Credibility (international relations)

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In international relations, credibility is the perceived likelihood that a leader or a state follows through on threats and promises that have been made. [1] Credibility is a key component of coercion (i.e. compellence and deterrence), as well as the functioning of military alliances. Credibility is related to concepts such as reputation (how past behavior shapes perceptions of an actor's tendencies) [2] [3] and resolve (the willingness to stand firm while incurring costs). [4] [5] Reputation for resolve may be a key component of credibility, but credibility is also highly context-dependent. [6]

Contents

Credibility may be determined through assessments of power, [7] past reputation, [8] [9] current interests, [7] and signaling. [10] Situational and dispositional factors may affect perceptions of credibility. [2] [4] Misperception and miscommunication can lead to erroneous assessments of credibility. [11] Assessments of reputation may be linked to specific leaders, [12] [13] as well as states.

Coercion

Much of the scholarship on coercion focuses on the credibility of coercive threats as a key component of the success of coercive diplomacy. [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] According to Thomas Schelling, a reputation for resolve "is one of the few things worth fighting over." [20]

Successful coercion frequently revolves around a demonstration of capabilities and resolve, both of which enhance the credibility of attempts to coerce others. According to Richard Ned Lebow, a credible threat entails: [19]

  1. A formulated commitment
  2. A communication of that commitment to the other side
  3. The capability to back up the commitment
  4. The will to back up the commitment

According to Robert Art, the perquisites for compellence success are: [21]

  1. Clear objectives
  2. Strong motivation
  3. Domestic and international support
  4. Strong leadership
  5. Clearly stated demands
  6. Creation of a sense of urgency in the other state's mind
  7. Making the target fear unacceptable escalation
  8. Asymmetry in motivation

Matthew Fuhrmann and Todd Sechser argue that there are three main components to credibility in coercion: [22]

  1. Ability to impose one's will militarily on the target
  2. The stakes in a dispute (to both the challenger and the target)
  3. The cost of military conflict (to both the challenger and the target)

According to Anne Sartori, states rarely seek to obtain goals through bluffing, because doing so undermines their reputation in future crises. [23] Survey experiment data from Barbara Walter and Dustin Tingley confirm the findings of Sartori's study, as they find that people "invest more heavily in reputation building if they believe a game will be repeated many times." [24]

Credibility (or reputation) refers to the degree to which an actor is expected to uphold their commitments based on past behavior. [25] [26] In terms of credible coercive diplomacy, credibility entails that defiance will be met with punishment, and that compliance will be met with restraint. [27] [15] One of the main problems in coercive diplomacy is that it is hard to credibly signal that compliance will not lead to punishment. [15] [28] [27] [29] Some scholars have argued that when great powers increase their power, their credibility to engage in restraint decreases, which may lead weaker adversaries to be less likely to comply with great power threats. [15] [30] [31]

To enhance the credibility of threats, some scholars argue that audience costs are effective in doing so. [32] [33] [34] Other scholars dispute that audience costs enhance credibility. [35] [36]

Some scholars question whether credibility or reputation matters in international disputes. [7] [37] [38]

States may be motivated to pay high costs in order to maintain reputations for resolve. They are most likely to do so when they expect that they will face future challenges where they will benefit from having reputations for resolve. [39]

Costly signaling

Some scholarship suggests that the credibility of threats is enhanced by costly signaling, which means that the threats themselves incur costs, which signify that the threats are genuine. [40] Other scholars argue that sunk-cost signaling is exceedingly rare in practice, as states prefer to signal credibility and resolve in other ways. [41]

A substantial literature points to audience costs as a meaningful form of signaling. An audience cost is the domestic political cost that a leader incurs from his or her constituency if they escalate a foreign policy crisis and are then seen as backing down. [42] The implication of audience costs is that threats issued by leaders (who incur audience costs) against other states are more likely to be seen as credible and thus lead those states to meet the demands of the leader making threats. [43] [44] The term was popularized in a 1994 academic article by James Fearon where he argued that democracies carry greater audience costs than authoritarian states, which makes them better at signaling their intentions in interstate disputes. [45] [46] [47] It is one of the mechanisms for democratic peace theory.

Alliances

The functioning of military alliances revolves around perceptions of credibility: whether an ally will honor alliance commitments. Alliances that are perceived to be unreliable are more likely to end up in war. [48] Scholars have argued that past reputation shapes whether alliance commitments are perceived as credible. [9] [49] When allies are perceived not to be reliable, allies may make up for it by increasing the number of allies [50] and include "costly reliability-enhancing provisions such as greater precision in when alliance obligations apply, issue linkage, and increased institutionalization." [51] States with a reputation for upholding alliance commitments are more likely to be involved in future alliances. [52]

States may be more likely to honor alliance commitments due to costly signaling, [53] including audience costs. [54] Some scholars argue that indiscriminate alliance loyalty is not desirable (as that could raise the risk of conflict and entrapment), [55] [56] [57] and that hawkishness may also not be desirable. [58]

Related Research Articles

Coercion involves compelling a party to act in an involuntary manner by the use of threats, including threats to use force against that party. It involves a set of forceful actions which violate the free will of an individual in order to induce a desired response. These actions may include extortion, blackmail, or even torture and sexual assault.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Military alliance</span> Alliance between different states with the purpose to cooperate militarily

A military alliance is a formal agreement between nations that specifies mutual obligations regarding national security. In the event a nation is attacked, members of the alliance are often obligated to come to their defense regardless if attacked directly. Military alliances can be classified into defense pacts, non-aggression pacts, and ententes. Alliances may be covert or public.

In international relations, the liberal international order (LIO), also known as the rules-based international order (RBIO), or the rules-based order (RBO), describes a set of global, rule-based, structured relationships based on political liberalism, economic liberalism and liberal internationalism since the late 1940s. More specifically, it entails international cooperation through multilateral institutions and is constituted by human equality, open markets, security cooperation, promotion of liberal democracy, and monetary cooperation. The order was established in the aftermath of World War II, led in large part by the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Democratic peace theory</span> International relations theory; posits that democracies are reluctant to go to war

Proponents of democratic peace theory argue that both electoral and republican forms of democracy are hesitant to engage in armed conflict with other identified democracies. Different advocates of this theory suggest that several factors are responsible for motivating peace between democratic states. Individual theorists maintain "monadic" forms of this theory ; "dyadic" forms of this theory ; and "systemic" forms of this theory.

International political economy (IPE) is the study of how politics shapes the global economy and how the global economy shapes politics. A key focus in IPE is on the distributive consequences of global economic exchange. It has been described as the study of "the political battle between the winners and losers of global economic exchange."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deterrence theory</span> Military strategy during the Cold War with regard to the use of nuclear weapons

Deterrence theory refers to the scholarship and practice of how threats of using force by one party can convince another party to refrain from initiating some other course of action. The topic gained increased prominence as a military strategy during the Cold War with regard to the use of nuclear weapons and is related to but distinct from the concept of mutual assured destruction, according to which a full-scale nuclear attack on a power with second-strike capability would devastate both parties. The central problem of deterrence revolves around how to credibly threaten military action or nuclear punishment on the adversary despite its costs to the deterrer. Deterrence in an international relations context is the application of deterrence theory to avoid conflict.

Economic interdependence is the mutual dependence of the participants in an economic system who trade in order to obtain the products they cannot produce efficiently for themselves. Such trading relationships require that the behavior of a participant affects its trading partners and it would be costly to rupture their relationship. The subject was addressed by A. A. Cournot who wrote: "...but in reality the economic system is a whole in which all of the parts are connected and react on one another. An increase in the income of the producers of commodity A will affect the demands for commodities B, C, etc. and the incomes of their producers, and by its reaction will affect the demand for commodity A." Economic Interdependence is evidently a consequence of the division of labour.

Militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) are conflicts between states that do not involve a full-scale war. These include any conflicts in which one or more states threaten, display, or use force against one or more other states. They can vary in intensity from threats of force to actual combat short of war. A MID is composed of a sequence of related militarized incidents, all but the first being an outgrowth of or response to a previous militarized incident. An initiator of a war need not necessarily be the same as the initiator of a preceding MID, since a MID can be started by a show of force, whereas the initiator of a war begins the actual combat. Under this definition, over 2400 MIDs have been identified from 1816 to 2014 in the Correlates of War project.

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James D. Fearon is the Theodore and Francis Geballe Professor of Political Science at Stanford University; he is known for his work on the theory of civil wars, international bargaining, war's inefficiency puzzle, audience costs, and ethnic constructivism. According to a 2011 survey of International Relations scholars, Fearon is among the most influential International Relations scholars of the last twenty years. His 1995 article "Rationalist Explanations for War" is the most assigned journal article in International Relations graduate training at U.S. universities.

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The capitalist peace, or capitalist peace theory, or commercial peace, posits that market openness contributes to more peaceful behavior among states, and that developed market-oriented economies are less likely to engage in conflict with one another. Along with the democratic peace theory and institutionalist arguments for peace, the commercial peace forms part of the Kantian tripod for peace. Prominent mechanisms for the commercial peace revolve around how capitalism, trade interdependence, and capital interdependence raise the costs of warfare, incentivize groups to lobby against war, make it harder for leaders to go to war, and reduce the economic benefits of conquest.

An audience cost, in international relations theory, is the domestic political cost that leaders incur from their constituency if they escalate a foreign policy crisis and are then seen as backing down. It is considered to be one of the potential mechanisms for democratic peace theory. It is associated with rational choice scholarship in international relations.

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Compellence is a form of coercion that attempts to get an actor to change its behavior through threats to use force or the actual use of limited force. Compellence can be more clearly described as "a political-diplomatic strategy that aims to influence an adversary's will or incentive structure. It is a strategy that combines threats of force, and, if necessary, the limited and selective use of force in discrete and controlled increments, in a bargaining strategy that includes positive inducements. The aim is to induce an adversary to comply with one's demands, or to negotiate the most favorable compromise possible, while simultaneously managing the crisis to prevent unwanted military escalation."

In international relations, international order refers to patterned or structured relationships between actors on the international level.

Constructivism presumes that ethnic identities are shapeable and affected by politics. Through this framework, constructivist theories reassesses conventional political science dogmas. Research indicates that institutionalized cleavages and a multiparty system discourage ethnic outbidding and identification with tribal, localized groups. In addition, constructivism questions the widespread belief that ethnicity inherently inhibits national, macro-scale identification. To prove this point, constructivist findings suggest that modernization, language consolidation, and border-drawing, weakened the tendency to identify with micro-scale identity categories. One manifestation of ethnic politics gone awry, ethnic violence, is itself not seen as necessarily ethnic, since it attains its ethnic meaning as a conflict progresses.

Rational choice is a prominent framework in international relations scholarship. Rational choice is not a substantive theory of international politics, but rather a methodological approach that focuses on certain types of social explanation for phenomena. In that sense, it is similar to constructivism, and differs from liberalism and realism, which are substantive theories of world politics. Rationalist analyses have been used to substantiate realist theories, as well as liberal theories of international relations.

Gender in security studies is a subfield of international relations and comparative politics. Feminist security studies and queer security studies have provided a gender lens which shows that the study of wars, conflicts, and the institutions involved in peace and security decision-making cannot be done fully without examining the role of gender and sexuality. Praising of masculine qualities has created a hierarchy of power and gender where femininity is looked down upon. Institutions reflect these power dynamics, creating systemic obstacles where women, who are seen as less capable than men, are prevented from holding high positions. Evolutionary theory and political sociology provides an understanding of how institutions like the patriarchy were created and how perceptions around national security formed between men and women.

In international relations, coercion refers to the imposition of costs by a state on other states and non-state actors to prevent them from taking an action (deterrence) or to compel them to take an action (compellence). Coercion frequently takes the form of threats or the use of limited military force. It is commonly seen as analytically distinct from persuasion, brute force, or full-on war.

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