This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."
International crises occur when two states confront each other with mutually incompatible demands. In general, states will not make concessions unless they are convinced that the alternative of fighting will be even more unpleasant. Crisis negotiations are exchanges of threats designed to persuade the opponent that one has the political will to use force if one's demands are not met, and that one has the military capabilities to render war sufficiently unpleasant to the opponent relative to the concessions demanded. These threats will not work unless the opponent believes both of these requirements are met-that is, they must be credible. The general conclusion from our studies of crisis bargaining is that to achieve credibility, actors must take actions that they could not, or would not, have taken unless they were serious about fighting. We have studied numerous ways in which militarily strong actors can signal their resolve, and we have learned that if one can, then one signals strength and resolve in a crisis: it never pays to pretend to be weak. The logic is straightforward: if one feigns weakness successfully, the opponent will not concede, and one would have to fight a costly and risky war. Hence, there appears to be no reason to signal weakness if one is strong. There are, however, instances in which opponents have concealed their strength even though they preferred to achieve a diplomatic solution (e.g., the Chinese prior to their intervention in the Korean War in 1950), and these are quite puzzling from our theoretical perspective.
This project investigates conditions under which a strong resolved actor might pretend to be weak during a crisis. It uses game-theoretic mathematical models to study the relationship between pre-war crisis bargaining and war-fighting. Among the questions to be explored are: how the information states transmit and obtain during the crisis influences their fighting strategies, how the pursuit of optimal fighting strategies might clash with the pursuit of peaceful means of crisis resolution, how actors might deliberately mislead the opponent into a false sense of superiority and risk deterrence failure in order to obtain a military advantage, the conditions that make such feints more or less likely, and the implications for the signaling theories of crisis bargaining. The project aims to advance the theories of the causes of war as well by advancing the notion that war should be seen as interdependent investments in costly effort to persuade the opponent to concede, with strategies chosen reflecting what one believes about the opponent's political will and military capacity. This further develops the study of war as an interactive process instead of an outcome that terminates political exchange.
The project aims to improve international relations theory, but it makes broader contributions. The development of the war-fighting component of the model is meant to bring our theories of war closer to what policy-makers and military officers seem to have in mind when they design war plans. Although the theoretical development is technical, the results must be communicated to a wider audience because of their implication for policy-making.
