wars. We argue that wars diffuse into multiparty wars only in the presence of alliances. In other words, in the absence of any alliance ties, war would not include more than two parties. We put forth a theoretical rationale for this relationship and conduct a series of tests on both dyadic and multiparty wars between 1816 and 2007. These tests provide support for our hypothesis, suggesting that alliances are a virtual necessary condition for multiparty wars: the larger the war, the more likely alliances are a necessary condition.

Informal Managerial Networks and Formal Firm Alliances

We investigate the relationship between managerial-level advice ties and organizational-level alliance ties in the context of an institutionalized biotech cluster. Cross-level processes are assumed to influence networking activities of managers and their organizations and lead to specific structural patterns characterizing networks with two levels. Applying exponential random graph models (ERGMs) to multilevel network data collected in a German biotech cluster we find that formal strategic alliances and the informal exchange of advice are inseparably interdependent. Managers have a higher propensity to exchange advice if their organizations are allied. Moreover, managers with many informal ties belong to firms with few alliance partners and vice versa.

Venture Capital Syndication Withdrawal and Collective Sanctions

The literature on strategic alliances has put significant attention on the formation, duration and stability of the alliances. We add to the alliance discourse by studying post-termination outcomes. To our knowledge, there is no research on the consequences of alliance break-ups. Building on arguments from the social capital theory, we posit that unexpected termination of alliance ties triggers collective punishment by community actors. We explore the effect of firm reputation on the severity of such collective sanctions. We test our hypotheses by investigating the impact of VC firms’ withdrawal from syndications and their inclusion in future deals. Our findings indicate that withdrawal from VC syndications reduces the chance of inclusion in future deals and this effect is stronger for reputable firm, which are more visible in the network.

In defence of the Indo-Pacific: Australia's new strategic map

The 2013 Australian Defence White Paper categorically termed Australia's zone of strategic interest the Indo-Pacific, the first time any government has defined its region this way. This raises questions about what the Indo-Pacific means, whether it is a coherent strategic system, the provenance of the concept and its implications for Asian security as well as Australian policy. Indo-Pacific Asia can best be understood as an expansive definition of a maritime super-region centred on South-East Asia, arising principally from the emergence of China and India as outward-looking trading states and strategic actors. It is a strategic system insofar as it involves the intersecting interests of key powers such as China, India and the USA, although the Indo-Pacific subregions will retain their own dynamics too. It suits Australia's two-ocean geography and expanding links with Asia, including India. The concept is, however, not limited to an Australian perspective and increasingly reflects US, Indian, Japanese and Indonesian ways of seeing the region. It also reflects China's expanding interests in the Indian Ocean, suggesting that the Chinese debate may shift towards partial acceptance of Indo-Pacific constructs alongside Asia-Pacific and East Asian ones, despite suspicions about its association with the US rebalance to Asia. Questions about Australia's ability to implement an effective Indo-Pacific strategy must account for force posture, alliance ties and defence diplomacy, as well as constraints on force structure and spending.

Toward a Network Theory of Alliance Formation

We propose a network-based theory of alliance formation. Our theory implies that, in addition to key state and dyad attributes already established in the literature, the evolution of the alliance network from any given point in time is largely determined by its structure. Specifically, we argue that closed triangles in the alliance network—where i is allied with j is allied with k is allied with i — produce synergy effects in which state-level utility is greater than the sum of its dyadic parts. This idea can be generalized to n-state closure, and, when considered along with factors that make dyadic alliance formation more attractive, such as military prowess and political compatibility, suggests that the network will evolve toward a state of several densely connected clusters of states with star-like groupings of states as an intermediary stage. To evaluate our theory, we use the temporal exponential random graph model and find that the roles of our network effects are robustly supported by the data, whereas the effects of non-network parameters vary substantially between periods of recent history. Our results indicate that network structure plays a greater role in the formation of alliance ties than has been previously understood in the literature.