Symposium: Military Coalitions and the Problem of Wartime Cooperation

[This is a post-publication review symposium.]

Military coalitions are everywhere in international politics: deterring wars, waging wars (when deterrence fails), and enforcing (or tolerating) the peace that follows. Alex Weisiger’s recent ISQ article, “Exiting the Coalition,” (2016) studies the challenges of sustaining military cooperation during interstate wars, showing that coalition partners are more likely to pull out of the war effort when fighting separately from their partners and when things aren’t going well on the battlefield—two factors that make cooperation difficult to sustain even in the face of the side payments that often secure military cooperation. The contributors to this symposium, Marina Henke and Daniel Morey, engage Weisiger’s study by exploring the limits of specific coding rules and how they relate to underlying concepts of abandonment (versus, say, entrapment) and the extent to which a coalition’s aims are fixed (across either time or the membership). In his response, Weisiger notes that coding rules generally hold up to some specific objections, but he also argues that his key hypotheses should be robust even to the possibility that states try to compensate their partners to prevent abandonment when things go poorly on the battlefield.1 It’s a rich symposium on a topic that feels very present—especially as (a) coalition efforts continue against ISIL in Iraq and Syria and (b) the peacetime coalition that has managed the Postwar global order for over seven decades has begun to show some cracks in its foundations.