In coercive diplomacy, actors employ the threat of force to get targets to change their behavior. The goal is to achieve the opponent's compliance without waging war. In practice, however, the strategy often falls short-even when coercers enjoy substantial military superiority. This finding inspires the central question of this thesis: What prompts leaders to reject coercive threats from stronger adversaries, and under what conditions do they yield? I argue that target leaders' affective reactions can help to explain why coercive diplomacy succeeds in some cases but not in others. Combining insights from psychology and social constructivism, this thesis presents a theory of emotional choice to analyze how affect enters into target leaders' decision-making. Specifically, it makes the case that preferences are not only socially but also emotionally constructed. The core of the theoretical framework outlines how five key emotions-fear, anger, hope, pride, and humiliation-help to constitute target leaders' preferences. This represents the first attempt to explore how a spectrum of emotions influences leaders' foreign policy decision-making. To test the analytic utility of emotional choice theory, the thesis examines nine major decisions by Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and ten main decisions by Saddam Hussein in the course of the Gulf conflict in 1990-91. The analysis yields mixed results: In the case of about a third of all decisions, the five key emotions exerted only minor effects or no impact at all. Another third of the decisions were influenced by one or more of these emotions to a degree similar to the impact of other factors. In the case of the final third of decisions, however, some of these emotions became the primary forces shaping the construction of preferences. Overall, emotional choice theory has thus advanced our understanding of the target leaders' decision-making in the missile crisis and the Gulf conflict, offering a more comprehensive explanation of why coercive diplomacy succeeded in one case but not in the other.

In the wake of the cyber-attacks in 2007 against Estonia and in 2010 against Iran, academics have debated the character of cyberwar. This study applies the theories of coercive diplomacy to the cases of Estonia and Iran in order to explain cyber-attacks as instrument for coercive diplomacy. While the long term effects of the attacks have yet to be understood it is clear that cyber-attacks can, and will, become a serious threat against political decision-makers in times of conflict.

The 2014 cyber attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment is an example of a disruptive event where a nation state utilized cyber tools in order to coerce a target into changing their course of action. Cyber attacks, something that might be perceived as a looming futuristic threat, became reality for Sony and its employees under the course of a few months in late 2014. The coercer’s attempt to change the behavior of the company eventually failed and North Korea who was attributed as coercer was imposed with new sanctions. This paper takes on the task of evaluating the Sony case against both the traditional theory of coercion and specific factors of cyber coercion in order to determine how the failure can be explained. The findings implicate that the failure can be explained by the traditional theory but needs to be complemented with the specifics of cyber coercion due to the difficulties in assessing the credibility of cyber attacks. Further studies are advised in the area of cyber coercion and a comparative approach would do particularly well in assessing causal explanations in a more comprehensive way.

The current political fraction between Russia and the West has led to the breakdown of the cooperative post-Cold War security order. Russia’s dramatic reliance on its tactical nuclear weapons arsenal is of concern for how Moscow might shape its foreign policy. Based on the gap in the existing literature on the role of Tactical Nuclear Weapons (TNW) and regional influence, this paper aims to examine the role of TNWs for Russia’s regional influence by answering the following research question: What changes in the nuclear doctrines, with regards to TNWs, contribute to a nuclear state’s increased regional influence? This thesis uses the theoretical frame of Coercive Diplomacy, with focus on compellence, which provides an alternative explanation to one state’s behavior against another in the pursuit of influence. In order to test the hypothesis, offensive changes in the doctrines, with regard to TNWs, contribute to a nuclear state’s likelihood of increasing its regional influence, this qualitative study examines the cases of Georgia and Armenia. The implementation of the analytical framework on the empirical material occurs through the method of structured focused comparison. The findings indicate that despite Russia’s engagement in compellence against Georgia and Armenia, the cases show very different outcomes.

<p>This is a study of how the United States has used different diplomatic strategies towards Iran and North Korea. The concept of coercive diplomacy is defined and explained, in or-der to see if it has been used by the United States, and if so, to what extent. After giving a brief historical background between the U.S and the two countries, the study will put a fo-cus on what and why the Bush administration has acted the way they have in their diplo-matic relation with Iran and North Korea. The study presents cases where you can see par-allels between strategies used, but also some significant differences. The latter part of the study will examine the reasoning behind the different strategies used. Conclusion drawn from this study was that, in the case of Iran, the United States has been forced to act in a certain way due to the other conflicts they are involved with in the region, i.e. the war in Iraq and the situation in Afghanistan. Due to the fear for North Koreas al-ready existing nuclear arsenal, the U.S. has shown a more restricted diplomatic policy to-wards the country, not wanting to push them towards starting a nuclear war.</p>

This thesis aims at developing a conceptual framework for advancing basic research on questions about coercive diplomacy and the management of intrastate conflicts by relying on hegemonic stability theory and its most fundamental concept: public good. In the light of the failure of international community in developing a unified response to the most cases of intrastate conflicts, the study investigates the role of leadership in international attempts to manage such conflicts. I argue that in the absence of a direct threat to the interests of each individual member, there will be a need for a leader that is capable to provide public goods associated with efforts to bring a solution to the conflict. Findings from several phases of Kosovo crisis which support this proposition is used to illustrate and evaluate the accuracy of this assumption. Thus, the study is not only concerned with coercive diplomacy as a form of intervention but also the process that finally culminates into that instrument as evidence of the necessity for a leader.

This paper aims to describe and explain the Russian use of cyberattacks in the Ukrainian conflict. Two major cyber events, BlackEnergy in 2015 and NotPetya in 2017, are analysed by the theoretical framework of coercive diplomacy developed by Daniel Byman and Matthew Waxman, as well as the theory of cyber coercion made by Daniel R. Flemming and Neil C. Rowe. This paper concludes that the Russian use of cyberattacks could be understood as an extension of their already widespread practice of coercive diplomacy as a foreign policy tool. The cyberattacks were developed to pressure the Ukrainian energy and economic sector, through destabilisation of the economic powerbase and the country as a whole. The cyber offenses are developed to push the Ukrainian politics from western influence back towards the Russian political orbit. This due to the political, economic, and power interests Russia finds in the post-soviet state of Ukraine.

This dissertation, by using the case of tensions between the United States and Venezuela between 2001-2007, examines Rummel’s hypothesis that democratic countries are inherently peaceful, and investigates whether the tensions in US-Venezuela relations under president George W Bush and president Hugo Chavez confirms or rejects Rummel’s hypothesis. A review of relevant documents, reports by non-governmental organizations and previous research in the field of international relations lead us to the conclusion that while the strained relationship between the US and Venezuela did reach a stage of coercive diplomacy, as defined by Jakobsen, the threats between the two countries did not escalate towards military aggression, and therefore Rummel’s hypothesis is confirmed.

This security study attempts to explain the dynamics of international conflict management of an intrastate conflict, through a combination of three theoretical frameworks. The conflict in Syria is shown to be managed mainly through strategies using coercive diplomacy, and some main contributions within the research field relating to strategies of coercion are used for guidance, to important factors which could affect coercive international conflict management, as well as to additional theories which could enhance the study’s explanatory power through a combined theoretical framework. The two added theoretical frameworks are Power Balancing and a Multidimensional concept of Power. With the aid of analytical tools derived from this combined framework the conflict management is analysed within both a multilateral and unilateral setting, offering some explanation as to why international conflict management (practiced by UNSC multilaterally and USA unilaterally) has shown so little progress in regard to the conflict, as well as why one significant, though limited, result could be achieved regarding the destruction of the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons arsenal.

Coercive diplomacy attempts to use military force in a limited fashion as a diplomatic and political tool in order to persuade an opponent to cease aggression rather than to bludgeon him into stopping. The use of limited military force in coercive diplomacy is not a military strategy, but rather a refined political and psychological instrument used for resolving a crisis. One relatively new instrument in the toolbox of limited force when engaging in coercive diplomacy, fashioned to deter adversaries, is the use of no-fly zones. The term no-fly zone describes the physical area of a nation that is patrolled using the airpower of another sovereign state or coalition. However, despite its relatively frequent use in its short history, it has largely been ignored in theoretical studies of coercive diplomacy. As scholars, such as Daniel Byman and Matthew Waxman, have presented a critical view on the limitations of approaching a study on a single instrument in coercive diplomacy, this paper grounds the argument that there is still value in this approach. Given that the conditions of coercive diplomacy mainly focus on an array of coercive instruments at a political level, are the conditions in the theories of coercive diplomacy sufficient to explain the political success of the military instrument of no-fly zones? Hence, this paper illustrates the theoretical reach of the theories of coercive diplomacy by highlighting the fungibility of the coercive diplomacy’s theoretical ‘success conditions’ when assessing a single military instrument. By studying the political success and failure in four separate cases, this paper proposes an analytical framework, which is by and large, derived from Peter Viggo Jakobsen and Alexander George’s theoretical basis. However, as the theoretical basis does not fully cover all of the political dimensions of no-fly zones, an additional variable is proposed. The resulting analytical framework suggests that this is a viable approach, but only by combining Jakobsen’s revised conditions with the original work of Alexander George, in addition to the proposed variable. Thus, this result contributes to the large body of scholarly work on coercive diplomacy theory and the debate whether one can assess a specific coercive instrument with the political ‘success conditions’ of coercive diplomacy, or not. / Master Thesis