Abstract
Reviewed by: Mira Sucharov (mira.sucharov@carleton.ca ), Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
In recent years, the role of emotion in shaping global politics has captured the imagination of a significant number of international relations scholars. At the same time, popular thinkers have brought to the fore a more nuanced understanding of the role of emotion in underlying everyday human reasoning. Robin Markwica’s study builds on this “emotions turn” in international relations by turning his attention to the role of affect in coercive diplomacy. Through two case studies—Soviet premier Nikita Kruschchev’s decision-making during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s behaviour in the lead-up to, and during, the 1991 Gulf War—Markwica demonstrates that emotion shapes actors’ choices in particular ways.
Markwica asks the following question: “Why and under what conditions do political leaders reject coercive threats from stronger opponents, and when do they yield?” (p.3). The book places a lens on five specific emotions: fear, anger, hope, pride, and humiliation.
Though the focus is on the recipients of the coercive diplomacy (and the author is careful to anticipate criticism that would point to that lens as suggesting that non-Western leaders are somehow more inflamed by passion than reason), Markwica lays out a keen observation about the coercer’s dilemma: those practicing coercive diplomacy “must induce enough fear of a military attack in target leaders to get them to change their behavior without giving the impression that an attack is inevitable and without shocking the target leaders into paralysis. At the same time,” he continues, “they need to avoid eliciting anger and an unjust sense of humiliation on the part of the target leaders, because these emotions are likely to provoke the defiant response that coercive diplomacy is supposed to avoid” (p.18). The solution? Positive incentives can help (but not too many!), as can, ultimately, empathy: the kind of empathy that enables the coercer to understand and anticipate the reaction of the target. Understanding the emotional landscape—contextualized by global and regional norms as well as the target’s personality and cultural identity—is key.
Defining emotion as “a transient, partly biologically based, partly culturally conditioned response to a stimulus, which gives rise to a coordinated process including appraisals, feelings, bodily reactions, and expressive behavior, all of which prepare individuals to deal with the stimulus” (p.4), Markwica resists both causal and constitutive forms of explanation. Instead, he adopts what he calls a “process orientation” type of explanation, one which “describes a relationship in which events exert influences over each other by becoming connected with each other while being continuously in motion” (p.119).
In terms of measurement, he employs what he calls a “qualitative sentiment analysis” methodology. For this, he relies on both the self-reports of leaders (through transcripts of meetings, interviews, speeches, and so on), and through the reports of others (including post-hoc interviews). All this is captured by an interpretive process-tracing approach, one that attempts to understand the role of these emotions in context, including identifying the preferences of each actor in order to assess how their decisions line up with their goals, and even understanding when actors are deploying particular emotions instrumentally.
The writing is clear and engaging, and the case studies are rendered with sufficient detail to make them persuasive. Especially helpful is the attention to various decision points during each crisis. For Khrushchev, these include the “decision to prohibit the Soviet troops in Cuba from using nuclear weapons in defense against a potential US attack” through to removing Soviet rockets (p.128). In between are six other decisions that Khrushchev took during the six days between 22 October and 28 October 1962. For Saddam Hussein, these span the decision to annex Kuwait in August of 1990, through to withdrawing troops in February 1991. In between were six other decisions, including presenting a “peace initiative” and taking hostages, cancelling meetings with the US government, and so on.
Readers who are impressed with the nuance developed in the model—one which rejects a forced choice between the rationalists’ “logic of consequences” and the social constructivists’ “logic of appropriateness”—will also appreciate Markwica’s fair presentation of the results. He acknowledges where the evidence falls short in being able to support his model (which also means that emotions may have driven a decision but simply weren’t contained in the documentary record); where the evidence modestly does; and where the evidence supports his predictions in a robust way.
Specialists and non-specialists alike will appreciate Markwica’s fresh take on two heavily studied cases, a take that is also refreshing for its training the lens on the non-US side. Dissertation writers would do well to examine the book as an excellent example of posing a clear research question; laying out an impressive literature review—one that is both expansive and concisely rendered; being clear about the methodology; anticipating criticism and responding to it effectively throughout without being overly defensive; using primary sources effectively; offering comparisons of the two case studies; laying out suggestions for future research; and, most importantly, developing a nuanced model—one that seeks to carve out a niche between various sets of assumptions that are often overly hardened in our field.