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Etel Solingen’s 2007 Nuclear Logics: Contrasting Paths in East Asia and the Middle East struck us as something genuinely fresh in the sometimes-stale proliferation literature: an attempt to construct a political economy of nuclear weapons. Solingen draws an admittedly stark dichotomy between outward-looking and “backlash” coalitions. But she notes that states that have actively sought integration with the world economy—Japan, South Korea--have either not pursued nuclear weapons programs or been more easily dissuaded from continuing once they have. By contrast, regimes actively seeking nuclear weapons tend to be based on a quite different political economy. To cite from one of her journal articles:
“Backlash grand strategies seek to preserve state entrepreneurship and military-industrial allocations, resist external pressures for economic liberalization and intrusions on sovereignty, and target internationalizing adversaries at home and abroad. Regional insecurity and competition is a natural side-effect at best, and a dominant requirement at worst, of this grand strategy. Regional cooperation threatens backlash coalitions because it scales back military imperatives, erodes statist privileges, and devalues nationalist and confessional myth-making as a political currency.”
That sounded right to us, so we were pleased when invited to participate in a collective research project that looked at the political economy of both sanctions and inducements. Although cognate, the political and economic logic of the two means of statecraft are quite different and inducements and engagement are generally understudied.
The results of that project have now been published as Sanctions, Statecraft and Nuclear Proliferation. A complete table of contents is listed below. In addition to Haggard and Noland, the book includes pieces by long-time students of economic statecraft, like Art Stein and Dan Drezner, some useful new data from Celia Reynolds and Wilfred Tan, and some studies of Iran and other Middle East cases. We are always impressed by the wisdom of Miroslav Nincic’s work. His 2005 book Renegade Regimes made the argument that sanctions and threats of force often strengthen incumbent authoritarian governments, while his new book explores the The Logic of Positive Engagement.
Table of Contents
Part I. Anatomy of Inducements
1. Introduction: the domestic distributional effects of sanctions and positive inducements, Etel Solingen
2. Sanctions, inducements, and market power: political economy of international influence, Arthur A. Stein
3. Empirical trends in sanctions and positive inducements in nonproliferation, Celia L. Reynolds and Wilfred T. Wan
Part II. Competing Perspectives: The Range of Sanctions and Positive Inducements:
4. Positive incentives, positive results? Rethinking US counterproliferation policy, Miroslav Nincic
5. An analytically eclectic approach to sanctions and nonproliferation, Daniel W. Drezner
6. Threats for peace? The domestic distributional effects of military threats,
Sarah Kreps and Zain Pasha
Part III. Reassessing the Record: Focused Perspectives
7. Influencing Iran's decisions on the nuclear program, Alireza Nader
8. Engaging North Korea: the efficacy of sanctions and inducements, Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland
9. Contrasting causal mechanisms: Iraq and Libya, David D. Palkki and Shane Smith
Part IV. Conclusions: Understanding Causal Mechanisms and Policy Implications
10. Ten dilemmas in nonproliferation statecraft, Etel Solingen
