Promoting Peace with Information

Transparency as a Tool of Security Regimes

Dan Lindley

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691224251
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

It is normally assumed that international security regimes such as the United Nations can reduce the risk of war by increasing transparency among adversarial nations. The more adversaries understand each other's intentions and capabilities, the thinking goes, the less likely they are to be led to war by miscalculations and unwarranted fears. But how is transparency provided, how does it actually work, and how effective is it in preserving or restoring peace? In Promoting Peace with Information, Dan Lindley provides the first scholarly answer to these important questions.
Lindley rigorously examines a wide range of cases, including U.N. peacekeeping operations in Cyprus, the Golan Heights, Namibia, and Cambodia; arms-control agreements, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; and the historical example of the Concert of Europe, which sought to keep the peace following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. Making nuanced arguments based on extensive use of primary sources, interviews, and field research, Lindley shows when transparency succeeds in promoting peace, and when it fails. His analysis reveals, for example, that it is surprisingly hard for U.N. buffer-zone monitors to increase transparency, yet U.N. nation-building missions have creatively used transparency to refute harmful rumors and foster democracy.
For scholars, Promoting Peace with Information is a major advance into the relatively uncharted intersection of institutionalism and security studies. For policymakers, its findings will lead to wiser peacekeeping, public diplomacy, and nation building.

CHAPTER ONE

Promoting Peace with Information

AFTER MORE THAN twenty years of civil war, foreign interference, and massacres by the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia finally seemed ready for peace. In 1991, a peace agreement was signed by the principle parties, and the United Nations sent peacekeepers to Cambodia to help maintain the ceasefire and rebuild the war-torn country. The U.N.’s prime objective was to hold an election to seal the peace with a new democratic government. Success depended on the U.N.’s ability to teach the country about elections, monitor the elections, and legitimize the results with a high turnout. A number of wild and false rumors and fears, however, threatened to jeopardize the elections. Some potential voters suspected that the ballot-marking pencils contained radio beacons that broadcast to satellites, revealing who had voted for whom. Others feared spying by secret electronic eyes in the polling places. With radio and other educational efforts, the U.N. defused these rumors about what the Khmer Rouge and others were imagined to be doing to sabotage the elections, assured voters that the ballots would be secret, and taught the Cambodians about democracy. The turnout was a resounding 90 percent.

What happened here? The U.N. used accurate information to calm false rumors. This is but one example of a security regime increasing transparency—what adversaries know about each other’s intentions, capabilities, and actions—to promote peace. There are many ways institutions can increase transparency and promote peace, ranging from providing a forum to broadcasting, inspecting, verifying, and monitoring.

Almost 200 years earlier, transparency also helped one of the first security regimes promote peace—though not in the way many think. At the end of 1814 and into 1815, the great powers of Europe met together in Vienna in what would become the first international crisis management forum in history: the Concert of Europe. Russia’s occupation of Poland and Prussian claims to Saxony caused a growing crisis. Supporting Prussia’s designs on Saxony with blustery belligerence, Tsar Alexander of Russia said in October 1814, “I have two hundred thousand men in the duchy of Warsaw. Let them drive me out if they can! I have given Saxony to Prussia. . . . If the King of Saxony refuses to abdicate, he shall be led to Russia; where he will die.”¹ In December, Prince Hardenburg of Prussia said that Austrian, British, and French resistance to his plans was “tantamount to a declaration of war.” British Viscount Castlereagh termed this “a most alarming and unheard-of menace.”² Talk of war swept through Vienna.

On January 3, 1815, Austria, Britain, and France signed a secret treaty to counter Russia and Prussia. Castlereagh revealed the treaty to Alexander the next day. Faced with hardened opposition, Russia forced Prussia to back down, and this quickly resolved the crisis. The great powers used the new forum to communicate threats and reach bargains far more rapidly than they could before. Information exchanged during forum diplomacy clarified the stakes at issue and the balance of power. Increased transparency did not calm fears, the most commonly imagined effect of transparency. Instead, it enhanced coercive diplomacy and bargaining.

International institutions in which states cooperate to prevent war are called security regimes. One of the main tools at a security regime’s disposal is increasing transparency. Scholars and policymakers often assume that increased transparency reduces unwarranted fears, misperceptions, and miscalculation, but few have examined how transparency is provided or how it operates in practice.

This book answers two main questions about transparency: How and when do security regimes increase transparency? How and when do these efforts to increase transparency promote peace?

I examine the role of transparency in crisis management by the Concert of Europe and in several different U.N. peacekeeping operations. While there are many different security regimes, these cases allow examination of the provision and effects of transparency in a variety of contexts. The Concert brought diplomats together in a forum to manage crises, something they had never done before. Today, in U.N. operations, peacekeepers more actively generate and exchange information. Findings based on these cases have global importance. Today, there are many forums from the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN) to the African Union, and proposals for additional forums often cite the Concert as a model.³ In 2005, some sixteen U.N. and ten non-U.N. peacekeeping missions around the world monitored cease-fires and elections, verified disarmament and arms control agreements, and patrolled buffer zones and other areas of conflict.⁴

The mechanisms for providing transparency vary greatly, as do transparency’s effects. As this book demonstrates, sometimes transparency succeeds in promoting peace, sometimes it fails, and sometimes it makes things worse. By helping figure out how and when security regimes can make transparency work, this book bolsters scholarship on security institutions, advances emerging debates about transparency, and helps policymakers more effectively use regimes to promote peace.

WHY STUDY TRANSPARENCY AND SECURITY REGIMES?

There are three practical and scholarly reasons for studying security regimes and transparency. The first is policy relevance. States have turned to security regimes to help prevent war for the past two hundred years. Recent years have seen renewed interest in the two types of security regimes examined here: peacekeeping and forums. Wherever one stands on debates about security regimes’ ultimate influence in international relations, such discussion consumes considerable attention and resources from decision-makers. Second, security regimes in general are understudied by academics, and the large policy-oriented literature on peacekeeping remains a surprisingly theory-free zone. Few scholars have used the subject to develop and test international relations theories. Third, transparency is a reasonably manipulable product for security regimes, and transparency in the context of security regimes is understudied. Knowledge about transparency also helps us understand the role and practice of public diplomacy, because it too aims to influence the information environment. Thus, figuring out whether and how transparency contributes to security regimes’ effectiveness will help policymakers use them better and will advance international relations scholarship on several fronts. I discuss these three points in turn, looking first at the topic of security regimes in policy and scholarly debates, then explaining the specific focus on transparency.

Security Regimes and Policy

Security regimes are of perennial concern to policymakers. Every time a major war ends, the participants set up a security regime to help prevent a “next” war. The Napoleonic Wars were followed by the Concert of Europe; World War I by the League of Nations; and World War II by the United Nations. Similarly, the end of the Cold War rekindled enthusiasm for the U.N. and sparked a number of new peacekeeping operations. Over time, the number of security regimes has grown, ranging from the Open Skies agreement in Europe to the African Union.

Security regimes are of immediate interest to today’s leaders. The 1990s were marked by a surge of debate and new policies focused on the U.N. and other security regimes. To replace the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or supplement the U.N., a number of analysts proposed new security forums modeled after the Concert of Europe.⁵ Others proposed strengthening the U.N. and moving it closer toward being an ideal all-against-any-aggressor collective security system.⁶

These proposals for new forums and the initial post–Cold War enthusiasm for the U.N., followed by the U.N.’s troubles in Bosnia and Somalia, provoked a backlash. Critics charged that peacekeeping is useless or counterproductive: that it makes peace only between those who want peace; that it works only between small countries; or that it prevents adversaries from negotiating an end to their dispute by removing the strongest incentive to compromise, the pain of continuing war.⁷

As a result of these critiques and real-world failures, U.N. peacekeeping declined in the mid-1990s, but demand for these operations soon returned. The number of U.N. military personnel and civilian police jumped from 10,000 in 1987–91 to 78,000 in mid-1993, falling back to around 10,000 in 1999 and rising again to almost 66,000 in May 2005. Accordingly, costs for peacekeeping rose from the typical Cold War level of less than $300 million per year to $640 million in 1989 to $3.6 billion in 1993, dropping to about $1.0 billion in 1998, and rising to $4.47 billion for the year July 2004 –June 2005.⁸

Despite this history and these policy debates, few scholars have stepped back to take a theoretically informed look at security regimes. With peacekeeping in particular, much analysis is directed at policymakers, but the subject is little used to test and develop international relations theories. Some scholarly debates about security institutions are heated, but do not contribute detailed analysis.⁹

Security Regimes and Scholarship

The study of security regimes is the study of how institutions affect security policies and the probability of war. This intersection of two core streams of international relations scholarship—liberal institutionalism and security studies—remains largely uncharted. Those who study institutions have contributed greatly to the political science subfield of international political economy, but relatively little to security studies. Few institutionalists have a background in security studies.

Regime theory originated in the subfield of international political economy (IPE), and theoretically driven work on international institutions continues to be dominated by the IPE subfield. Work here started with the question, Do regimes matter? It moved on to the questions, How and under what conditions do regimes matter?¹⁰ Stephan Haggard and Beth Simmons wrote that regimes could be shown to matter if case studies showed that decision-makers

were actually concerned with reputation, reducing transactions costs, the need for transparency, and so forth, when facing decisions about regime creation and compliance. . . . An even stronger claim [could be made if such analysis showed that regimes] can alter actors’ interests and preferences. . . . Surprisingly little work of this kind has been done.¹¹

That statement is still true, particularly in security studies. That work is the aim of this book.

Robert Keohane, a leading international political economist and proponent of international institutions, laments the lack of attention that the field of international relations has paid to security regimes—a concern echoed more recently by David Lake.¹² The best work on security regimes is by Robert Jervis, Charles Lipson, and Charles Kupchan and Clifford Kupchan, who have used the Concert of Europe to discuss transparency and other peace-promoting effects of institutions such as the promotion of rules and norms.¹³ I advance this research program by focusing on transparency and expanding the analysis to U.N. peacekeeping. Other scholars of security regimes examine how institutional momentum, persistence, or form affect states’ policies. For example, John Duffield brings institutional analysis to bear on the contentious issue of weapons procurement within NATO.¹⁴

Some of the most insightful work on institutions and information comes from literatures on cooperation and bargaining, and security issues are especially prominent in the bargaining literature. Cooperation theorists have identified a number of barriers to cooperation among states and have studied how actors can overcome these hurdles. Barriers to cooperation include deadlock, inability or unwillingness to forecast or take into account the long-term consequences of policies (theorists call this inability a short shadow of the future), large numbers of actors that cause collective action problems, uncertainty about the costs and benefits of cooperation, and insufficient capabilities to monitor compliance with agreements and punish defectors (which in turn increases the likelihood of cheating and defection). Regimes can promote cooperation by giving states forums for discussion and helping them bargain and horse trade across different issue areas (issue linkage). Regimes can increase the shadow of the future, reduce transaction costs, and increase the amount of information available to actors.¹⁵

Bargaining theorists have focused on why states fail to arrive at negotiated settlements to their conflicts, why this sometimes leads to war, and how war is itself a bargaining process. Even though the word “transparency” may not be frequently or explicitly used, the arguments in this burgeoning literature often hinge on the quality of information available to the actor...