The Politics of Military Coalitions [Paperback]

This book explains how military coalitions form, as well as their implications for war, peace, and the spread of conflicts.The Politics of Military Coalitions is an impressive study that challenges dominant conceptual and empirical approaches to international conflict and cooperation. Academics, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates will find advanced methods presented accessibly in a book that explores the formation of military coalitions and their implications for the outbreak and spread of war.The Politics of Military Coalitions is an impressive study that challenges dominant conceptual and empirical approaches to international conflict and cooperation. Academics, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates will find advanced methods presented accessibly in a book that explores the formation of military coalitions and their implications for the outbreak and spread of war.Military coalitions are ubiquitous. The United States builds them regularly, yet they are associated with the largest, most destructive, and consequential wars in history. When do states build them, and what partners do they choose? Are coalitions a recipe for war, or can they facilitate peace? Finally, when do coalitions affect the expansion of conflict beyond its original participants? The Politics of Military Coalitions introduces newly collected data designed to answer these very questions, showing that coalitions  expensive to build but attractive from a military standpoint  are very often more (if sometimes less) than the sum of their parts, at times encouraging war while discouraging it at others, at times touching off wider wars while at others keeping their targets isolated. The combination of new data, new formal theories, and new quantitative analysis will be of interest to scholars, students, and policymakers alikePreface; 1. Introduction; 2. Why coalitions?; 3. Power, preferences, and cooperation; 4. Cooperation, signaling, and war; 5. Durability, balancing, and conflicl“8