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Bargaining scholars predict rapid power shifts cause preventive war. But cases with rapidly shifting power often remain peaceful. To explain the dogs that don’t bark, we introduce instant, repeated, costly militarization into Powell’s (1999) conventional-weapons power transition model. First, we rationalize preventive war during long, slow, complete-information power shifts. Second, we find that where past research into conventional shifts predicts war, a grand bargain backed by the decliner’s threat of war emerges as a second equilibrium. Because war and a grand bargain both prevent power from shifting, declining powers deploy them under the same conditions. Our grand bargain survives war-causing hazards, and some latent shifts. It occurs after incremental militarization causes repeated appeasement-like concessions, and when power shifts are instant, slow or fast, and perfectly observed; suggesting conventional shifts induce grand bargains under surprising conditions. The Great Game’s end fits our grand bargain, but that British elites seriously considered war.

Great socioeconomic transitions bring about the demise of certain industries and the rise of others. The losers of the transition tend to deploy a variety of tactics to obstruct change. We develop a political-economy model of interest group competition and garner evidence of tactics deployed in the global climate movement. From this we deduce a set of strategies for how the climate movement competes against entrenched hydrocarbon interests. Five strategies for overcoming obstructionism emerge: (1) appeasement, which involves compensating the losers; (2) co-optation, which seeks to instigate change by working with incumbents; (3) institutionalism, which involves changes to public institutions to support decarbonization; (4) antagonism, which creates reputational or litigation costs to inaction; and (5) countervailance, which makes low-carbon alternatives more competitive. We argue that each strategy addresses the problem of obstructionism through a different lens, reflecting a diversity of actors and theories of change within the climate movement. The choice of which strategy to pursue depends on the institutional context.

Appeasement signals are behavioural patterns displaying an animal’s non-aggressive attitude and are hypothesized to reduce the aggressive behaviours in the receiver. In domestic dogs, specific displacement behaviours (i.e., behavioural patterns exhibited without an apparent function related to the ongoing situation), have been suggested to function as appeasement signals. To test this possibility, we assessed whether the occurrence of these behaviours was dependent on a social conflict context, predicting that, if displacement behaviours also function as appeasement signals, they should be more prevalent in a conflict vs. non-conflict context. Fifty-three dogs were exposed to two unfamiliar humans approaching them in either a mildly threatening or neutral way. We categorized the attitude of the dogs towards the strangers as “reactive”, i.e., barking and lunging towards the stimulus, and “non-reactive”, i.e., remaining passive in front of the stimuli. We coded dogs’ displacement activities and modelled their duration or frequency as a function of the interaction between the test condition and the attitude of the dog. Displacement behaviours of “blinking”, “nose licking” and “lip wiping” were associated with a “non-reactive” attitude, independently from the test condition, confirming an association with a non-aggressive intention. “Head turning” was associated with a “non-reactive” attitude in the threatening condition. In conclusion, dogs with a non-aggressive attitude exhibited more putative appeasement signals; however, these were not strictly associated with a conflict-ridden situation, calling for further investigation of their function.

Social communication, based on signals such as facial expressions, is a fundamental aspect of group living in animals, shaping cooperation, competition, and the regulation of conflicts. The bared-teeth display (BTD) has traditionally been considered a signal used by subordinate individuals to convey submissions to dominant individuals in macaque species that exhibit strict dominance hierarchies. Although previous studies have regarded BTD primarily as a signal of dominance–submission relationships, its other potential determinants and functions remain poorly understood. To address this gap, we investigated the factors influencing the occurrence of BTD and their effects in a provisioned group of 129 Japanese macaques ( Macaca fuscata ) in Katsuyama, Okayama Prefecture, Japan. We observed aggressive interactions during feeding and subsequent behaviors of victims for 1 minute following each event to analyze how BTD influenced post-conflict dynamics. We recorded counter-aggression only twice during the 100 days of the study, and BTD was consistently performed unidirectionally by the victim. Victims were more likely to show BTD when they were kin (mother-daughter, sister, or grandmother–granddaughter) to the aggressor, when the aggression involved physical contact, when the rank distance between the two individuals was smaller, and when the victim was closer to the aggressor at the end of the event. Furthermore, performing BTD reduced the likelihood of re-aggression and increased the likelihood of proximity to the aggressor 1 minute after the event. These findings suggest that BTD in despotic macaques may function not only to convey submission, but also to serve as an appeasement signal in feeding contexts.

Governments often fear the future intentions of their adversaries. In this article we show how this fear can make deterrent threats credible under seemingly incredible circumstances. We consider a model in which a defender seeks to deter a transgression with both intrinsic and military value. We examine how the defender’s fear of the challenger’s future belligerence affects his willingness to respond to the transgression with war. We derive conditions under which even a very minor transgression effectively “tests” for the challenger’s future belligerence, which makes the defender’s deterrent threat credible even when the transgression is objectively minor and the challenger is ex ante unlikely to be belligerent. We also show that fear can actually benefit the defender by allowing her to credibly deter. We apply the model to analyze a series of historical cases and show the robustness of our results to a variety of extensions.

This article examines the reason behind the dramatic shift in Philippine foreign policy under the Duterte Administration. His predecessor, president Benigno Aquino, vigorously challenged China's expansive territorial claim in the South China Sea throughout his six-year term. However, president Rodrigo Duterte's actions and pronouncements are undoing the former president's geopolitical agenda of balancing China's expansion in the disputed waters. He distances the Philippines from the United States, its long-standing treaty ally, and gravitates toward China. This stance aims to earn goodwill with China so that the Philippines can avail itself of enormous aids and loans from China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This stemmed from this administration's fear that the Philippines would not benefit from China's emergence as an economic power. Nevertheless, by appeasing an expansionist power, the Philippines becomes complicit to China's long-term strategy of maritime expansion to push the United States out of East Asia. In conclusion, the article warns that the Duterte Administration might end up losing the country's exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the South China Sea and the confidence and trust of its allies and security partners. This administration might also leave the public coffers empty and dry because of China's reneging on its commitment to fund the Philippines' massive infrastructure-building program, labeled \"Build, Build, and Build.\"

In the context of socio-ecological change, developing people-nature connections in cities could potentially improve city dwellers’ well-being while developing an attachment to other living beings. Increasing wildness by limiting management interventions may promote biodiversity in cities, but little is known about the ways in which city dwellers relate to wild places. In this study, we analyse how city dwellers use and experience an urban near-wild river flowing through the centre of a historic French city. We firstly presented the interweaving of historical cultural components and ecological processes that shaped the river. Based on behavioural mapping and questionnaires, we then investigated three different dimensions of user-river relationships (activities, affects and cognitions) and analysed how they are modulated by individual features. Users’ activities were diverse and spatially related to facilities (i.e. benches, types of ground cover), and they mainly perceived the river as a place of appeasement and relaxation. Wild elements such as birds, flora and water were more notable components of places than historic architectural elements, and users preferred riverbank vegetation with high structural complexity. However, plant and animal species living along the river were not well known. Users’ age and visit frequency were positively correlated with some components of affects and knowledge, but users’ features had only modest explanatory power. The results refine our understanding of city dwellers’ perceptions and attachment to urban wild places, and provide inspiration for designing places that promote biodiversity and enrich experiences of nature in cities.

Research on rising powers has made advances in studying new actors, broader questions, conceptualization, and models of world order. Instead of the previous focus on a hegemon and rising power in the power transition literature, scholars are focusing on major and middle powers such as India, Brazil, and Turkey. Instead of a narrow concern with prospects for hegemonic war, researchers are examining the effects of rising powers on global governance and world order. Some scholars argue that rising powers are not trying to overturn the international order, but to establish a parallel order within it. Advances have also been made in conceptualization, such as the important concept of accommodation, transcending the earlier narrow concern with territorial accommodation or appeasement. More work has been done on the concept of clubs such as the BRICS and the G20. Finally, scholars are identifying new, more pluralistic patterns of world order, in which countries specialize in various tasks.

What do terrorists want? No question is more fundamental for devising an effective counterterrorism strategy. The international community cannot expect to make terrorism unprofitable and thus scarce without knowing the incentive structure of its practitioners. The strategic model-the dominant paradigm in terrorism studies-posits that terrorists are political utility maximizers. According to this view, individuals resort to terrorism when the expected political gains minus the expected costs outweigh the net expected benefits of alternative forms of protest. The strategic model has widespread currency in the policy community; extant counterterrorism strategies seek to defeat terrorism by reducing its political utility. The most common strategies are to fight terrorism by decreasing its political benefits via a strict no concessions policy; decreasing its prospective political benefits via appeasement; or decreasing its political benefits relative to nonviolence via democracy promotion. Despite its policy relevance, the strategic model has not been tested. This is the first study to comprehensively assess its empirical validity. The actual record of terrorist behavior does not conform to the strategic model's premise that terrorists are rational actors primarily motivated to achieving political ends. The preponderance of empirical and theoretical evidence is that terrorists are rational people who use terrorism primarily to develop strong affective ties with fellow terrorists. Major revisions in both the dominant paradigm in terrorism studies and the policy community's basic approach to fighting terrorism are consequently in order.

The current state of the relations between Russia and the ‘West’ presents curious similarities with the ’30s appeasement of Germany. These include the change in the international order, the (late) emergence of a system-challenger after an ‘intermediary’ period that followed the change, the conduct of the challenge and the reactions of the direct custodians of the system. Similarly in both cases, a cycle of escalation-empathy-appeasement defines the interactions between the system and its challenger, creates a centrifugal effect among third actors and deteriorates the system. The similarity necessitates a theoretical effort to define the phenomenon as to its genesis, processes and its end from a systemic perspective, through the comparison of the two cases yet beyond a purely historical angle that has been almost the only one in dealing with the appeasement. In other words, this article engages in two theory-developing case studies centred on the German Reich and contemporary Russia to understand the theoretical value of appeasement as a specific mode of interactions in international politics.