Marina E. Henke
RESEARCH AND PUBLICATIONS
My academic expertise is in the area of international security. I am particularly interested in three topics: grand strategy, nuclear security, military interventions, and European security and defense policy.
BOOK
Constructing Allied Cooperation:
Diplomacy, Payments, and Power in Multilateral Military Coalitions
Cornell University Press, 2019.
*Winner of the Joseph Lepgold Book Prize for outstanding book on international relations 2020*
*Winner of the APSA International Collaboration Section Best Book Award 2020*
*Winner of the ISA Diplomatic Studies Section Best Book Award 2021*
This book examines how diplomatic networks allow states to organize collective action. It thereby focuses on one of the areas of international cooperation where such collective action is the most difficult to achieve: multilateral military coalitions. The book argues that such coalitions seldom emerge naturally due to common interests, norms, values, or alliance commitments. Rather, coalitions are purposefully constructed by pivotal states. These states instrumentalize bilateral and multilateral networks, or what I term diplomatic embeddedness, to bargain fellow states into a specific coalition. Via these networks, pivotal states have access to private information on deployment preferences of potential coalition participants. Moreover, these connections facilitate issue-linkages and side-payments. Finally, pivotal states can use common institutional contacts (i.e., IO officials) as cooperation brokers and convert common institutional venues into coalition negotiation fora. The theory and evidence presented in this book generate new insights on how states cooperate in international affairs and the importance of diplomacy and diplomatic ties therein.
Online appendix
Link to Publisher's website
Reviewed in Foreign Affairs (March/April 2020), Perspectives on Politics (Dec 2020), H-Diplo (July 2020), und International Peacekeeping (September 2021)
BOOK PROJECT
Intervention Entrepreneurs
This book project looks at the political decision-making process that leads countries to launch military interventions. The book argues that intervention entrepreneurs play a key role in this process. These actors influence (1) the creation of a narrative for intervention; (2) the spreading and “selling” of such narrative; (3) the act of establishing faits accomplis— quasi-irreversible acts that can create a slippery slope toward intervention; and (4) the act of building a domestic/international political coalition in favor of intervention. Via these deliberate actions, intervention entrepreneurs are able to move the needle toward intervention at critical political junctures when intervention plans are put in doubt. The book draws from historical and contemporary cases to illustrate this theory including the Korean War, the Gulf War, French intervention in Mali, AU-UN intervention in Darfur, and NATO intervention in Libya.
ARTICLE PUBLICATIONS
The Populist Challenge to European Defense (with Richard Maher), Journal of European Public Policy 28, no. 3 (2021):389-406. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2021.1881587
This article assesses the consequences and implications of the rise of European populist parties for European defense cooperation. Focusing on six of the most prominent populist parties in Europe today, we examine their positions along three important defense-related issues: recommended national force posture; integrated military forces; and main national security threats. To determine their position on these three issues, we examine every party manifesto and, if available, official party document on security and defense policy since 2010. We argue that the rise of populism in Europe does not represent an inflection point for the future of European defense cooperation. Instead, our analysis reveals the following three findings: European defense cooperation will continue to be essentially ad hoc, functionally driven, and issue specific; populist parties’ attitudes and preferences regarding European defense cooperation both overlap with and diverge from those of other populists and non-populists in the EU; and populism over time may contribute to a shift in domestic preferences toward a Europe that more readily embraces military power.
Article
Link to Publisher's website
A Tale of Three French Interventions: Intervention Entrepreneurs and Institutional Intervention Choices, Journal of Strategic Studies, online first, 11 March 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2020.1733988
What factors explain the institutional shape of military interventions spearheaded by France? This article suggests that Intervention Entrepreneurs are the deciding agents. To secure the viability of their intervention proposal, they select an intervention venue based on pragmatic grounds. Most importantly, they carefully study possible domestic and international opposition to their intervention plans and conceive institutional intervention choices accordingly. The result is an ad hoc selection of intervention venues with little impact of political ideology, norms, organizational interests, or historical learning. Moreover, on many occasions, little attention is paid to the question: Which intervention format would most benefit the peace and prosperity in the conflict theatre in the medium to long term? The article illustrates this argument by tracing French institutional decision-making for interventions in Chad/CAR, Mali and Libya.
Article
Link to Publisher's website
Networked Cooperation: How the EU Recruits Military Forces, Security Studies 28, n0. 5 (2019):901-934
A substantial literature examines the causes that impel the European Union to launch peacekeeping operations. Much less is known about how these operations are staffed. This article develops a social-institutional theory and presents qualitative evidence based on over 50 elite interviews to fill this gap. The theory suggests that pivotal EU member states make strategic use of the social and institutional networks within which they are embedded to recruit EU peacekeepers. These networks create trust, provide information on deployment preferences, allow to call in favors and facilitate side-payments and issue-linkages. The theory and evidence presented in this article generate new insights into what factors enable EU security cooperation. It suggests that EU operations are not necessarily dependent on intra-EU preference convergence. Rather, EU force recruitment appears to hinge on highly proactive EU actors, which use social and institutional ties to bargain fellow states into serving in a peacekeeping mission.
Article
Link to Publisher's website
Buying Allies: Payment Practices in Multilateral Military Coalition-Building, International Security 43, no. 4 (2019):128-162
Many countries serving in multilateral military coalitions are "paid" to do so, either in cash or in concessions relating to other international issues. This article examines whether these payment practices follow a systematic pattern. It suggests that 'pivotal states' provide the means to cover such payments. These states reason that rewarding third parties to serve in multilateral coalitions holds important political benefits. Moreover, two distinct types of payment schemes exist: deployment subsidies and political side-deals. Three types of states are most likely to receive such payments: (1) states that are inadequately resourced to deploy; (2) states that are perceived by the pivotal states as critical contributors to the coalition endeavor; and (3) opportunistic states that perceive a coalition deployment as an opportunity to negotiate a quid pro quo. Using hundreds of declassified archival sources as well as elite interviews, the article illustrates these practices with historical examples from the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the U.S. intervention in Iraq, the NATO intervention in Afghanistan, the UN-AU mission in Darfur, and the AU mission in Somalia. The theory and evidence presented in this article generate new insights into how security cooperation comes about, and how burden-sharing works in practice. Moreover, it raises important questions about the efficiency and effectiveness of such payment schemes in multilateral military deployments.
Article
Link to Publisher's website
Online Appendix
Tony Blair’s Gamble: The Middle East Peace Process and British Participation in the Iraq Campaign in 2003, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 20, no. 4 (2018):773–789
*Runner-up for BJPIR Best Article of the Year Award 2018*
Tony Blair tried throughout the preparatory phase of the US-led Iraq intervention in 2003 to influence US policy on the Middle East Peace Process (MEPP). This article tries to understand how Blair fared in this endeavor. Using newly declassified documents, it examines the circumstances under which the US administration listened and engaged with British ideas regarding the MEPP and when and why it ignored British requests. The study shows that Blair was able to extract the greatest US concessions on the MEPP in moments when Great Britain’s participation in the Iraq campaign was the most uncertain. The findings promote fresh thinking on how, when and why the UK can influence US decision-making.
Article
Link to Publisher's website
The Rotten Carrot: Reexamining U.S.-Turkish Bargaining Failure over Iraq in 2003, Security Studies 27, no. 1 (2018): 120-47.
Side-payments are commonly used in international relations to alter the foreign policies of states. Despite their frequent usage, however, our understanding is very limited when it comes to why certain side-payment negotiations succeed while others fail. This article tries to remedy this shortcoming. It argues that social embeddedness between actors involved in the negotiations has a major bearing on bargaining outcomes. Under ideal circumstances, social relationships can be used to reduce information asymmetries and increase trust. Nevertheless, in the presence of fractured social networks, social ties can foster information bias and distrust thus ultimately increasing the likelihood of bargaining failure. This article uses U.S.-Turkish bargaining failure over the Iraq intervention in 2003 to illustrate and test this theory.
Article
Link to Publisher's website
The Politics of Diplomacy: How the United States builds Multilateral Military Coalitions, International Studies Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2017): 410-24.
*Winner of the ISA Diplomatic Studies Section (DPLST) Best Article of the Year Award 2018*
The conventional wisdom advances that formal alliance structures guide military coalition-building processes: allies band together because they share threat perceptions, political ideology, norms and values. This article suggests otherwise. It proposes that U.S.-led coalition-building is first and foremost a diplomatic process influenced by bilateral and multilateral institutions other than formal alliances. The breadth of institutions matters because it allows accessing information on the potential coalition partner's deployment preferences that are not only related to the security aspect of the operation but also its political, economic and other facets. In addition, diplomatic embeddedness offers linkage opportunities between military and non-military interests, which facilitates the construction of side-payments.
Article
Data Files
Link to Publisher's website
Why did France intervene in Mali? Examining the Role of Intervention Entrepreneurs, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal 23, no. 3 (2017): 307-23.
Intervention Entrepreneurs are the key to understanding the political processes leading up to a military intervention and thus ultimately why military interventions come about. Intervention entrepreneurs are private citizens, bureaucrats, associations and groups which lobby for intervention. In this process they follow a similar playbook to promote their intervention proposal. This playbook contains five different tasks: (1) creating a narrative for intervention; (2) selling the narrative; (3) building a domestic coalition supportive of the intervention; (4) creating faits accomplis that accelerate the path toward intervention and (5) lobbying the head of state in favor of the intervention proposal. This article illustrates these five tasks by means of a case study of the decision-making process that led to the French intervention in Mali (2013).
Article
Link to Publisher's website
UN Fatalities 1948-2015: A New Dataset,Conflict Management and Peace Science 36, no. 4 (2019): 425–442.
This article presents a new dataset on UN peacekeeping fatalities that occurred during 1948-2015. The data includes five types of fatality counts: total fatalities, fatalities caused by accidents, illness, malicious acts (i.e., hostile deaths) and a fourth category marked 'other incident types.' For every UN operation during 1948-2015, data on the number of these four types of UN fatalities are coded at the yearly as well as monthly level. The monthly data also indicate the nationality of the deceased.
Article
Data Files
Link to Publisher's website
Great Powers and UN Force Generation: A case study of UNAMID, International Peacekeeping 23, no. 3 (2016): 468-92.
How are UN peacekeepers recruited? While we know a lot about UN member states’ general predispositions to participate in UN peacekeeping operations, we know very little about the actual UN force generation process. What role do the UN and its powerful member states play in this process? How do they interact to recruit UN forces? This article seeks answers to these questions by means of an in-depth case study of the force generation process for the UN–AU operation to Darfur (UNAMID).
Article
Link to Publisher's website
Has UN Peacekeeping become more deadly? Trends in UN Fatalities, Providing for Peacekeeping, No. 14, December 2016
This article examines trends in UN peacekeeping fatalities using a new dataset on UN fatalities. The principal findings of the article are as follows: fatality rates and ratios due to accidents and malicious acts are on the decline. Nevertheless, the same cannot be said for illness-related fatality rates and ratios. Indeed, this report provides strong evidence, that UN fatalities due to illness follow an upward trajectory: increasingly troops, police and military observers die due to illness-related causes while serving in UN missions.
Article
Link to Publisher's website
WORKING PAPERS
The Psychology of Limited Nuclear War (work in progress)
Why do UN peacekeepers die? (work in progress)
Blackhawk Down Revisited: Do UN Fatalities have a systematic effect on UN Peacekeeping Resolutions? (with Joe Baka) (work in progress)