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Thesis--Geneva. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Canterbury, 2009. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 279-292). Also available via the World Wide Web.

One way states can mitigate external threats is by entering into military alliances. However, threatened states are reluctant to enter into military alliances because alliance membership can require significant policy concessions. An important and unanswered question is: when will states be willing to make policy concessions in exchange for military alliances? This is the question that is investigated in this project. To address this question I develop a simple three actor bargaining model of alliance formation that endogenizes both external threat and policy concessions. I test the model's implications with two sets of large N analyses and find strong support for the hypotheses. The first set of empirical analyses uses a novel research design that takes into account the attributes of challengers to evaluate states' alliance formation decisions. The second set is based on the same research design and provides one of the first analyses of foreign policy concessions among alliance members. The results suggest that threatened states are willing to make more concessions in exchange for an alliance when they are unlikely to defeat their challengers alone and when their allies have a large effect on their probability of defeating their challengers. This research highlights both the security and non-security motivations for alliance formation and demonstrates that alliances have important influences beyond international security.

This project asks the question of how different aerial strategies can affect the characteristics of aerial campaigns in conflict. It begins by developing a new categorization of aerial strategies that distinguishes aerial strategies by how targeted thy are. Data is collected on the type of strategies that were used in aerial campaigns from 1914 to 2003. A preliminary analysis of aerial strategy choice is conducted, studying the effect of military doctrines on strategy choice. The project also takes into consideration the role that ground forces, both those of the state carrying out the aerial attack and of its opponent, will play in determining the effect of aerial strategies on campaign duration and outcome.

Do nations' allies and trading partners affect their vulnerability to transnational terrorist attacks? Prior research has focused on how the attributes of individual nations, such as regime type, economic stability, and international power, affect their likelihood of being the target of transnational terrorist attacks. However, prior research has not addressed the impact of a nation's economic and foreign policy ties on this phenomenon. Specifically, the question I ask is whether terrorists attempt to indirectly affect the status quo policy stance of a powerful nation by attacking the allies and trading partners of that nation. I develop a theoretical framework to explain why terrorists are likely to target allies of powerful nations in the international arena to force the more powerful nation to change its policy stance. Focusing on the United States, I examine how a nation's economic and foreign policy ties to the U.S. affect its vulnerability to transnational terrorist attacks. I test my expectations using the ITERATE database of transnational terrorist events from 1968 to 2000. The results suggest that a nation's economic and foreign policy ties may have a significant impact on its vulnerability to transnational terrorism.

<p>Critiquing dyads as the unit of analysis in statistical work has become increasingly prominent; a number of scholars have demonstrated that ignoring the interdependencies and selection effects among dyads can bias our inference. My dissertation argues that the problem is even more serious. The bargaining model relies on the assumption that bargaining occurs between two states in isolation. When we relax this assumption one of the most crucial findings of these bargaining models vanishes: it is no longer irrational, even with complete information and an absence of commitment issues, for states to go to war. By accounting for the non-dyadic nature of interstate relations, we are better able to explain a number of empirical realities, and better able to predict when states will go to war.</p><p>In the first chapter of my dissertation I model a bargaining episode between three players and demonstrate its marked divergence from canonical bargaining models. In traditional two player bargaining models, it is irrational for states to go to war. I find this irrationality of war to be in part an artifact of limiting the focus to two players. In the model in chapter one, three states are bargaining over policy, and each state has a preference in relation to this policy. When these preferences diverge enough, it can become impossible for players to resolve their disputes peacefully. One implication of this model is that differences between two and three player bargaining is not just a difference in degree, but a difference in kind. The model in this chapter forms the core of the writing sample enclosed. Chapter two tests whether my own model is just an artifact of a particular set of assumptions. I extend the bargaining model to allow for N-players and modify the types of policies being bargained over, and I find that not only do the results hold, in many cases they are strengthened. The second chapter also changes chapter one's model so states are bargaining over resources rather than policy which results in a surprising finding: while we might expect states to be more willing to fight in defense of the homeland than over a policy, if more than two states are involved, it is in fact the disputes over territory that are significantly more peaceful.</p><p>In the final chapter of my dissertation, I attempt to apply the insights from the theoretical chapters to the study of interstate conflict and war. In particular, I compare a purely dyadic model of interstate crises to a model that accounts for non-dyadic interdependencies. The non-dyadic model that I present is an Additive and Multiplicative Effects Network model, and it substantially outperforms the traditional dyadic model, both in explaining the variance of the data and in predicting out of sample. By combining the theoretical work in the earlier chapters with the empirical work in the final chapter I can show that not only do dyadic models limit our ability to model the causes of conflict, but that by moving beyond the dyad we actually get notable gains in our ability to understand the world and make predictions.</p> / Dissertation

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

China and Japan have claimed sovereignty of tiny, inhabitant islands in the East China Sea for a long time. This paper attempts to analyze this territorial dispute from the conflict transformation perspective to seek a peaceful end. I believe that Nationalism plays a key role and interferes to resolve the dispute by international conflict resolution methods. To prove the influence of the nationalism on the dispute, I conducted a survey to measure individual’s nationalistic attributions and inquire attitudes toward the islands dispute of Chinese and Japanese. The survey result shows that a majority of the both Chinese and Japanese participants having a strong individual nationalistic attribution support their nation’s sovereignty over the islands. Moreover, a majority of the Chinese and Japanese having a weak individual nationalistic attribution do not support their nations’ sovereignty rather take different positions regarding to the islands dispute.

China and Japan have claimed sovereignty of tiny, inhabitant islands in the East China Sea for a long time. This paper attempts to analyze this territorial dispute from the conflict transformation perspective to seek a peaceful end. I believe that Nationalism plays a key role and interferes to resolve the dispute by international conflict resolution methods. To prove the influence of the nationalism on the dispute, I conducted a survey to measure individual’s nationalistic attributions and inquire attitudes toward the islands dispute of Chinese and Japanese. The survey result shows that a majority of the both Chinese and Japanese participants having a strong individual nationalistic attribution support their nation’s sovereignty over the islands. Moreover, a majority of the Chinese and Japanese having a weak individual nationalistic attribution do not support their nations’ sovereignty rather take different positions regarding to the islands dispute.