What strategies can states use to achieve their goals in interstate crises? How likely are these strategies to result in war? Crisis behavior is bargaining in the shadow of power: actors employ threats to use force, or engage in limited uses of force, to coerce their opponent and secure concessions. Threats must be credible to be effective: it must be in one's interest to follow through despite the temptation to avoid their costs. Hence, the ability to credibly commit to the use of force is at the heart of crisis bargaining. Whereas scholars have investigated how actors can communicate their commitments in an environment where uncertainty makes bluffing possible, they have not explored how actors can restructure the environment itself through their actions. Military moves, such as arms buildups and troop mobilization and deployments, can serve as signals, but can also alter the strategic situation by improving one's expected payoff from the use of force. These are tacit bargaining moves that can be used to create one's own commitment or undermine the opponent's. Even though we know about the consequences of the inability to commit credibly, we do not know much about the process of creating commitments themselves.
Scientific Objectives This project investigates the use of military moves for coercive purposes. It uses a series of gametheoretic mathematical models to study the use of the military instrument to establish commitments and communicate them. Among the questions to be explored are: the impact of military technology on crisis stability and the use of preemptive war; how uncertainty about opponents creates incentives for bluffing, and how these can be undermined; how certain moves may be provocative and destabilizing; how diplomatic negotiation can be used alongside tacit bargaining moves; how resource constraints affect the ability to resolve crises peacefully to one's advantage; how the commitment process extends once war begins; and how the instrument can be used to terminate the war. The project is not entirely theoretical: a significant component involves detailed historical case studies and careful statistical testing of hypotheses derived from the theoretical model using data specifically collected for this project.
Broader Social Value This project aims to improve international relations theory, but it makes broader contributions. Although the theoretical development is very technical, the results will be communicated to a wider audience because of their implications for the coercive use of force, its limits, and potential dangers. The attempt to use the military instrument for coercive purposes may produce the war leaders were trying to avoid, and not by mistake.
