Resolve in International Politics

Abstract

Why do some leaders and publics display remarkable persistence in war, while others "cut and run" at the first sign of trouble? Why did the French remain in the First World War despite having suffered nearly a third of a million soldiers killed, missing, or wounded in the Battle of Verdun alone, while the United States immediately halted its military operations in Somalia after 18 of its soldiers were killed during the Battle of Mogadishu? Although resolve is one of the most frequently used independent variables in International Relations, used to explain everything from developments on the battlefield to deliberations at the bargaining table to decisions at the ballot box, we have very little sense of why some actors are more resolved than others. I argue that resolve is an interaction between situational stakes and dispositional traits; by pointing to a series of dispositional characteristics frequently studied in a growing body of research on willpower in behavioral economics and social psychology (time and risk preferences, honor orientations, and trait self-control), I disaggregate the costs of war and explain why certain types of actors are more sensitive to the costs of fighting, while others are more sensitive to the costs of backing down. I test this argument at the micro-level with laboratory and survey experiments, and at the macro-level with Boolean statistical analyses of great power military interventions from 1946-2003. The macro-level analyses suggest that resolve indeed boosts the probability of victory, finding evidence in favor of country-level situational and leader-level dispositional sources of resolve.

How Do Observers Assess Resolve?

“…Whereas other scholarship has focused on the origins of resolve, and why some actors display more of it than others (Kertzer 2016), our interest here is how observers assess it at a distance. This question is theoretically interesting because assessing resolve is a computationally intractable, ill-defined decision problem, characterized by irreducible uncertainty (Brutger and Kertzer 2018;Edelstein 2002;Levy 1994;Voss and Post 1988).…”

A Framework for Measuring Leaders’ Willingness to Use Force

“…Where the initial wave of this research typically focused on leaders' desire to remain in power, an increasingly popular approach argues interstate conflict processes are driven by attributes related to leaders' underlying willingness to use force. Scholarship in this tradition explains a range of conflict-related outcomes in terms of a range of leader characteristics, including prior military service (Horowitz, Stam, and Ellis 2015), time in office (Wu and Wolford 2018), foreign policy beliefs (Saunders 2011), resolve (Kertzer 2016), political orientations (Heffington 2018), a revolutionary past (Colgan and Weeks 2015), and perceptual biases (Yarhi-Milo 2013). This research program has led to an accumulation of knowledge about the effects of particular leader attributes, but it has made relatively little progress on how leaders' general willingness to use force, or latent hawkishness, influences conflict processes.…”

Redefining the Debate Over Reputation and Credibility in International Security

“…56 Hopf 1994. 57 Kertzer 2016;Hafner-Burton et al 2017. 58 We distinguish here between dispositional attributions, or judgments about another's type, and predispositions, which are a feature of actors' psychologies that may make them care more or less about reputation, as in the discussion above about costly signals.…”