Bücher von Richard Ned Lebow

Now available in paperback, Psychology and Deterrence reveals deterrence strategy's hidden and generally simplistic assumptions about the nature of power and aggression, threat and response, and calculation and behavior in the international arena.

It has three new substantial chapters: a prologue, a chapter on new evidence on World War I, and an epilogue. The new chapters update and reevaluate these arguments and approach a critical hindsight assessment in light of post-Cold War developments.

Identity is the master variable for many constructivist scholars of international politics. In this comparative study, Richard Ned Lebow shows that states do not have identities any more than people do. Leaders, peoples, and foreign actors seek to impose national identifications consistent with their political projects and psychological needs. These identifications are multiple, fluid and rise in importance as a function of priming and context. Leaders are at least as likely to invoke national identifications as rationalizations for policies pursued for other reasons as they are to be influenced by them. National identifications are nevertheless important because they invariably stress the alleged uniqueness of a people and its country, and are a principal means of seeking status and building self-esteem. Lebow tracks the relative appeal of these principles, the ways in which they are constructed, how they influence national identifications, and how they in turn affect regional and international practices.

Drawing on recently declassified documents and extensive interviews with Soviet and American policy-makers, among them several important figures speaking for public record for the first time, Ned Lebow and Janice Stein cast new light on the effect of nuclear threats in two of the tensest moments of the Cold War: the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the confrontations arising out of the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. They conclude that the strategy of deterrence prolonged rather than ended the conflict between the superpowers.

This book recapitulates and extends Ned Lebow's decades' long research on conflict management and resolution. It updates his critique of conventional and nuclear deterrence, analysis of reassurance, and the conditions in which international conflicts may be amenable to resolution, or failing that, a significant reduction in tensions.