David A. Lake

Donald Rothchild

The wave of ethnic conflict that has recently swept across parts of Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Africa has led many political observers to fear that these conflicts are contagious. Initial outbreaks in such places as Bosnia, Chechnya, and Rwanda, if not contained, appear capable of setting off epidemics of catastrophic proportions. In this volume, David Lake and Donald Rothchild have organized an ambitious, sophisticated exploration of both the origins and spread of ethnic conflict, one that will be useful to policymakers and theorists alike. The editors and contributors argue that ethnic conflict is not caused directly by intergroup differences or centuries-old feuds and that the collapse of the Soviet Union did not simply uncork ethnic passions long suppressed. They look instead at how anxieties over security, competition for resources, breakdown in communication with the government, and the inability to make enduring commitments lead ethnic groups into conflict, and they consider the strategic interactions that underlie ethnic conflict and its effective management. How, why, and when do ethnic conflicts either diffuse by precipitating similar conflicts elsewhere or escalate by bringing in outside parties? How can such transnational ethnic conflicts best be managed? Following an introduction by the editors, which lays a strong theoretical foundation for approaching these questions, Timur Kuran, Stuart Hill, Donald Rothchild, Colin Cameron, Will H. Moore, and David R. Davis examine the diffusion of ideas across national borders and ethnic alliances. Without disputing that conflict can spread, James D. Fearon, Stephen M. Saideman, Sandra Halperin, and Paula Garb argue that ethnic conflict today is primarily a local phenomenon and that it is breaking out in many places simultaneously for similar but largely independent reasons. Stephen D. Krasner, Daniel T. Froats, Cynthia S. Kaplan, Edmond J. Keller, Bruce W. Jentleson, and I. William Zartman focus on the management of transnational ethnic conflicts and emphasize the importance of domestic confidence-building measures, international intervention, and preventive diplomacy.

Fear, Diffusion, and Escalation

The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict

Why do nations so frequently abandon unrestricted international commerce in favor of trade protectionism? David A. Lake contends that the dominant explanation, interest group theory, does not adequately explain American trade strategy or address the contradictory elements of cooperation and conflict that shape the international economy. Power, Protection, and Free Trade offers an alternative, systemic approach to trade strategy that builds on the interaction between domestic and international factors. In this innovative book, Lake maintains that both protection and free trade are legitimate and effective instruments of national policy, the considered responses of nations to varying international structures.

International Sources of U.S. Commercial Strategy, 1887–1939

Power, Protection, and Free Trade

Jeffry A. Frieden

Now in its fourth edition, this best-selling reader in international political economy offers 31 solid articles - 15 new - by renowned scholars in political science and economics. Frieden and Lake have edited and introduced each reading with care to ensure its accessibility to students who are new to the subject. This reader continues to offer a provocative look at the postive and negative impacts of globalization.

Perspectives on Global Power and Wealth

International Political Economy

Throughout what publisher Henry Luce dubbed the "American century," the United States has wrestled with two central questions. Should it pursue its security unilaterally or in cooperation with others? If the latter, how can its interests be best protected against opportunism by untrustworthy partners? In a major attempt to explain security relations from an institutionalist approach, David A. Lake shows how the answers to these questions have differed after World War I, during the Cold War, and today. In the debate over whether to join the League of Nations, the United States reaffirmed its historic policy of unilateralism. After World War II, however, it broke decisively with tradition and embraced a new policy of cooperation with partners in Europe and Asia. Today, the United States is pursuing a new strategy of cooperation, forming ad hoc coalitions and evincing an unprecedented willingness to shape but then work within the prevailing international consensus on the appropriate goals and means of foreign policy. In interpreting these three defining moments of American foreign policy, Lake draws on theories of relational contracting and poses a general theory of security relationships. He arrays the variety of possible security relationships on a continuum from anarchy to hierarchy, and explains actual relations as a function of three key variables: the benefits from pooling security resources and efforts with others, the expected costs of opportunistic behavior by partners, and governance costs. Lake systematically applies this theory to each of the "defining moments" of twentieth-century American foreign policy and develops its broader implications for the study of international relations.

American Foreign Policy in Its Century

Entangling Relations

Peter A. Gourevitch

Janice Gross Stein

This book evaluates the credibility of NGOs as they monitor and supplant the public and private sectors.

When Virtue is Not Enough

The Credibility of Transnational NGOs

Eli Berman

The most common image of world politics involves states negotiating, cooperating, or sometimes fighting with one another; billiard balls in motion on a global pool table. Yet working through local proxies or agents, through what Eli Berman and David A. Lake call a strategy of "indirect control," has always been a central tool of foreign policy. Understanding how countries motivate local allies to act in sometimes costly ways, and when and how that strategy succeeds, is essential to effective foreign policy in today's world. In this splendid collection, Berman and Lake apply a variant of principal-agent theory in which the alignment of interests or objectives between a powerful state and a local proxy is central. Through analysis of nine detailed cases, Proxy Wars finds that: when principals use rewards and punishments tailored to the agent's domestic politics, proxies typically comply with their wishes; when the threat to the principal or the costs to the agent increase, the principal responds with higher-powered incentives and the proxy responds with greater effort; if interests diverge too much, the principal must either take direct action or admit that indirect control is unworkable. Covering events from Denmark under the Nazis to the Korean War to contemporary Afghanistan, and much in between, the chapters in Proxy Wars engage many disciplines and will suit classes taught in political science, economics, international relations, security studies, and much more.

Suppressing Violence through Local Agents

Proxy Wars

Robert Powell

This text brings together a selection of accepted and contested knowledge in the field of international relations, in an attempt to offer a unifying perspective. Together these elements enable the pragmatic application of theories to different cases.

Strategic Choice and International Relations

International relations are generally understood as a realm of anarchy in which countries lack any superior authority and interact within a Hobbesian state of nature. In Hierarchy in International Relations, David A. Lake challenges this traditional view, demonstrating that states exercise authority over one another in international hierarchies that vary historically but are still pervasive today. Revisiting the concepts of authority and sovereignty, Lake offers a novel view of international relations in which states form social contracts that bind both dominant and subordinate members. The resulting hierarchies have significant effects on the foreign policies of states as well as patterns of international conflict and cooperation. Focusing largely on U.S.-led hierarchies in the contemporary world, Lake provides a compelling account of the origins, functions, and limits of political order in the modern international system. The book is a model of clarity in theory, research design, and the use of evidence. Motivated by concerns about the declining international legitimacy of the United States following the Iraq War, Hierarchy in International Relations offers a powerful analytic perspective that has important implications for understanding America's position in the world in the years ahead.

Hierarchy in International Relations

Miles Kahler

The Great Recession and its aftershocks, including the Eurozone banking and debt crisis, add up to the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although economic explanations for the Great Recession have proliferated, the political causes and consequences of the crisis have received less systematic attention. Politics in the New Hard Times is the first book to focus on the Great Recession as a political crisis, one with both political sources and political consequences. The authors examine variation in crises over time and across countries, rather than treating these events as undifferentiated shocks. Chapters also explore how crisis has forced the redefinition and reinforcement of interests at the level of individual attitudes and in national political coalitions. Throughout, the authors stress that the Great Recession is only the latest in a long history of international economic crises with significant political effects—and that it is unlikely to be the last.

The Great Recession in Comparative Perspective

Politics in the New Hard Times

The central task of all statebuilding is to create a state that is regarded as legitimate by the people over whom it exercises authority. This is a necessary condition for stable, effective governance. States sufficiently motivated to bear the costs of building a state in some distant land are likely to have interests in the future policies of that country, and will therefore seek to promote loyal leaders who are sympathetic to their interests and willing to implement their preferred policies. In The Statebuilder's Dilemma, David A. Lake addresses the key tradeoff between legitimacy and loyalty common to all international statebuilding attempts. Except in rare cases where the policy preferences of the statebuilder and the population of the country whose state is to be built coincide, as in the famous success cases of West Germany and Japan after 1945, promoting a leader who will remain loyal to the statebuilder undermines that leader’s legitimacy at home. In Iraq, thrust into a statebuilding role it neither anticipated nor wanted, the United States eventually backed Nouri al-Malaki as the most favorable of a bad lot of alternative leaders. Malaki then used the support of the Bush administration to govern as a Shiite partisan, undermining the statebuilding effort and ultimately leading to the second failure of the Iraqi state in 2014. Ethiopia faced the same tradeoff in Somalia after the rise of a promising but irredentist government in 2006, invading to put its own puppet in power in Mogadishu. But the resulting government has not been able to build significant local support and legitimacy. Lake uses these cases to demonstrate that the greater the interests of the statebuilder in the target country, the more difficult it is to build a legitimate state that can survive on its own.

On the Limits of Foreign Intervention

The Statebuilder's Dilemma

Daniel L. Nielson

Darren G. Hawkins

Michael J. Tierney

Why do states delegate certain tasks and responsibilities to international organizations rather than acting unilaterally or cooperating directly? Furthermore, to what extent do states continue to control IOs once authority has been delegated? Examining a variety of different institutions including the World Trade Organization, the United Nations and the European Commission, this book explores the different methods that states employ to ensure their interests are being served, and identifies the problems involved with monitoring and managing IOs. The contributors suggest that it is not inherently more difficult to design effective delegation mechanisms at international level than at domestic level and, drawing on principal-agent theory, help explain the variations that exist in the extent to which states are willing to delegate to IOs. They argue that IOs are neither all evil nor all virtuous, but are better understood as bureaucracies that can be controlled to varying degrees by their political masters.

David A. Lake

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