The Effectiveness of Coercion

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel brings together innovative new research investigating how and why coercion succeeds or fails. The papers make significant advances in theorizing, conceptualizing, and typologizing coercion. Reid Pauly develops the important yet poorly understood concept of brinkmanship, explaining whether and how leaders can threaten to have escalation get out of their control in order to pressure adversaries into backing down. Danielle Gilbert provides a novel theoretical framework for typologizing hostage-taking. Better understanding this distinctive and underexplored form of coercion sheds new light on both hostage-taking itself and coercive effectiveness more generally. Dan Altman explores that fundamental question of whether coercion or imposition is more effective at making gains in international politics, rethinking the classic distinction between brute force and coercion to develop a new typology of imposition strategies. He theorizes that a compliance-dependence disadvantage explains why imposition strategies tend to be more effective than coercion strategies. Finally, Alexander Downes and Todd Sechser challenge the conventional wisdom that personalist dictatorships make for poor coercers. They theorize instead that other forms of signaling besides audience costs are more consequential and present evidence that personalist regimes are no less successful at making threats than other regimes.

Sub Unit

• Division 19: International Security 

Individual Presentations

• Personalist Dictatorships and Coercive Diplomacy - Todd S. Sechser, University of Virginia; Alexander B. Downes, George Washington University

• Coercion versus Imposition in International Politics - Dan Altman, Georgia State University

• Prisoner Dilemmas: Conceptualizing Hostage-Taking Violence - Danielle Gilbert, Northwestern University

• Revisiting Threats That Leave Something to Chance - Reid Pauly, Brown University

Chair

• Roseanne McManus Pennsylvania State University

Discussants

• Fiona Cunningham University of Pennsylvania

• Hyun-Binn Cho College of New Jersey