The first comprehensive textbook on crisis bargaining for graduate and advanced undergraduate students, and a reference for researchers.

Formal Models of Crisis Bargaining offers a groundbreaking guide to modern crisis bargaining theory and is essential reading both for advanced undergraduates (providing comprehensive coverage of the field for the first time) and graduates and researchers (as a vital learning tool for those wishing to conduct original research).

An accessible treatment of important formal models of domestic politics, fully updated and now including a chapter on nondemocracy.

Political scientists use models to investigate and illuminate causal mechanisms, generate comparative data, and more. But how do we justify and rationalize the method? Why test predictions from a deductive, and thus truth-preserving, system? Primo and Clarke tackle these central questions in this novel work of methodology.

The Great War is an immense, confusing and overwhelming historical conflict - the ideal case study for teaching game theory and international relations. Using thirteen historical puzzles, from the outbreak of the war and the stability of attrition, to unrestricted submarine warfare and American entry into the war, this book provides students with a rigorous yet accessible training in game theory. Each chapter shows, through guided exercises, how game theoretical models can explain otherwise challenging strategic puzzles, shedding light on the role of individual leaders in world politics, cooperation between coalitions partners, the effectiveness of international law, the termination of conflict, and the challenges of making peace. Its analytical history of World War I also surveys cutting edge political science research on international relations and the causes of war. Written by a leading game theorist known for his expertise of the war, this textbook includes useful student features such as chapter key terms, contemporary maps, a timeline of events, a list of key characters and additional end-of-chapter game-theoretic exercises.

This volume examines the point where the concepts and practices of escalation and negotiation meet.

International conflict is neither random nor inexplicable. It is highly structured by antagonisms between a relatively small set of states that regard each other as rivals. Examining the 173 strategic rivalries in operation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book identifies the differences rivalries make in the probability of conflict escalation and analyzes how they interact with serial crises, arms races, alliances and capability advantages. The authors distinguish between rivalries concerning territorial disagreement (space) and rivalries concerning status and influence (position) and show how each leads to markedly different patterns of conflict escalation. They argue that rivals are more likely to engage in international conflict with their antagonists than non-rival pairs of states and conclude with an assessment of whether we can expect democratic peace, economic development and economic interdependence to constrain rivalry-induced conflict.

Why are countries often able to communicate critical information using diplomacy? Why do countries typically use diplomacy honestly, despite incentives to bluff? Why are they often able to deter attacks using merely verbal threats? International relations theory is largely pessimistic about the prospects for effective diplomacy, yet leaders nevertheless expend much time and energy trying to resolve conflicts through verbal negotiations and public statements. Deterrence by Diplomacy challenges standard understandings of deterrence by analyzing it as a form of talk and reaches conclusions about the effectiveness of diplomacy that are much more optimistic. Anne Sartori argues that diplomacy works precisely because it is so valuable. States take pains to use diplomacy honestly most of the time because doing so allows them to maintain reputations for honesty, which in turn enhance their ability to resolve future disputes using diplomacy rather than force. So, to maintain the effectiveness of their diplomacy, states sometimes acquiesce to others' demands when they might have been able to attain their goals through bluffs. Sartori theorizes that countries obtain a "trade" of issues over time; they get their way more often when they deem the issues more important, and concede more often when they deem the issues less important. Departing from traditional theory, this book shows that rather than always fighting over small issues to show resolve, states can make their threats more credible by sometimes honestly acquiescing over lesser issues--by not crying "wolf."

A formal theory of why some crises end in war