Coercive Diplomacy as Crisis Management

In war-threatening crises, the contestants face a crucial dilemma: Should they yield to the opponent’s demands to avoid war or risk war to protect their interests? Coercive diplomacy is a holistic “stick-and-carrot” crisis management strategy devised to tackle this dilemma and enable policymakers to resolve crises by means of mutually acceptable compromises short of war. It is in focus here because it integrates the three principal strands of crisis management theory into a single strategy. The first component is coercive. It involves threats to do harm (political, economic, or military) and action that would hurt the adversary in order to influence it to stop/undo its hostile activities. Hurting action may involve political, economic, and military measures, but actual use of force must be limited and serve signaling and influencing purposes only. Its purpose is to bring the opponent to the negotiating table, not to defeat it or render it incapable of continued resistance. The second component is conciliatory and accommodating. It involves the use of positive incentives for compliance with the coercer’s demands. Their purpose is to reduce the cost of compliance and thereby increase the prospects for finding a mutually acceptable solution to the crisis short of war. The third component is the use of assurances to convince the adversary that the coercer will keep three promises: (a) that it will stop hurting the adversary if it complies with the coercer’s demands, (b) that the promised compensation for compliance will be forthcoming, and finally, (c) that compliance will not result in new demands in the future. This combination of coercion and accommodation situates coercive diplomacy in the middle of the crisis management continuum, which has winning at the one end and war avoidance at the other. It also sets coercive diplomacy apart from strategies relying solely on coercion, such as compellence and deterrence, or solely on accommodation and positive inducements, such as appeasement. Coercive diplomacy is a hard-to-use, high-risk strategy with a low success rate—especially with respect to solving crises without any use of force. Success hinges on a favorable context, skillful diplomacy, and psychological factors beyond the coercer’s control. The many factors affecting its successful use and the holistic nature of the strategy involving coercion, positive inducements, and assurances have produced a rich but also fragmented and dichotomous literature, which has been marred by a number of theoretical, methodological, and definitional disputes. Since 2010, a new generation of scholars has taken promising steps to overcome some of these problems using sophisticated mixed-methods research designs. Significant progress can be made if scholars begin to use such designs to better understand how the interaction of coercion, positive inducements, and assurances affects the scope for resolving crises short of war.

Disaggregating Clientelism

Chapter 2 presents the theoretical framework of the analysis. Definitional and conceptual issues related to the study of electoral clientelism are clarified, and a classification of clientelistic strategies that differentiates among strategies based on public versus private resources, and those structured as positive promises versus negative threats, is proposed. A theory is built that begins by conceptualizing the way that voters who are directly and indirectly exposed to different forms of clientelism perceive and react to it. Drawing on normative theories, it is conjectured that voters are likely to judge coercive strategies more severely than strategies premised on positive inducements. While candidates incur political audience costs from using various clientelistic strategies, they may attempt to reduce the severity of this constraint by sending voters signals about their personal attributes and their policy positions. The chapter develops theoretical expectations about the informational signals that may result from the use of different non-programmatic strategies for voters with certain policy preferences or characteristics. Finally, the chapter conceptualizes how these audience costs and resource constraints shape the choices that politicians make about the level and form of clientelism that they use. The normative reactions of voters and their likelihood of complying with the clientelistic exchanges shape the potential effectiveness of different strategies. It is also predicted that politicians’ abilities to employ different forms of clientelism are shaped by access to resources, including, most importantly, control of local flows of social policy through city halls.

Intimidating voters with violence and mobilizing them with clientelism

Recent research suggests that intimidating voters and electoral clientelism are two strategies on the menu of manipulation, often used in conjunction. We do not know much, however, about who is targeted with which of these illicit electoral strategies. This article devises and tests a theoretical argument on the targeting of clientelism and intimidation across different voters. We argue that in contexts where violence can be used to influence elections, parties may choose to demobilize swing and opposition voters, which frees up resources to mobilize their likely supporters with clientelism. While past research on this subject has either been purely theoretical or confined to single country studies, we offer a first systematic cross-national and multilevel analysis of clientelism and voter intimidation in seven African countries. We analyze which voters most fear being intimidated with violence and which get targeted with clientelistic benefits, combining new regional-level election data with Afrobarometer survey data. In a multilevel analysis, we model the likelihood of voters being targeted with either strategy as a function of both past election results of the region they live in and their partisan status. We find that voters living in incumbent strongholds are most likely to report having being bribed in elections, whereas those living in opposition strongholds are most fearful of violent intimidation. We further provide suggestive evidence of a difference between incumbent supporters and other voters. We find support that incumbent supporters are more likely to report being targeted with clientelism, and mixed support for the idea that they are less fearful of intimidation. Our findings allow us to define potential hot spots of intimidation. They also provide an explanation for why parties in young democracies concentrate more positive inducements on their own supporters than the swing voter model of campaigning would lead us to expect.

Antecedents and pro-environmental consumer behavior (PECB): the moderating role of religiosity

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the predictabilities of five intra-personal factors to predict pro-environmental consumer behavior (PECB) and the moderating role of religiosity in Oman. Design/methodology/approach The study uses neural network to analyze the antecedents/antecedents × religiosity → PECB relationships by using a sample of 306 consumers from Oman. Findings This study finds that the most important predictors of PECB, according to the order of importance, are attitude × religiosity, knowledge, concern × religiosity, knowledge × religiosity, value, religiosity, attitude, concern and value × religiosity. Research limitations/implications The convenience sample from a single Islamic country limits the generalizability of the findings. Future studies should use probabilistic sampling techniques and multiple Islamic countries located in different geographical regions. Practical implications To promote PECB, businesses and policymakers should provide environmental education to expand knowledge and value, leverage ecological religious values in integrated marketing communications, make positive inducements to change attitude and concern enhancing interventions. Social implications As religiosity enhances PECB by moderating the impacts of environmental intra-personal factors on PECB, businesses and policymakers should find ways to use faith-based ecological messages in Islamic countries. Originality/value Determining the predictabilities of psychological factors and their interactions with religiosity to predict PECB in Islamic countries is necessary for promoting environmentally friendly products in Islamic countries and for reducing the ecological damage to the environment.

Mind the Gap: A Systematic Approach to the International Criminal Court’s Arrest Warrants Enforcement Problem

ICCTs have been established on a belying enforcement paradox between their significant mandate and their inherent lack of enforcement powers due to absence of systemic law enforcement. This article is premised on the idea that ICCTs fail to procure substantial results due to their delusive persistence in rejecting the factoring of politics in their operation. Thus, I suggest a perspective for arrest warrant enforcement that not only recognizes the relevance of politics but also capitalizes on it. Accordingly, I argue that by fully comprehending its enforcement tools and making use of its political role, the ICC may increase its rates in the apprehension of suspects, and therefore secure higher levels of judicial enforcement. Based on different compliance theories, I argue that the Office of The Prosecutor of the ICC (OTP) can improve compliance with ICC arrest warrants by making use of third states and non-state actors. In Part I, I address the way states and international actors may assist the OTP towards unwilling to arrest states through inducements, reputational sanctions, and support for enforcement agencies. I propose that external pressure in the form of positive inducements (membership, development aid) or negative inducements (travel bans, asset freezes) as well as condemnation and reputational damage towards non-compliant states, are likely to increase compliance with arrest warrants. In Part II, I examine a strategy for the OTP towards states that are willing to arrest but are unable to do so. In these cases, the OTP would benefit from improving its institutional capacity to identify and use overlapping interests with activist states in the field of human rights and international justice through the establishment of a diplomatic arm within its Jurisdiction, Complementarity and Cooperation Division (JCCD). I unpack the question of what this engagement may look like by examining such a potential relationship between the US and the ICC. Finally, in Part III, I focus on the instances, where civil society has the ability to influence third states or situation states to assist in the execution of arrest warrants. I argue that the OTP ought to include more actively different actors within the global civil society, such as NGOs, transnational networks, and individuals, during its bargaining efforts.

Economic Incentives as Weapons of War

International relations scholars tend to differentiate between a state’s use of military and economic instruments of power and also between rewards and punishments. In conflict scenarios, leaders are typically depicted as facing a choice between using military versus economic forms of punishment to achieve desired political outcomes. The role of economic rewards is seldom analyzed within the context of adversarial relations or within combat operations. The U.S. military has used money in combat and noncombat operations to influence actors and shape the operational environment in a manner favorable to the troops. There has been some attention devoted to the military’s noncombatant role and to efforts to win hearts and minds. Little attention has been devoted to the use of money in kinetic operations. The military’s use of money in its operations, including counterinsurgency and stability operations, provides insight for international relations scholars interested in when economic inducements may be effective within adversarial relations or conflict situations. It represents a form of targeted sanctions, in the sense of applying positive inducements selectively at the micro level, to achieve macro-level objectives. The U.S. military has relied on a growing body of empirical research in persuasion science to inform its operations. The case and findings from persuasion science could contribute to understanding the problems and possibilities of harnessing the power of money to achieve political outcomes.

Moving Beyond the Influence of Neighbors on Policy Diffusion: Local Influences on Decisions to Conduct Property Tax Reassessment in New York

Over the past few decades, research on policy adoption and diffusion has grown rapidly. Despite the relatively large number of publications, however, little attention has been paid to the important question of why a policy is differently implemented or diffused across governments. To answer this question and improve our understanding of local policy choice beyond widely cited neighboring influences, we closely examine the roles of three main policy actors—internal actors, external actors, and go-betweens—in the local policy diffusion process, drawing particularly upon property tax reassessment scenarios. In addition, we focus on nested institutional arrangements, including form of government and type of property tax assessor, that affect the policy decisions of internal actors. Using data on cities and towns in New York State for 1993-2010, we estimate event history models of property tax reassessment activities. Our findings reveal that regional interactions with neighbors that have already adopted the policy and top-down go-betweens through positive inducements can help facilitate property tax reassessment across municipalities. Reformed municipal governments in the council-manager form, along with appointed assessors, are also most likely to adopt reassessment policy frequently, compared with other institutional arrangements. Overall, this study advances the policy diffusion literature by exploring the roles of different influences through a more detailed, broader approach.