Deterrence §

• Deterence can be a IRT or Conflict Management Strategy

  • Usually targeted at Civilians: attacking civilians cities

• Preassumptions of Rational Choice Theory: states are rational actors who make decisions on cost-benefit ratio {#049dfe}

  • Decisions are influenced by manipulating the perception of the cost-side of the decision as being much larger than the benefits of the action
  • Compellence uses the same strategy but to convince the other actor to make a decision it wouldn’t normally make

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• Deterrence: an attempt to influence the enemie’s perception of your interest
  • Stop the enemy from an undesired behavior by convincing them that the cost will be bigger than the gain
• Charateristics
  • Passive strategy
  • To maintain the status quo
  • Deterrence is successful when the status-quo doesn’tchange
• Deterrence Strategy
  • Nuclear Deterrence (in Cold War): is the most effective type of deterrence, because such big consequences make inaction
• Self-Deterrence: the action of deterring the adversary, but in turn also making themselves not able to act freely either
  • Cold War, Cuban Missile Crisis

Contemporary Deterence §

• Contemporary Compellence and Deterrence in Post-Cold War has characteristics of self-deterrence for US and Europe
  • In challenging those who don’t care about willingness to suffer and the consequences, they failed in challenging them using deterrence
  • Rwanda, Yugoslavia
• Terrorism
• Deterrence against Small States: who wants to aquire Nuclear Weapons

Historical Development of Studies of Deterrence §

Thomas Schelling §

• Arms and Influence: “With enough military force, a country may not need to bargain”
  • 3 Determinants of success or failure of military deterrence
    1. Context: the stakes and range of possible outcomes, who are at risk, build ally
    2. Skill: act irrational, develop reputation of heartlessness, act as if cornered
    3. Willingness to suffer: same as Clauswitz, ability to endure pain is just as important as ability to cause damage

• Finite player cannot compete with infinite player ⇒ finite player will run out of resources

• States abilities are limited by norms, international laws, and modern expectation of civilization

References §

1. C36-RHOSS-Routledge handbook of security studies-Routledge (2017)