This book explains how military coalitions form, as well as their implications for war, peace, and the spread of conflicts.

A broad-ranging study of the relationship between alliances and the conduct of grand strategy, examined through historical case studies.

Why does the United States sometimes seek multilateral support for its military interventions? When does it instead sidestep international institutions and intervene unilaterally? In Coalitions of Convenience, a comprehensive study of US military interventions in the post-Cold War era, Sarah Kreps shows that contrary to conventional wisdom, even superpowers have strong incentives to intervene multilaterally: coalitions confer legitimacy and provide ways to share the costly burdens of war. Despite these advantages, multilateralism comes with costs: multilateral responses are often diplomatic battles of attrition in which reluctant allies hold out for side payments in exchange for their consent. A powerful state's willingness to work multilaterally, then, depends on its time horizons--how it values the future versus the present. States with long-term--those that do not face immediate threats--see multilateralism as a power-conserving strategy over time. States with shorter-term horizons will find the expediency of unilateralism more attractive. A systematic account of how multilateral coalitions function, Coalitions of Convenience also considers the broader effects of power on international institutions and what the rise of China may mean for international cooperation and conflict.

In Allies That Count, Olivier Schmitt analyzes the utility of junior partners in coalition warfare, determines which political and military variables are more likely to create utility, and challenges the conventional wisdom about the supposed benefit of having as many states as possible in a coalition.

Every day, coalition cabinets make policy decisions critical to international politics. Juliet Kaarbo examines the dynamics of these multiparty cabinets in parliamentary democracies in order to assess both the quality of coalition decision making and the degree to which coalitions tend to favor peaceful or military solutions. Are coalition cabinets so riddled by conflict that they cannot make foreign policy effectively, or do the multiple voices represented in the cabinet create more legitimate and imaginative responses to the international system? Do political and institutional constraints inherent to coalition cabinets lead to nonaggressive policies? Or do institutional and political forces precipitate more belligerent behavior? Employing theory from security studies and political psychology as well as a combination of quantitative cross-national analyses and twelve qualitative comparative case studies of foreign policy made by coalition cabinets in Japan, the Netherlands, and Turkey, Kaarbo identifies the factors that generate highly aggressive policies, inconsistency, and other policy outcomes. Her findings have implications not merely for foreign policy but for all types of decision making and policy-making by coalition governments.

How do states overcome problems of collective action in the face of human atrocities, terrorism and the threat of weapons of mass destruction? How does international burden-sharing in this context look like: between the rich and the poor; the big and the small? These are the questions Marina E. Henke addresses in her new book Constructing Allied Cooperation. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis of 80 multilateral military coalitions, Henke demonstrates that coalitions do not emerge naturally. Rather, pivotal states deliberately build them. They develop operational plans and bargain suitable third parties into the coalition, purposefully using their bilateral and multilateral diplomatic connections—what Henke terms diplomatic embeddedness—as a resource. As Constructing Allied Cooperation shows, these ties constitute an invaluable state capability to engage others in collective action: they are tools to construct cooperation. Pulling apart the strategy behind multilateral military coalition-building, Henke looks at the ramifications and side effects as well. As she notes, via these ties, pivotal states have access to private information on the deployment preferences of potential coalition participants. Moreover, they facilitate issue-linkages and side-payments and allow states to overcome problems of credible commitments. Finally, pivotal states can use common institutional contacts (IO officials) as cooperation brokers, and they can convert common institutional venues into fora for negotiating coalitions. The theory and evidence presented by Henke force us to revisit the conventional wisdom on how cooperation in multilateral military operations comes about. The author generates new insights with respect to who is most likely to join a given multilateral intervention, what factors influence the strength and capacity of individual coalitions, and what diplomacy and diplomatic ties are good for. Moreover, as the Trump administration promotes an "America First" policy and withdraws from international agreements and the United Kingdom completes Brexit, Constructing Allied Cooperation is an important reminder that international security cannot be delinked from more mundane forms of cooperation; multilateral military coalitions thrive or fail depending on the breadth and depth of existing social and diplomatic networks.

This book presents an account of war settlement in Georgia and Tajikistan as local actors maneuvered in the shadow of a Russian-led military intervention. Combining ethnography and game theory and quantitative and qualitative methods, this book presents a revisionist account of the post-Soviet wars and their settlement.