Most accounts of U.S. foreign policy change tend to be unsystematic in their characterizations of what the policy is at a given time and regarding a specific issue or country. A basic reason for this is that specific sequences of actions are glossed over. We propose an alternative,...

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's The War Trap (1981) is an ambitious attempt at putting forward a rational choice theory of war initiation. The book is subjected to a critical reading and found wanting on three criteria: concepts, measures, and empirical analysis.

Neorealist theories of international relations, particularly when formalized as noncooperative games, have difficulty accounting for substantial cooperation between nation-states, perhaps because neorealists have underestimated the role of communication between states. To address this issue, the...

Explaining why political events occur at different speeds is usually done by invoking tipping points or shocks. We argue that the latter, although a starting point, is inadequate and has to be supplemented, at least for activities involving multiple bureaucracies, by the policy instruments...