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States attempting to peacefully coerce an adversary by building military power face a dilemma. Build too little and the adversary may challenge because the state is too weak. Build too much and the adversary may challenge because it thinks the state is bent on aggression and will attack no matter what the adversary does. We develop a model of this dilemma and show under what conditions it makes peaceful coercion impossible. We then extend the model to show how threats and assurances can help commit a state to fight challenges but not attack in the absence of a challenge, ameliorating the dilemma. We discuss insights from the model in the context of the 1930's appeasement crises, Cold War Europe, and the Gulf War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about the role of ideology in the origins and implementation of the containment doctrine during former U.S. President Harry S. Truman's administration is presented which is prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association Conference, in Toronto, Ontario, on September 2-6, 2009. The paper discusses topics including the origins of containment and the Cold War.

This paper examines whether foreign aid, like oil revenue, decreases the likelihood of regime transitions. It tests the hypothesis that with respect to aid, it is donor intent rather than the money itself that determines whether or not aid is associated with a decreased likelihood of regime change. By examining the impact of aid on the likelihood of regime transitions in both the Cold War and post-Cold War period, support is found for the central role of donor intent. During the Cold War, when Western donors gave aid in order to prop up friendly regimes, the negative effect of aid on the likelihood of a regime transition surpassed that of revenue from state-owned enterprises. In the post-Cold War period, when donors have lost their desire to use aid to prop up regimes, there is no significant association between aid receipts and the likelihood of regime change. This suggests that as long as donor intentions are benign, it is possible to give aid to authoritarian regimes without decreasing the chances of a democratic transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the end of the Cold War, multilateral organizations have frequently authorized military forces to prevent, manage and/or resolve civil conflicts. Military commanders are asked to respond to the orders of both their national governments and the multilateral organization to which their countries belong. These efforts pose significant challenges to all involved, particularly the lead military commander. Surprisingly, however, few scholars or practitioners have examined the political circumstances confronting military commanders engaged in multilateral interventions. In this paper, we explore the principal-agent dynamics associated with the Kosovo conflict. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demise of the Cold War is commonly associated with the collapse of the Soviet empire in East Europe in late 1989 or with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and of Communism in 1991. However, judging from the rhetoric and actions of important observers and key international actors at the time, the Cold War essentially ended in the spring of 1989, well before these momentous events took place. This suggests that the Cold War was principally (or even entirely) about an ideological conflict, and not about the military, nuclear, or economic balance between the East and the West, Communism as a form of government, the need to move the world toward democracy and/or capitalism, or, to a degree, Soviet domination of East Europe. The Cold War was not about these issues because it came to an end before any of them was really resolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A core premise behind NATO and EU enlargement has been the notion that the rational, pluralist economic and security community that the West created and strengthened during the Cold War could help stabilize the East in the post-Cold War world and squelch potentially dangerous nationalisms that might emerge. We argue that despite a common belief that nationalism has been submerged in Europe, at least four types of nationalisms have emerged across the continent as states and groups develop strategies in the shadow of an enlarging Union. We discuss in depth one of these types - what we call virtual nationalism - as it has developed in Hungary over the past decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A natural affinity exists between the interests of policy makers and scholars of security studies. Nowhere has this affinity been more evident than in Cold War studies of coercion. Yet it has grown strained recently as a tendency towards the quantitative over the contextual in political science has coincided with the absence of a dominant threat in the political arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]