Costly Peace and War

Date
-
Event Sponsor
The Munro Lectureship Fund and The Lane Center
Speaker

Andrew Coe, Ph.D. student in the Department of Government, Harvard University

 

Abstract

 I argue that scholars of war have neglected an important rationalist explanation for war: sometimes peace is more costly than war. This explanation is important because it provides sounder accounts of some historical wars than other explanations. To demonstrate this, I identify three empirically common sources of costs in peace: arming, imposition, and predation. For each, I provide a simple model that demonstrates the conditions under which war can occur and show that these wars are not due to other rationalist explanations. I then offer analytic narratives of the Iraq War, the civil conflicts in Iraq after the Gulf War, and the American Revolution based on these models, and argue that these accounts t the facts better than other rationalist accounts.

 

Biography

Andrew Coe is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Government at Harvard University and an adjunct member of the research staff at the Institute for Defense Analyses.  At Harvard, he studis international relations (especially at the intersection of security and political economy) and formal theory.  At IDA, he works mainly on issues of US nuclear strategy and proliferation, as well as defense organization and planning.  You can find more information using the links above.