Security
Morgan defines this as A threatening to inflict “intolerable damage” on B to prevent B from attacking A’s vital interests.
What is deterrence?
If a state fails to carry out a threat (like Obama's "red line" in Syria), they lose this essential component required for deterrence to work.
What is Credibility?
Liberals argue states should trade whenever they can achieve these types of gains.
What are Absolute Gains?
According to Lenin, capitalist states saved themselves from collapse by engaging in this practice to find cheaper raw materials and new markets.
What is Imperialism (or Colonialism)?
Marxists argue that IGOs like the IMF use this mechanism and require borrowers to adopt capitalist policies.
What is Conditionality?
Critics of arms control argue that treaties often only limit these types of weapons, which states were planning to discard anyway.
What are Obsolete Weapons?
This concept describes how a state’s defensive actions can unintentionally threaten others, causing everyone to feel less secure and sometimes act more aggressively.
What is the security dilemma?
A major domestic problem with "peace through strength" is this economic tradeoff, where spending on weapons reduces money available for social welfare.
What is Guns vs. Butter?
This type of disarmament involves banning specific types of weapons, such as biological, chemical, or nuclear arms, rather than banning all weapons.
What is Qualitative limit or disarmament?
A modern Realist would only agree to trade if it preserves this status regarding their adversary.
What is the Relative Power Gap (or Position)?
In Marxist theory, capitalism sows the seeds of its own destruction through these two core contradictions.
What are Over-production and Under-consumption?
According to the bureaucratic-politics view of IGOs, these organizations aren’t neutral arenas but self-interested actors that fight for budgets and prioritize this main goal.
What is Survival?
This non-tariff barrier limits the specific number of foreign goods entering a country, creating an artificial shortage that raises prices.
What is a Quota?
This IR theory suggests the idea that economic ties promote peace.
Economic Interdependence Theory
This explanation for the Democratic Peace suggests that institutional checks and balances make democracies slow to mobilize, giving time for diplomacy.
What is the Institutional Explanation?
Peace anywhere is a threat to peace everywhere
What is the Indivisibility of Peace?
Liberals argue that IGOs are useful because they standardize rules and reduce these costs associated with making and enforcing agreements.
What are Transaction Costs?
Dependency theory argues that the "Global South" or Periphery suffers from this economic phenomenon, where they must sell more bananas to buy the same tractor.
What are Declining Terms of Trade?
These organizations leave states out on purpose and often focus on activism, monitoring, or advocacy (examples: Human Rights Watch).
What are international non-governmental organizations (INGOs)?
NATO is an example of this system, which is exclusionary and designed to defend members against external threats from non-members
What is Collective Defense?
Dependency theorists argue that the "Global South" is trapped because they must export more and more raw materials to buy the same amount of high-tech goods, a problem called this.
What are Declining Terms of Trade?
This explanation of democratic peace theory suggests that democratic leaders hesitate to start wars because they fear being punished if they lose, but once they do choose war, they tend to fight fiercely.
What is office retention explanation?
This concept means all states agree to protect any state attacked, unlike the version where states only promise to defend their allies
What is the difference between collective security and collective defense?
This development strategy, recommended by Dependency theorists, failed because domestic goods were often inefficient and required government subsidies the state couldn't afford.
What is Import Substituting Industrialization (ISI)?
This term describes how the prospect of future dealings pushes states to obey IGO rules to avoid losing out on later benefits.
What is the Shadow of the Future?
Powerful states often use IGOs to hide their self-interested actions behind a veil of multilateral legitimacy, a practice known as this.
What is Laundering (Policy Laundering)?
This classic IPE view demands that a state's exports must always exceed its imports to accumulate wealth and power.
What is Mercantilism?
The constructivist approach often cites these pair of countries as a success story for interdependence, given that centuries of conflict shifted into cooperation after WWII through repeated cooperative interactions?
What are France and Germany?
This is the logical problem with knowing whether deterrence is “working,” since it’s very hard to prove why something did not happen.
What is the “non-event” problem / logical nightmare of proving a negative?
One critique of the Democratic Peace Theory is this "reverse causality" argument, suggesting that democracy doesn't cause peace, but rather...
What is Peace Causes Democracy?
Realists view trade as a zero-sum contest for power. Liberals, however, believe trade creates this mutually beneficial alignment among states
What is a Harmony of Interests?
Dependency theorists criticize this liberal development prescription, encouraging them to specialize in goods they can produce cheaply for global markets. (development prescription)
What is export-oriented growth?
According to the Bureaucratic Politics view, IGOs might avoid difficult problems and instead pick "easy" conflicts to resolve to make themselves look effective, a problem known as this.
What is Case Selection Bias?
Despite significant economic ties, this 2022 case is often cited as a major challenge to interdependence theory, since war occurred despite heavy trade, pipelines, and interlinked markets.
What is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?
Realists describe IGOs as secondary to power politics and unable to change the behavior of powerful states.
What is epiphenomenal?