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Study Tool Kit Summaries (Chapter 2 (Interests are fundamental building…
Study Tool Kit Summaries
Chapter 1
Conflict and cooperation among nations have ebbed and flowed over time. Individual countries have also varied in their own relations with other nations. Explaining the ebbs and flows, and the differences among countries, is the principal purpose of the study of international relations.
Our explanations focus on understanding how the interests of the world's countries, and of the people in them, lead the world's nations to interact with one another and to what effect.
We also study the kinds of international institutions that arise from and mediate these interactions.
Chapter 2
Interests are fundamental building blocks of politics. Explanations of international political events begin by specifying the relevant actors and their interests.
Cooperation is a type of interaction involving two or more actors working together to achieve a preferred outcome. Successful cooperation depends on the number and relative sizes of actors involved, the number of interactions among actors, and the accuracy of the information they possess.
Bargaining is a type of interaction involving the distribution of a fixed value. That is, if one actor gets more, someone else necessarily gets less. In bargaining, outcomes depend on what will happen in the event that no agreement is reached. Actors derive power from their ability to make the consequences of no agreement less attractive for the other side.
Institutions are sets of rules. Actors comply with institutions because they facilitate cooperation and lower the cost of joint decision making in the pursuit of valued goals.
Institutions also bias policy outcomes. Rules restrain what actors can and cannot do, and thus they make some outcomes more or less likely. Actors struggle over institutions in efforts to shift policy toward outcomes they prefer.
Chapter 3
States may have conflicting interests over goods like territory, policies, or the composition of another's governments. However, because war is costly, a peaceful settlement that all sides would prefer to war generally exists. War occurs when the bargaining interaction fails to reach such a deal.
In the bargaining interaction, states may be unable to reach negotiated settlements when they are uncertain about one another's willingness and ability to wage war.
Even if states can find a mutually acceptable bargain, peace can break down if they cannot credibly commit to abide by the terms of the agreement.
Bargaining may also fail if there are features of the disputed good that make it hard to divide, which makes compromise agreements impossible to reach.
Given this logic, promoting peaceful conflict resolution requires efforts to increase the costs of conflict, to promote transparency and communication between disputants, to bring in third parties to enforce states' commitments to one another, and to find creative ways of sharing apparently indivisible goods.
Chapter 5
Alliances form when states have compatible interests that lead them to cooperate militarily. They are institutions created between or among states to facilitate cooperation for the purpose of influencing the outcomes of disputes with outsiders.
Alliances are successful at deterring or fighting off challenges when allies have a strong interest in coming to one another's aid in the event of war, and when they are able to signal this interest to the opponent in a credible manner.
Collective security organizations form around a common interest, which all states are presumed to share, in promoting peace. As broad-based institutions, their primary role is to facilitate collective action within the international community so that states can respond effectively to prevent or stop the outbreak of violence whenever and wherever it may occur.
Collective security organizations are successful when leading states perceive a common and compelling interest in stopping an act of aggression; they fail when leading states have conflicting interests in the outcome of a particular dispute or when they have too little interest in the matter to justify the costs of intervention.
Chapter 6
Civil conflict can arise when individuals have interests that conflict with those of the central government, leading to demands over territory, policy, or government composition. But conflicting interests are not sufficient for organized opposition to emerge. Whether a rebel group can overcome the collective action problem depends on its own resources, the capacity of the government, and the willingness of foreign states to lend support.
As interstate relations, bargaining between a government and a rebel group can lead to war as a result of information problems, commitment problems, and issue indivisibilities. In the context of civil war, there are particularly severe commitment problems that often make disputes hard to resolve without the outright victory of one side or the other.
International terrorist organizations are composed of relatively small numbers of individuals with extreme preferences. Their weakness relative to their targets and relative to their goals drives their strategy of attacking civilians and their organization into loose networks that are hard to root out.
Rebel groups and terrorists empty strategies of violence that are intended both to coerce their targets and to address their collective action problem by attracting supporters. For this reason, efforts to defeat these groups often require strategies that take account of their effects on noncombatants.
Chapter 7
Economists are virtually unanimous in concluding that international trade brings important benefits and that reducing trade barriers - trade liberalization - is good for the nation's economy.
While trade may be beneficial for a country as a whole, it can harm the interests of groups and individuals in the society. Trade can create both winners and losers.
The nature of a country's economy determines which groups have an interest in expanding or restricting trade with the rest of the world. National political institutions shape the outcomes when these interests come into conflict.
The politics of international trade also involves strategic interaction among national governments. Governments can face difficult problems of bargaining and cooperation, which sometimes lead to trade conflicts among nations.
The institutions of the international trading system can facilitate cooperation among governments as they confront the demands of both their own constituents and their foreign counterparts.
Chapter 8
Within borrowing nations, there are many actors who value access to foreign funds. However, there are others who resent the constrains and burdens that foreign investments sometimes impose on debtors. Similar conflicting interests exist within lending nations.
At the international level, both lenders and borrowers, like investors and recipients of investment, have a common interest in sustaining capital flows, which benefit both sides. Nonetheless, they may enter into conflict - especially over how the benefits from the loans or investments will be divided.
Lenders and borrowers, and investors and recipients, bargain over the investments that tie them together. There is frequent disagreement over debt payments to foreign creditors and profit payments to foreign corporations.
An array of important and influential international institutions structure interactions in the international financial realm. The most prominent is the IMF, which has often played a major role in managing the problems of heavily indebted countries. Like international finance generally, the role of the IMF is very controversial: some analysts think it contributes to the cooperative resolution of financial problems while others think that it takes unfair advantage of struggling debtor nations.
Chapter 11
International law and norms are institutions that seek to shape how states understand their interests and to constrain the ways in which they interact.
States create and abide by international law because of the cooperation it enables. Although states are typically dependent upon "state-help" for enforcement, the benefits of cooperation to states are often large enough that international laws are self-enforcing, or in the interests of states to follow apparently willingly.
International norms affect world politics by changing how individuals and, in turn, states conceive of their interests and appropriate actions in their interactions with other states.
TANs have an important effect on world politics by promoting normative values. TANs also alter interactions between states and facilitate cooperation by providing information about international agreements and monitoring compliance.
Chapter 12
International human rights law is an institution created by and largely reflecting the political norms of Western, liberal democracies. The norms embodied in these laws remain controversial, are not shared equally by all countries, and have not yet internalized in many societies and governments. Nonetheless, there is new evidence that international human rights law is improving practice in specific contexts.
Individuals and states have an interest in international human rights, and thus they undertake costly acts to punish states that violate the rights of their citizens. These interests are rarely strong enough to compel states to pay high costs to protect vulnerable individuals and groups outside their own borders. Human rights practices, in turn, may be more affected by TANs that change how both individuals and states conceive of their interests.
States that violate human rights reason that in their interactions with other states they will probably not face serious consequences for their behavior and, therefore, can freely abuse indivduals and groups. Unfortunately, these states are most likely correct. Although international human rights law does appear to promote impoved practices, it remains of only limited effectiveness in altering the actions of states. Despite increasing support for human rights, international law by itself is not a panacea.
Chapter 13
Despite widely shared interests in the quality of the environment, the interactions of individuals as well as countries suffer from problems of collective action. In the absence of any international authority that can mandate improved performance, the net result is less overall environmental cooperation than individuals and even countries themselves collectively desire.
Small groups of actors, one of whom is substantially larger than the others and all of whom interact frequently on multiple issues, are most likely to cooperate effectively on issues relating to the international environment.
Individuals, groups, and countries have conflicting interests over who bears the costs of mitigating harmful environmental practices. How environmental policies distribute these costs affects how likely actors are to cooperate successfully on issues relating to the environment.
International institutions facilitate environmental cooperation primarily by enhancing information and verifying compliance. TANs and other NGOs now play an essential role in monitoring compliance with environmental agreements. The clearer and more easily verified the standard, the more likely states are to cooperate successfully.