What Politics Entails

• Politics involves using authority to allocate limited resources and resolve conflicts within communities, coordinating social behavior.

What Politics Entails

• Authority is the power to direct social behavior of others.
• Authority relies on coercion by imposing costs for non-compliance.
• Authority relies on legitimacy, where directives are recognized even in disagreement.
• Scarce resource allocation leads to competition and conflict.
• Politics explains broad social outcomes like war and elections.

Violence and Political Order

• Political order are stable patterns of social behavior shaped by authority and coercion.
• Violence, its deployment or threat, is often key for enforcing directives.
• Centralizing power ensures societal function, like a Leviathan.
• This plays out on a smaller scale, like maintaining order on a busy street late at night.

States & International Order

• A state's ability to resolve disputes with violence is central to domestic political order.
• Relations between states define the international order.
• States protect themselves and prevent foreign interference.
• Political exclusion depends on military power and the ability to wage war.

The Coercion Dilemma

• Governments can enforce directives to maintain order
• Governments can leverage authority for its own gain.
• Violence facilitates predation, like armed robbery by political groups.
• How to empower governments to enforce directives without enabling predatory behaviors?
• Successful societies regulate violence, making its use legitimate.

Implications for the US: Violence & International Order

• Predators in international politics exist and must be addressed.
• Examples include Hitler, who overturned democracy and engaged in genocide, using resources from predation to strengthen the military and further predation.
• War to impose limits or regulate violence sometimes becomes necessary.
• Failure to counter force leads to political impotence and extortion.
• The United States faces a dilemma: its military power is needed to defeat threats, yet this power must be constrained.
• Competition with the Soviet Union was a factor in this dilemma.
• Institutions such as internal democracy and external alliances like NATO aimed to bind American power.
• A dangerous legacy emerged in 2003; allies and the UN opposed the Iraq War, but the US proceeded anyway - Was American power unbound and still legitimate?
• The US deems itself an indispensable nation, providing needed military power, but its exercise needs regulation.

Domestic Consequences of War

• War strengthens governments and states through:
• Leveraging security threats to raise taxes.
• Expanding administrative bureaucracy.
• Imposing restrictions on political participation to weaken dissent.
• War alters territorial and demographic makeup through:
• Resources and people shifting from territorial transfers.
• Creating refugee flows.
• War can trigger revolution, as seen in WWI Russia (1917) and the US/Iraq War (2003).

The Seven Years' War/French-Indian War

• Global conflict originating in Europe that involved Great Britain making territorial gains.
• New challenges arose for the British in North America such as:
• Paying for the war.
• Protecting the western frontier.

Moving Toward Independence

• War significantly altered the political relationship between Great Britain and its colonies.
• New taxes were introduced to pay for troops like the Stamp Act, Sugar Act, Currency Act, Townshend Act, and Monopoly on Tea Trade.
• Political opposition in colonies mobilized, focusing on independence.
• Great Britain responded with new limits on self-governance.
• These events triggered secession, a new war, and political independence for the USA.

The Bargaining Model of War

• This creates a theoretical foundation that examines why wars happen
• Defines the conditions that facilitate their end.
• War's costs create an incentive to avoid war and maintain peace
• The "fundamental puzzle" - political groups struggle to identify and maintain a distributional settlement.
• Prevents avoiding the costs of war and benefiting all parties
• This becomes an explanation for why war occurs.
• Two main sets of failures in bargaining which causes war:
• Problems due to private information, with incentives to misrepresent it.
• Commitment problems, which are generated by difficulties in contracting over time.

War in the Bargaining Model

• All wars involve conflicting interests between opponents.
• Prewar bargaining aims to reach a distributional settlement.
• War is a tool to pressure the other side for concessions.
• War is an exit alternative to bargaining and negotiation that offers insufficient rewards.
• Compares utility for war versus the standing offer.
• Dilemma - Cost of war creates incentive to avoid it, but each side wants maximised control over what is in dispute.
• There is no bargaining during war, “War is the continuation of politics by other means"- Clausewitz

The Bargaining Model of War: Bargaining

• Steps to war/compromise:
• Political Conflict
• Bargaining
• Peaceful compromise OR bargaining failure/war
• How do states gain bargaining leverage by enhancing bargaining leverage with threats to use military force, so going to war is the outside/exit option.
• Military force is used i.e., to seize control of the disputed issue.
• When estimating military power with distribution of military capabilities, p = likelihood home wins, 1-p = likelihood foreign wins.
• Cost of war exceeds benefits either side seeks (e.g., nuclear war), so states must factor in war costs when assessing bargaining leverage.
• Important is the costs paid without the military outcome
• Expected utility for war frames the war and peace alternatives and thus is the choice for war or peace.
• Assumes military victory enables the winner to impose distributional solution and seize entire disputed, leaving loser with nothing
• Expected utility for war is the prediction for war comes if they go to war.
• Likelihood of military victory influences decisions during war and peace.

The Central Puzzle of War

• War is always costly, which should motivate settlements that benefit both sides, for there is always a potential peace deal.
• Wars occur when states fail to reach an agreement within the peace range, and it can't be reached so avoids war

Private Information

• All parties have complete information about military capabilities and war costs, and know and agree on distribution for capabilities, costs paid by all.
• Reality means information is often hidden/misrepresented leading to discrepancies when assessing indifference between peace and war
• Overestimating bargaining leverage results in excessive demands leading to war.
• States do not give up having private information because they want as much control of the dispute as possible and not agree just peace.
• Preserve by Lessen by Lessen problems of private information by Audience costs and Sunk costs.
• Enable the two sides to separate liars from truth since liars don't pay for signals

Commitment Problems as Cause of War

• Problems associated with contracting over time, to avoid avoid mistakes and locate a range for peace, don't expect the opponent to uphold their obligations associated with peace.
• Fear opponent will new concessions in future and become more powerful
• Arises when states assess compromise in present & future when deciding war or peace
• Often activated by shifts in power between opposing groups,
• strong states have leverage to demand concessions for continued peace
• Launch preventive war because of future political concessions because stronger side can't credibly commit or restrain in future.
• Ex: Kissinger on Germany's leaders; China: Xi cannot bind Chinese leaders of 2050
• If commitment problems cause war then commitment arise from the inability to contract in order to prevent concessions from a weakened position.

Solutions

• Institutional mechanisms preserve static power or remove incentives to change peace settlement.
• Requires states to commit and control arms, so that it that can stabilize distribution
• Historical examples:
  • WWI Versailles Settlement was to preserve the postwar distribution.
• Iran nuclear agreement was to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.
• Democracy and NATO promote peace.

Historical Significance of WWI

• Russia, Germany, Austria and the Ottoman Empire was destroyed and the modern middle east came from the European state.
• 10 million soldier and 7 million lost their life
• Economic, political, and military conditions made the US the power state.