The Impact of Relative Gains on Interstate Cooperation in the Areas of Security and International Economy

In the last twenty years, the issue of the impact of relative gains on interstate cooperation has been at the center of the debate between the two major schools of thought in International Relations theory, namely neoliberalism and neorealism. Over time, the relative gains problem has ceased to be a radically divisive issue and has worked as a common research program that has brought the two theoretical perspectives closer together. Both neoliberals and neorealists have set aside major questions regarding the origins of the relative gains problem and of states\u27 preferences, and they have focused on the problem of determining the impact of relative gains in specific issue-areas. The result of this shift of focus has been that relative gains no longer represent an independent variable that may help to explain the phenomenon of international collaboration but an additional dependent variable to be explained by the strategic characteristics of particular issue-areas. This paper argues that the recent attention to issue-areas is partially misdirected in that it overlooks the main research question -why states are concerned with relative gains and why this affects international cooperation. The analysis of the influence of relative gains on cooperation among states in the realms of security and international economy shows that states are concerned with relative gains not only across, but also above issue-areas. This occurs because states are multipurposed actors which are interested in both welfare and security, and which value their standing vis-a-vis other states because their relative position determines whether they can achieve the aforementioned goals. Regardless of the nature of the objectives they pursue, it is the competitive orientation with which states interact in the international system that makes relative gains important. From this systemic perspective, it is then possible to conclude that relative gains have an impact on interstate collaboration because they affect states\u27 positionality, and to predict that such an impact will be greater when states\u27 positionality is immediately at stake

State partisan interventions in international conflicts

The dissertation explores the phenomenon of joining behavior--non-neutral interventions by third party states in interstate conflicts. The opportunity and willingness theoretical framework (Most and Starr 1989) is used to develop a model of third party intervention that integrates simultaneously intervention decision, alignment choices, and selection of specific intervention techniques. Within the general model of third party intervention, two models of third party's preference formation--a rational choice and a homophily-based model--are compared. The models are empirically tested with newly collected data on interventions in interstate disputes for the 1946-2001 period. The data expand current knowledge on third states' activities by including information on non-military--diplomatic and economic--intervention techniques. Opportunity factors are found to predict effectively third parties' intervention; while willingness shapes alignment decisions and selection of intervention techniques. Strategic and homophily-based similarities with the state supported in a conflict and dissimilarities with the state being antagonized are found to matter equally in shaping third parties' decisions. Methodologically, this study addresses a variety of selection issues present in current research on joining behavior. Theoretically, it speaks to a variety of international relations issues, such as balance-of-power and bandwagoning, spatial diffusion of conflict, foreign policy substitutability and decision-making, and alliance formation and reliability

Danger Beyond Dyads: Third-Party Participants in Militarized Interstate Disputes

Stuart Bremer often reminded us that third parties—directly or indirectly—affect the initiation, evolution, and termination of conflict. He encouraged scholars to research the phenomenon of joining behavior further and personally investigated it. Questions about joining behavior are indeed deeply intertwined with a variety of theories of conflict. However, existing records on third-party interventions are limited to states’ military involvement in conflict. The limitations imposed by the data can lead researchers to biased or incomplete conclusions about many international phenomena. We heed Bremer’s encouragement and present here the results of an effort to collect new evidence on non-neutral (partisan) interventions in militarized interstate disputes for the 1946–2001 period. The data we present differ from existing records in that: (1) they provide information on both third parties’ military and nonmilitary activities; (2) they broaden the notion of what constitutes a third party by including coalitions of states, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); (3) they expand the investigation framework by recording interventions that occur before and after a militarized dispute. We test the usefulness of the data by exploring the issue of major powers’ interventions in conflicts, as Yamamoto and Bremer did in their 1980 “Wider Wars and Restless Nights” article. We offer strong support for Yamamoto and Bremer’s finding that major powers drag one another into ongoing conflicts and show how the data may help us raise and answer new and more complex hypotheses about third parties and the dynamics of joining behavior

Multilateralism, Major Powers, and Militarized Disputes

American foreign policy has been animated by public debate between multilateralism and unilateralism in recent years. Some strains of traditional realist thinking suggest that major powers like the U.S. will naturally tend to be less enamored of multilateral action precisely because they possess the capabilities to engage a wider range of unilateral options and they face fewer structural limitations than other states. We empirically investigate this intriguing potential connection between major power status and multilateralism through the lens of interstate conflict. Using Keohane’s (1990) definition of multilateralism as coordination among three or more states, we analyze states’ propensity to participate multilaterally in militarized disputes. Contrary to expectations, we find that major powers are substantially more prone toward multilateral participation than other states. These results prove to be highly robust in the face of a number of potentially confounding factors and over time

A framework for Li-ion battery prognosis based on hybrid Bayesian physics-informed neural networks

Abstract Li-ion batteries are the main power source used in electric propulsion applications (e.g., electric cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, and advanced air mobility aircraft). Analytics-based monitoring and forecasting for metrics such as state of charge and state of health based on battery-specific usage data are critical to ensure high reliability levels. However, the complex electrochemistry that governs battery operation leads to computationally expensive physics-based models; which become unsuitable for prognosis and health management applications. We propose a hybrid physics-informed machine learning approach that simulates dynamical responses by directly implementing numerical integration of principle-based governing equations through recurrent neural networks. While reduced-order models describe part of the voltage discharge under constant or variable loading conditions, model-form uncertainty is captured through multi-layer perceptrons and battery-to-battery aleatory uncertainty is modeled through variational multi-layer perceptrons. In addition, we use a Bayesian approach to merge fleet-wide data in the form of priors with battery-specific discharge cycles, where the battery capacity is fully available or only partially available. We illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework using the NASA Prognostics Data Repository Battery dataset, which contains experimental discharge data on Li-ion batteries obtained in a controlled environment