Emotional Choices by Robin Markwica, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters

In coercive diplomacy, states threaten military action to persuade opponents to change their behaviour. The goal is to achieve a target's compliance without incurring the cost in blood and treasure of military intervention. Coercers typically employ this strategy toward weaker actors, buttargets often refuse to submit and the parties enter into war. To explain these puzzling failures of coercive diplomacy, existing accounts generally refer to coercers' perceived lack of resolve or targets' social norms and identities. What these approaches either neglect or do not examinesystematically is the role that emotions play in these encounters. This book contends that target leaders' affective experience can shape their decision-making in significant ways. Drawing on research in psychology and sociology, the study introduces an additional, emotion-based action model besides the traditional logics of consequences and appropriateness. Thislogic of affect, or emotional choice theory, posits that target leaders' choice behaviour is influenced by the dynamic interplay between their norms, identities, and five key emotions, namely fear, anger, hope, pride, and humiliation. The core of the action model consists of a series of propositionsthat specify the emotional conditions under which target leaders are likely to accept or reject a coercer's demands. The book applies the logic of affect to Nikita Khrushchev's decision-making during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and Saddam Hussein's choice behaviour in the Gulf conflict in1990-91, offering a novel explanation for why coercive diplomacy succeeded in one case but not in the other. | Emotional Choices by Robin Markwica, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters