Mixing Coercion and Incentives in Counterproliferation Bargaining.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Nuclear proliferation and countering it are critical international security issues. Literature on counterproliferation acknowledges the importance of bargaining solutions to this issue, but overly focuses on strategies that use either coercive or incentive-based methods of deterrence in isolation. The literature on mixing coercion and incentives in counterproliferation deterrence is not as robust as one would expect given the findings on the success rate of such mixing methods in the broader bargaining literature. I argue that by using a framework of costs and benefits to analyze the decisions to engage in nuclear proliferation, the increased utility of mixing coercion and incentives over either in isolation can be observed. Using three case studies, those of South Africa, North Korea, and Iran, as well as a statistical analysis on economic sanctions, I analyze the efficacy of the various bargaining methods at achieving counterproliferation success. The case study analysis reveals the failure of coercive methods when used in isolation, with military-based methods especially degrading relationships between proliferators and counterproliferators. However, when combined with frameworks that offer positive incentives to proliferators, deterrence success is observed more frequently. Additionally, logistic regressions suggest that economic sanctions can achieve counterproliferation success only in cases where the target of sanctions is economically reliant upon the sender. Their effect on rogue proliferators is minimal at best. I conclude with a discussion on the need for new datasets on the use of incentives as bargaining, as well as an expansion of sanctions datasets to include more recent cases.