The Merits and Limitation of Incentive Theory in Application to Gray Zone Conflicts-A Review of Lifting the Fog of War by

摘要

Within contemporary international affairs, the decision by nations to engage against opponents is difficult to ascribe to the character of a single leader, regime type, or incentives emanating from the international system. Lifting the Fog of War highlights this complexity of decision making by emphasizing the need to pay attention to factors associated with (a) individual leaders' personality, (b) bureaucratic culture and regime type, and (c) various systemic pressures such as balance of power, deterrence, and preoccupation of states with relative gains. Today interstate conflicts are overrepresented in media headlines because in fact they are becoming increasingly rare and account for a decreasing percentage of overall armed conflicts in the world (Munich Security Conference Report: Kluefers, 2017). Instead, since the end of the Cold War, states increasingly engage in gray zone conflicts, in which low intensity tools and tactics dominate. Moreover, gray zone conflicts often draw in nonstate actors such as organized ethnic diasporas for the achievement of the political goals of foreign governments willing to provide financial and material support. This volume makes an important contribution to academic disciplines such as psychology and international relations by demonstrating the need to interweave the empirical knowledge and research methodologies from these disciplines. This will help better understand why nations engage in conflicts. Moreover, the volume seeks to reconcile opposing views of international relations schools such as liberalism and realism. The former emphasizes the need to examine foreign policy decision making by looking at individual and societal-level factors such as the personal qualities of leaders and regime characteristics. The latter argues for the necessity to examine foreign policy decision making by looking at the characteristics of the international system such as balance of power and states' preoccupation with relative gains. The authors of the volume suggest that the above differences can be resolved through the use of Incentive Theory.