To compete and thrive in the 21st century, democracies, and the United States in particular, must develop new national security and economic strategies that address the geopolitics of information. In the 20th century, market capitalist democracies geared infrastructure, energy, trade, and even social policy to protect and advance that era’s key source of power—manufacturing. In this century, democracies must better account for information geopolitics across all dimensions of domestic policy and national strategy.
Why do some coercive threats succeed while others fail? Successful coercion requires not only credible threats to succeed, but also credible assurances that the target will not be punished if it complies. This is the overlooked dilemma at the heart of coercive strategies. In this talk, Reid Pauly explains how threats can fail when they are insufficiently contingent. He then steps back to test theories on how states make their assurances believable in the process of coercive bargaining. Pauly examines cases of coercive bargaining between non-allies over nuclear weapons programs, with a focus on South Africa, Libya, and Iran. At the end of the talk, Pauly will focus on the implications of his work for transparency in the nuclear nonproliferation regime.
Reid Pauly
Reid Pauly is a PhD candidate in Political Science at MIT and a predoctoral fellow with the Belfer Center's International Security Program and the Project on Managing the Atom. His dissertation explains the causes of credible coercive assurance—why and how targets of coercion believe that they will not be punished after they comply with demands. His broader research interests include nuclear proliferation, nuclear strategy, deterrence and assurance theory, wargaming, and Arctic security. Prior to graduate school, Reid was a research assistant at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and earned a B.A. in History and Government from Cornell University.
