The addition of new issues and parties to negotiations is often recommended as a means of conflict management at the international level. Such addition (or "negotiation arithmetic") contains an element of strategic interaction that is often ignored in the prescriptive work on conflict management. Though disputants in an international crisis may be seeking to avoid war, they are also trying to protect important national interests. For that reason, each disputant has an incentive to choose only those options that make her better off. Since what makes one disputant better off may make the other disputant worse off, conflict management is necessarily a matter of strategic choice. A game-theoretic analysis of disputants' incentives to pursue the conflict management options of issue linkage and mediation demonstrates that these strategies are complementary. The conditions that preclude the pursuit of one strategy encourage the pursuit of the other. Empirical tests of the resulting hypotheses indicate that the more likely a dispute dyad is to pursue mediation, the less likely it is to pursue issue linkage.

Bilateral air service agreements have determined the nature of international air services through regulation of entry, service quality and pricing. Negotiations for such treaties reflect each government's aim to gain at least an equivalent right before granting certain traffic rights to the other party. Given these negotiated rights as endowments, each airline determines its strategies within the designated market. Station routing models and profit functions identify each firm's strategies. Using stage length as a proxy for network type, efficiency forecasting of stochastic frontiers measures productive efficiency for three primary transpacific airlines. The inclusion of input and output prices accounts for relative costs and revenues. Results indicate that international route structures must be linked to an extensive domestic route network in order to exhibit high productive efficiency. Changes in relative costs through exchange rate fluctuations furthermore reflect the vulnerabilities in the international trade of services.

The primary objectives of U.S.-South Korean military cooperation are the defense of South Korea against any possible external aggression and the protection of U.S. national interests in the region. The principal means of their military relations include: (1) a mutual defense treaty between both countries, signed in 1953; (2) U.S. military presence in South Korea; and (3) U.S. military assistance to South Korean armed forces. This military relationship had been characterized as unequal: South Korea was heavily dependent on the United States. After the mid-1960's, however, the relationship changed toward a self-reliant or partner status of South Korea, while the United States gained more flexibility in its obligations for the security of the country. In this context, this study attempts to analyze the military relations between the United States and South Korea during the period 1961 to 1979, a period that encompasses the most significant changes and issues in military cooperation between the two nations. In this study, two propositions are analyzed: (1) the unequal military relationship between the United States and South Korea has been dominated by U.S. political interests, which have motivated changes in their relations; and (2) in its military relationship with the United States, a primary South Korean objective has been to keep a significant number of American troops stationed in its territory. For analysis, two main categories of military interactions are chosen: combined military operations and cooperation for improvement of South Korean military strength in the context of the U.S. and Korean political environments. The former category includes the structure of the combined command system and the U.S. military posture in Korea. The latter interaction stems from U.S. military assistance to the ROK armed forces. The analysis focuses military to military relations with an emphasis on the changing characteristics of the relations and the political environments in which those changes have been generated. The results of the analysis seem to support the two propositions of this study.

This thesis is a theoretical and empirical investigation of the escalation process that results when states are in dispute over some issue(s) in the international system. Escalation is viewed as a cost-imposing bargaining strategy enacted by states for the purpose of eliciting concessions from the adversary. Each state has a cost tolerance which identifies the maximum costs a state is willing to suffer to achieve their demand on the issue at stake. A player determines the likelihood that escalation will produce the adversary's concession by comparing the cost tolerances of both players. Once a player decides that the opponent has a greater willingness to bear the costs of escalation, that player concedes and quits the escalation game. A formal theory of the escalation process is developed which produces several hypotheses identifying the conditions under which states are expected to escalate in conflict and, once the decision to escalate is made, the level of escalation that that state is likely to achieve. One advantage in developing a general theory of escalation is that the interrelationships among the variables are expected to hold across a wide variety of escalation contexts. These hypotheses are then tested empirically in order to assess the utility of the general theory of escalation. In one of these contexts, the extended deterrence crisis, potential attackers are expected to refrain from pursuing higher levels of escalation when the attacker can perceive the value that the defender attaches to its ally and when the defender has the capacity to impose serious escalation costs on its opponent. Another of the hypotheses tested produced the expectation that lower cost tolerant actors were more likely to achieve their highest level of escalation on their first move in the conflict given that they were unable to prevail in a long, drawn-out game of escalation with their stronger opponent. The results of the empirical tests indicate that the general theory of escalation developed in the thesis is useful in identifying the conditions that motivate states to escalate, the level of escalation that is likely to be achieved and the conditions under which states concede.

The impact of French decentralization reforms undertaken in the early 1980s is examined. The study presents institutional, cultural, partisan, and policy models to explain economic performance changes across twenty-one metropolitan French regions. Regions are found to be still largely dependent on the French state, although elements of each model account for some regional economic differences.

Building on earlier reciprocity research in arms control negotiations by Stoll and McAndrew (1986) and Druckman and Harris (1990), this study evaluates various models of cooperative and inverse reciprocity in a independent environment: the Sino-British negotiations regarding the future of Hong Kong. Coding of concessions and retractions is based on a wide range of news and government sources using methods developed by Jensen (1988). Both the trend model and the comparative reciprocity model are supported, albeit inconsistently. Statistical analysis of model predictions suggests the mixed use of cooperative and inverse strategies. A combined "hybrid" model nets support comparable to the trend and comparative models. While evidence of reciprocity is demonstrated in this study, to better understand the dynamics of parties' interactions, more studies of negotiation behavior need to be conducted which can systematically incorporate dominant aggregate contextual variables.

Under what conditions does international trade have pacifying or exacerbating effects on militarized interstate conflict? Previous scholars have asserted that rational, aggregate welfare-maximizing leaders will promote free trade and refrain from actions, such as militarized interstate conflict, harmful to international trade. Assuming, however, that all leaders are motivated to serve aggregate interests leaves out potentially important domestic political-institutional characteristics that may produce different motivations across leaders. Drawing upon the work of early political economists, the author presents a theory integrating the effects of economically important trade and domestic political institutions on the likelihood of militarized interstate disputes. Using measures of the selectorate, winning coalition, participation, and competition, the hypotheses derived from this theory are tested for all members of the interstate system from 1885--1992. The findings suggest that domestic political institutions do condition the effect of international trade on militarized interstate conflict. As a greater percentage of the citizenry are involved in the leadership selection process, economically important trade reduces the likelihood of militarized conflict. Similarly, as the size of the leader's supporting constituency increases, again involving a greater percentage of the citizenry, trade reduces the likelihood of conflict. At low levels of citizen involvement in leadership selection---and for leaders with smaller supporting constituencies---international trade does not reduce the likelihood of interstate conflict and may actually increase the likelihood of such conflict.

A game-theoretic model of civil war termination is constructed that incorporates processes of bargaining and coercion. Key features of the model are the asymmetric nature of bargaining between the government and rebels, the presence of a post-agreement security dilemma representing the implementation phase of the agreement, and a model of how the military situation is expected to change over time. This model generates hypotheses, which are tested using newly collected data on all civil wars fought and terminated between 1816 and 1997. As the relative capabilities of the government increase, its probability of victory increases, and the probability of a rebel win or a compromise settlement decreases. Military intervention is found to exert a substantial positive effect on the likelihood of compromise, which persists even after controlling for the purely military contributions of the intervenors. In addition, the analysis suggests that although military intervention promotes compromise, it also reduces the probability of a quick end to the fighting.

States often experience disagreements such as competing territorial claims. Sometimes they attempt to address these differences by negotiating explicit, written settlements. Can these agreements help ensure a durable peace? I examine the effect of agreements that attempt to address differences after significant conflict has occurred, such as peace agreements, as well as agreements designed to manage competing claims before they reach the level of violence. I refer to these two sets of agreements together as 'conciliatory agreements'. Using the theoretical framework of the bargaining model of war, I argue that the provisions specified in conciliatory agreements make the existing peaceful equilibrium more robust against the potentially disruptive effect of environmental shocks, such as changes in relative capabilities or regime type. Furthermore, I argue that conciliatory agreements not only increase the likelihood that peace is maintained but also impact the kind of peace maintained. Specifically, competing states that experience disruptive changes may remain at peace either because they continue to accept the status quo or because they peacefully renegotiate a new settlement. I argue that varying agreement provisions can account for why, when conditions change, some states resort to force, while others peacefully renegotiate, and still others maintain their original agreement. In order to evaluate my propositions, I rely on an existing list of territorial claims from the Americas, the Middle East, and Europe between 1919 and 1995, provided by Huth and Allee's (2002) research. For each of these cases, I collect all conciliatory agreements between the claimants and use these to test my theoretical expectations about the impact of agreement provisions on the durability of peace and the occurrence of renegotiation.

This study presents a theoretical model of state security policy choice under varying conditions of external threat and domestic political competition. This model specifies a set of conditions associated with state capability, governmental structure and external threat that determine the levels and patterns of state resource allocation and redistribution. Domestic and international arenas are linked into an inclusive political environment. As politics is a reflection of competition for resources, all policy choices reflect decisions to allocate and distribute resources for a variety of goals. Given this interaction of domestic and international political spheres in the resource tradeoff dynamic, three issue areas are emphasized: national security, the maintenance of political position, and domestic political requirements. Instead of examining policy behavior from a static perspective, the model addresses changing conditions and how these conditions influence resource allocation and policy behavior. The model produces a number of expectations about state security behavior. In particular, external threat is hypothesized to increase resource allocation for security policies as well as increase cohesion within states. Conversely, as threat diminishes, domestic institutional factors return to prominence. Competition for the domestic allocation of resources increases. The validity of the model's expectations is assessed through the empirical examination of military expenditure levels, the formation of military alliances and foreign policy substitution efforts. Annual data (1816--1985) for all states in the international system is used in evaluation. A number of statistical tests, particularly maximum likelihood and cross-sectional time series techniques, are applied to the theoretical expectations. The model receives a great deal of empirical support. States do react to external threat and allocate resources for the development of security policy. As threats dissipate, domestic political preferences arise forcing resources to be reprioritized across the issue areas. Five principle findings emerge from the various analyses: (1) security policy is rarely static as decision-making environments are often in a state of flux; (2) threat motivates security policy; (3) internal political structures influence through institutional and resource allocation constraints; (4) the domestic stability of a state affects its security behavior; and (5) time and evolution of the international system influence individual state security.