Approximately one-third of all interstate conflicts are multilateral, with the majority of these having a coalition of states fighting on at least one side. Despite the frequency of coalition wars, coalitions have not received much attention within the conflict literature. This paper presents the first general study on the effectiveness of coalitions during interstate wars. While there are many drawbacks to fighting as part of a coalition, the benefits of cooperation outweigh the cost, making coalitions more likely to win wars. An empirical examination of war outcomes between 1816 and 2007 confirms this hypothesis; coalitions have greater odds of victory than states fighting outside a coalition. This finding holds after controlling for possible endogeneity and selection bias.

Treaties represent an important policy mechanism in US foreign policy. There are good reasons to expect that the political process underlying treaty ratification in the United States is structured by the partisan political context, the policy context including the policy agenda, and, in the case of bilateral agreements, the relationship between the treaty partners. I analyze the duration of the ratification process for all bilateral treaties transmitted by the president to the Senate from 1949 to 2012. I focus the analysis on two key stages where delay is most common: the presidential transmittal stage and the Senate Foreign Relations committee stage. Analysis indicates that presidential resources, partisan polarization, the broader policy agenda, and the value of the treaty structure presidential decisions on treaty transmittal. I find less support for these factors at the committee stage; however, the committee processes treaties with democracies more quickly than treaties with other states. The results have important implications for US foreign policy.

What happens to a securitized issue over time? In many cases, the issue goes through a process of desecuritization and ceases to be an existential threat. But in some cases, enunciators attempt to further securitize the issue, attracting public attention through dramatic means to bring it to a new climax. The aim of these securitizing actors is to justify taking more intensive exceptional measures than those taken previously in securitizing the same threatening issue. In this paper, I focus on the securitization of the Iranian nuclear project in Israel, which began in the 1990s. Although the issue was successfully securitized at that time, and has been maintained as a securitized issue for years, it reached a new peak during Prime Minister Netanyahu's second government (2009–2013), particularly in 2012. I suggest that examining this case in developing the concept of securitization climax not only clarifies a number of aspects of politics, threat perception, and insecurity in Israel, but provides a more nuanced view of securitization dynamics.

This paper applies the framework of affective intelligence theory—a theory of how emotions affect attitudes, beliefs, and decision making—to elite learning during war time. Doing so provides novel hypotheses about when and how war leaders respond to new events. These hypotheses are tested using a set of cases drawn from the Winter War. Findings suggest that these emotion-derived hypotheses may be more effective in predicting learning and its absence than purely Bayesian or extant cognitive models of learning.

We apply a modified version of the bargaining model of war to the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. We conceptualize the informational path to war as a two-step process, the first identifying the sources of informational asymmetries, and the second specifying the causal linkages between informational asymmetries and war. The sources of informational asymmetries include not only private information and incentives to misrepresent that information, but also individual, societal, and governmental-level factors. We argue that the primary causes of the Russo-Japanese War involved a combination of the commitment problem and preventive logic arising from Russia's growing power relative to that of Japan, and informational problems arising from disagreements about relative power and resolve. These disagreements arose almost exclusively from Russian political and military leaders' underestimation of Japanese capabilities and resolve, and they generated highly intransigent Russian bargaining behavior. Russia misperceptions can be traced primarily to racial and cultural stereotypes and psychological biases, and to competition between rival domestic and bureaucratic factions that distorted information flows, created an incoherent decision-making process, and sent confusing signals to Japan.

Change at the level of the international system as a whole has always been a challenging subject matter in IR. This is especially true with regard to the link between foreign policy agency and systemic transformation—processes of societal re-creation at the global level of interacting states, societies, and human beings which are significantly shaped by socialized foreign policy agents. In IR and foreign policy analysis, this link is largely taken for granted. At the same time, the connections between foreign policy agency and systemic transformation are widely considered to be essentially intractable in epistemological and methodological terms. As a result, the link has been surprisingly undertheorized. In this article, I will try to show how a Deweyan (or pragmatist) understanding of social action in general and of causal analysis in particular might help to theorize the link. More specifically, I will mobilize Deweyan notions of situated creativity, historical contingency, and event-processes as sites of interaction which emphasize the “existential” character of systemic transformation and agential resocialization. The article also reviews available methodological tools of disciplinary inquiry in order to show that many of the necessary tools to examine the links between foreign policy agency and systemic transformation are actually at hand.

Democratic victors hoping to protect war gains by forcing the vanquished to be free must not only overcome the problems associated with imposed democracy but also ensure continued influence over and interests in the newly democratic state. To secure this dual imperative, I argue victors must coercively socialize the vanquished state. I create a framework of coercive socialization and conduct a plausibility probe of the theory by detailing the imposition strategies the United States utilized to transform the Federal Republic of Germany into a reliable democratic partner after World War II. The findings suggest imposing democracy to ensure peace and secure interests is likely to succeed only under even more limited conditions than recent scholarship on imposed democracy allows and also lend insight into why the US effort to impose democracy on Iraq is unlikely to provide the benefits policymakers sought.

In studies of war and terrorism, an exclusive focus on action misses an important and logically prior stage of constitutive thinking and discursive contestation. Particularly in ambiguous contexts, which states often face when waging conflict against nonstate actors such as terrorist organizations, how the situation is defined is a key to understanding state decision making and action. This paper employs symbolic interactionist theory to analyze the process of defining situations under ambiguity. It argues that how different domestic actors develop preferences for definitions depends on (i) the kind of situational parameters that they monitor as part of their group perspective, (ii) the availability of historical analogies, and (iii) (role)-identity and self-esteem needs, namely the legitimation of actors' claimed identity through an effective role performance. These ideas are examined in a case study of Israeli understanding of and response to Hizbollah's attack of July 12, 2006, which developed into the 2006 Lebanon War (known in Israel as the Second Lebanon War).

This article explores possible theories of international economic policy coordination, and then proceeds to test these theories through a qualitative analysis of four EU member states – Germany, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands – and their preferences and experiences during the financial market crisis period of Fall/Winter 2008–2009. Both institutional and basic realist theories for coordination preferences are evaluated for explanatory power against the case of the 2008 financial crisis and are found lacking. Instead, this analysis finds that a comparative foreign policy theory of political constraints – institutional design, political polarization, and leader time horizons – emerges as the best fit for explaining the divergence in foreign policies among these EU member states.