Coercive diplomacy - the use of threats and assurances to alter another state's behavior - is indispensable to international relations. Most scholarship has focused on whether and when states are able to use coercive methods to achieve their desired results. However, employing game-theoretic tools, statistical modeling, and detailed case study analysis, Power Plays builds and tests a theory that explains how states develop strategies of coercive diplomacy, how their targets shield themselves from these efforts, and the implications for interstate relations. Focusing on the World Trade Organization, Power Plays argues that coercive diplomacy often precludes cooperation due to fears of exploitation, but that international institutions can solve these problems by convincing states to eschew certain tools for coercive purposes.

Power Plays argues that international institutions prevent extortion in some areas, but cause states to shift coercive behavior into less effective policy domains.

About the Author
Allison Carnegie is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. She received a joint PhD in Political Science and Economics from Yale University and was a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University from 2013 to 2014. Her work has been published in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis, and the Election Law Journal. Carnegie has been awarded the Provost's Grant from Columbia University, along with fellowships from the Bradley, Falk, Ethel Boies Morgan, and Kaufman Foundations. Her essay on foreign aid delivery won the Global Development Network's Next Horizons Essay Contest, which was cosponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Reviews
'The success of the World Trade Organization in ensuring free trade has inadvertently shifted states' coercive strategies toward other areas like foreign aid, regulation, and military intervention. This is just one of the many insights in Allison Carnegie's excellent book, which challenges much of what we thought we knew about international institutions and international cooperation. Power Plays - with its mix of formal modeling, careful data analyses, and country case studies - will quickly become required reading among scholars of international relations.' David A. Singer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
'Allison Carnegie shows, with both quantitative and qualitative evidence, that multilateral institutions - particularly the World Trade Organization (WTO) but others as well - help states credibly to commit not to extort concessions from partners after international agreements that generate costly investments. Power Plays is a theoretically original and methodologically convincing addition to the literature on multilateral institutions and the world political economy.' Robert Keohane, Princeton University, and author of After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy
'In this concise and theoretically sophisticated book, Allison Carnegie explains the dynamics of trade as a tool of coercive diplomacy. Bringing together insights from international political economy, security, and international organization, she shows how the WTO reduces economic underinvestment between states that are vulnerable to coercive diplomacy, and how reducing the coercive use of trade shifts international pressure towards other methods. This book is a nuanced and important work for all students of international relations.' Susan D. Hyde, Yale University



Book Information
ISBN 9781107547506
Author Allison Carnegie
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 320g
Dimensions(mm) 228mm * 152mm * 13mm