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Knowing the Unknown Unknowns: Misplaced Certainty and the Onset of War

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 20; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09636412.2011.549023

1556-1852

Jennifer Mitzen, Randall L. Schweller,

International Relations and Foreign Policy

Abstract International Relations (IR) theory grants a privileged place to uncertainty. In practice, however, the problem does not seem to be uncertainty but certainty: if only the decision makers would acknowledge uncertainty, conflict might somehow be avoided. We challenge the "uncertainty bias" of IR scholarship by developing misplaced certainty as a distinct and common pathway to war. By misplaced certainty we mean cases where decision makers are confident that they know each other's capabilities, intentions, or both; but their confidence is unwarranted yet persists even in the face of disconfirming evidence. We argue that misplaced certainty drives two familiar conflict pathways thought to depend on uncertainty: security dilemmas and spirals. We then conceptualize misplaced certainty, highlighting its affective dimension. Building on the work of post-Keynesian economists and economic sociologists we articulate the dynamics of certainty production and how it can go awry. Our "confidence model" of certainty can account for both the phenomenology and frequency of misplaced certainty, particularly in conflict situations, while providing social theoretical underpinnings to the Classical Realist admonition of prudence. Acknowledgments For comments on previous drafts, many thanks to Tom Dolan, Charlie Glaser, Eric Grynaviski, Jason Keiber, Joshua Kertzer, Andrew Kydd, Eric MacGilvray, John Oates, Xiaoyu Pu, Shiping Tang, Alex Thompson, Alex Wendt, and William Wohlforth. Thanks in particular to Zoltan Buzas for expert research assistance. Previous versions of this paper were presented at annual meetings of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in Toronto, Canada, 2009, and Philadelphia, PA, 2006; and at the Research in International Politics (RIP) workshop at Ohio State University. Notes Quoted in Walter Russell Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 116. Quoted in Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006), 49. For a discussion of how mutual overconfidence and positive illusions fueled this war, see Dominic D. P. Johnson, Overconfidence and War: The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), chap. 8, "Iraq 2003." The most significant essay on interwar beliefs about the devastating effects of air power is Edward Warner, "Douhet, Mitchell, Seversky: Theories of Air Warfare," in Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. Edward Mead Earle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943), 484–503. See Arie Kruglanski and Uri Bar Joseph, "Intelligence Failure and Need for Cognitive Closure: On the Psychology of the Yom Kippur Surprise," Political Psychology 24, no. 1 (March 2003): 75–99. See, for example, Richard Ned Lebow, Between Peace and War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). See Eliot Cohen and John Gooch, "Failure to Adapt: The British at Gallipoli, August 1915," in Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War (New York: Free Press, 1990), 133–64. Along these lines, Robert Jervis suspects that harmonious relations "are the product of routinized and highly constrained patterns of interaction more often than the result of accurate perceptions." Jervis, "War and Misperception," in The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars, eds., Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 106. See also Eric Grynaviski, "Necessary Illusions: Misperception, Cooperation, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty," Security Studies 19, no. 3 (July 2010): 376–406. See John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 18–22; Ken Booth and Nicholas Wheeler, The Security Dilemma: Fear, Cooperation, and Trust in World Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Dale C. Copeland, The Origins of Major War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Charles Glaser, "The Security Dilemma Revisited," World Politics 50, no. 1 (October 1997): 171–201; Robert Jervis, "Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma," World Politics 30, no. 2 (January 1978): 167–214; Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, "Security Seeking Under Anarchy: Defensive Realism Revisited," International Security 25, no. 3 (Winter 2000/01): 128–61; Shiping Tang, "The Security Dilemma: A Conceptual Analysis," Security Studies 18, no. 3 (July 2009): 587–623; Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), chap. 6; Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979); and Andrew Kydd, "Game Theory and the Spiral Model," World Politics 49, no. 3 (April 1997): 371–400. In previous work, Schweller developed the role of accurate or well-placed certainty in causing conflict. When greedy aggressors exist and their intentions are known, states arm themselves, form alliances, and prepare for war. There is no need to explain these behaviors by means of uncertainty. See Randall L. Schweller, "Neorealism's Status-Quo Bias: What Security Dilemma?" Security Studies 5, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 90–121. We also see misplaced certainty as an important driver of imprudent appeasement and decisions for preventive war. But in the interest of space we limit our inquiry to security dilemmas and spirals. Brian Rathbun, "Uncertain about Uncertainty: Understanding the Multiple Meanings of a Crucial Concept in International Relations Theory," International Studies Quarterly 51, no. 3 (September 2007): 533–57. Another way to understand it would be as a mistaken image. See Richard Herrmann and Michael P. Fischerkeller, "Beyond the Enemy Image and Spiral Model: Cognitive-Strategic Research after the Cold War," International Organization 49, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 415–50. We focus on security politics, but the adaptive management literature in environmental studies similarly suggests that uncertainty reveals the limits of a framework that assumes optimization is possible. For a discussion see Alexander Thompson, "Management Under Uncertainty: International Politics of Climate Change," Climactic Change 78 (2006): 7–29, at 16 ff. Jens Beckert, "Economic Sociology and Embeddedness: How Shall we Conceptualize Economic Action?" Journal of Economic Issues 37, no. 3 (September 2003): 769–87. Jonathan Mercer, "Rationality and Psychology in World Politics," International Organization 59, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 77–106. Jervis, "Introduction: Approach and Assumptions," in Psychology and Deterrence, eds., Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 1–12; and Jack Levy, "Political Psychology and Foreign Policy," in Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, eds., David O. Sears, Leonie Huddy, and Robert Jervis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 253–84. See Jonathan Steinberg, "The Copenhagen Complex," Journal of Contemporary History 1, no. 3 (July 1966): 23–46. The irrationality of the entire German nation's anxiety over a British preventive naval attack is astonishing: "What makes the Copenhagen complex so puzzling and intriguing is that it began to influence German policy before the Germans had a fleet worth 'Copenhagening.' Why should Britain risk international opprobrium and the dangers of major war to destroy six or seven old tubs?" Ibid., 42 (emphasis in original). Collective level thinking is routine in the work of economic sociologists, who discuss an economy's general "state of expectation," which can sometimes degenerate into a panic, where confidence in the economy suddenly disappears without necessarily any change in objective indicators, bringing the economy to a halt. Jervis, "Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma"; Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), chap. 3; Herbert Butterfield, History and Human Relations (London: Collins, 1951), 19–20; John Herz, "Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma," World Politics 2, no. 2 (January 1950): 157–80; Sean M. Lynn-Jones, "Offense-Defense Theory and Its Critics," Security Studies 4, no. 4 (Summer 1995): 660–91; and George H. Quester, Offense and Defense in the International System (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1977). For insightful discussions of the security dilemma and offense-defense balance theory, see Kier Leiber, "Grasping the Technological Peace: The Offense-Defense Balance and International Security," International Security 25, no. 1 (Summer 2000): 71–104; Richard K. Betts, "Must War Find a Way?: A Review Essay," International Security 24, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 166–98; and John J. Mearsheimer, "Reckless States and Realism," International Relations 23, no. 2 (June 2009): 241–56. Kenneth N. Waltz, "The Origins of War in Neorealist Theory," in The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars, eds., Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 46. Dale C. Copeland, "The Constructivist Challenge to Structural Realism," International Security 25, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 187–212; and Copeland, The Origins of Major War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 45. For a summary of offensive and defensive realist views on how states deal with uncertainty about others' intentions, see David M. Edelstein, "Managing Uncertainty: Beliefs About Intentions and the Rise of Great Powers," Security Studies 12, no. 1 (Autumn 2002): esp. 1–8. "The security dilemma," he writes, "reflects the basic logic of offensive realism" because it clearly implies that "the best way for a state to survive in anarchy is to take advantage of other states and gain power at their expense. The best defense is a good offense." The "tragedy" of great power politics is that international structure forces them to behave in offensive ways for purely defensive reasons: "Great Powers behave aggressively not because they want to or because they possess some inner drive to dominate, but because they have to seek more power if they want to maximize their odds of survival." Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 21, 35–36. Robert Jervis, American Foreign Policy in a New Era (New York: Routledge, 2005), 86. Jervis, "Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma," 177. If all states, because they operate in an uncertain and potentially dangerous setting, constantly sought power advantages and dominance over others, international politics would be truly nasty, brutish, and short. Prudent elites, however, base crucial decisions on probabilities, not mere possibilities. See Robert O. Keohane, "Institutional Theory and the Realist Challenge After the Cold War," in Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate, ed. David A. Baldwin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 269–300. As Alexander Wendt remarks: "Copeland is right that states must be more concerned about the future than the past, since agency is always into the future, but in moving forward they are always looking back, using what they have learned about each other to guide their actions … Not to do so would be irrational." Wendt, "Social Theory as Cartesian Science: An Auto-Critique From A Quantum Perspective," in Constructivism and International Relations: Alexander Wendt and His Critics, eds., Stephano Guzzini and Anna Leander (New York: Routledge, 2006), 50–51. Also see Wendt, "Driving with the Rearview Mirror: On the Rational Science of Institutional Design," International Organization 55, no. 4 (Autumn 2001): 1,019–49. Robert Powell, "Bargaining Theory and International Conflict," Annual Review of Political Science 5 (June 2002), 24. See Brian M. Pollins and Randall L. Schweller, "Linking the Levels: The Long Wave and Shifts in U.S. Foreign Policy, 1790–1993," American Journal of Political Science 43, no. 2 (April 1999): 431–64. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 168. Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War, 3rd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1988), 122. James Fearon and other formal theorists have extended this insight to include uncertainty regarding a state's willingness to fight or resolve. See James D. Fearon, "Rationalist Explanations for War," International Organization 49, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 379–414; Powell, "Bargaining Theory and International Conflict"; and Dan Reiter, "Exploring the Bargaining Model of War," Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 1 (March 2003): 27–43. For the issue of trust and uncertainty, see Andrew H. Kydd, Trust and Mistrust in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). The most prominent of the "others" was Robert Gilpin. See Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Gilpin, "The Theory of Hegemonic War," in The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars, eds., Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 15–37. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 168. This central premise—that rational people with the same information cannot reach conflicting estimates of uncertain events—is, in the words of Jonathan Kirshner, "almost certainly wrong," both "fundamentally and consequentially." Jonathan Kirshner, "Rationalist Explanations for War?" Security Studies 10, no. 1 (Autumn 2000), 144, 148. As Kirshner points out, "experts [flush with relevant, symmetrically available information] can look at the same information and disagree over the likely outcome of football games. In international relations, there is a dramatically smaller amount of information (even assuming both sides share it), while the number of decision points over which the experts must make judgment calls rises markedly. Surely we should see even more disagreement in this setting." Ibid., 149–50. It is no mystery, therefore, why revealing information does not automatically prevent war: leaders with the same information often reach different estimates about the utility of war. Given the many difficulties in estimating the probable costs and benefits of war (the shortage of reliable data, the excess of "unknowable" information, the large number of decision points, leaders' different risk propensities), it would be remarkable if leaders actually reached the same estimates about its utility. Specifically, Fearon's rationalist explanations for war center on actors' inability to make credible commitments and incentives to misrepresent private information as well as the problem of issue indivisibilities. See Fearon, "Rationalist Explanations for War." Also see Robert Powell, "Bargaining Theory and International Conflict," 1–30; and Reiter, "Exploring the Bargaining Model of War." For the issue of trust and uncertainty, see Kydd, Trust and Mistrust in International Relations. A third condition that can prevent states from reaching a prewar bargain is the problem of issue indivisibility. Bargaining indivisibilities occur if the pie to be divided can only be allocated or "cut up" in a few ways and none of these allocations simultaneously satisfy all of the players. While Fearon downplayed the likely incidence of indivisible issues, bargaining model scholarship has gone on to explore the conditions under which an issue is treated, rightly or wrongly, as indivisible, especially with respect to ethnic conflict. See Reiter, "Exploring the Bargaining Model of War," 30. Ibid., 34. See, for example, James D. Fearon, "Signaling Foreign Policy Interests: Tying Hands vs. Sunk Costs," Journal of Conflict Resolution 41, no.1 (February 1997): 68–90; James D. Morrow, Game Theory for Political Scientists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Andrew Kydd, "Trust, Reassurance, and Cooperation," International Organization 54, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 325–57; and Andrew Kydd and Barbara F. Walter, "Sabotaging the Peace: The Politics of Extremist Violence," International Organization 56, no 2 (Spring, 2002): 263–96. Recently, Robert Powell has pointed out problems with the formal bargaining literature's emphasis on informational issues: "Informational problems abound in international politics, and most of the formal work on war done in the past decade has pursued an informational approach to the inefficiency puzzle. … Informational explanations and the models underlying them, however, have at least two major limitations. They often provide a poor account of prolonged conflict, and they give a bizarre reading of the history of some cases." Robert Powell, "War as a Commitment Problem," International Organization 60, no. 1 (Winter 2006), 170. Powell advocates "a complete-information approach [that] simply lets one abstract away from informational problems to focus more directly on other possible solutions to the inefficiency puzzle." Ibid. See also, Powell, "The Inefficient Use of Power: Costly Conflict with Complete Information," American Political Science Review 98, no. 2 (May 2004): 231–41. Jervis, "Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma,"167. Regarding positional goods, see Fred Hirsch, The Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); Randall L. Schweller, "Realism and the Present Great-Power System: Growth and Positional Competition Over Scarce Resources," in Unipolar Politics: Realism and State Strategies After the Cold War, eds., Ethan B. Kapstein and Michael Mastanduno (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 28–68; and Schweller, "New Realist Research on Alliances: Refining, Not Refuting, Waltz's Balancing Proposition," American Political Science Review 91, no. 4 (December 1997): 927–30. See Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 37–40; Eric J. Labs, "Beyond Victory: Offensive Realism and the Expansion of War Aims," Security Studies 6, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 1–49; and Peter Liberman, Does Conquest Pay?: The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Recognizing these two dimensions of the security dilemma, Jervis proposes two ways to measure the offense-defense balance: "First, does the state have to spend more or less than one dollar on defensive forces to offset each dollar spent by the other side on forces that could be used to attack? If the state has one dollar to spend on increasing its security, should it put it into offensive or defensive forces? Second, with a given inventory of forces, is it better to attack or to defend? Is there an incentive to strike first or to absorb the other's blow?. … The first has its greatest impact on arms races. … The second aspect—whether it is better to attack or to defend—influences short-run stability." Jervis, "Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma," 175–76. For a critique of this powder-keg analogy, see Dan Reiter, "Exploding the Powder Keg Myth: Preemptive Wars Almost Never Happen," International Security 20, no. 2 (Fall 1995): 5–34. For the reciprocal fear of surprise attack, see Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), chap. 9. Oddly, Schelling misidentifies the preference structure as Stag Hunt. Fearon, "Rationalist Explanations for War," 402. See Lewis F. Richardson, Arms and Insecurity (Pittsburgh, PA: Boxwood Press, 1960). Charles L. Glaser, "The Causes and Consequences of Arms Races," in Annual Review of Political Science, ed. Nelson Polsby, vol. 3 (Palo Alto: Annual Reviews, 2000), 253; George W. Rathjens, "The Dynamics of the Arms Race," in Progress in Arms Control?: Readings from Scientific American, eds., Bruce M. Russett and Bruce G. Blair (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1979), 33–43. Overreactions of this kind are most likely to occur in bipolar systems, as this structure tends to instill within the two polar powers a "zero-sum" view of the world. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 170–74. Jervis, "Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma," 189–90. Ibid., 187. This basic point has been misunderstood in most discussions of the security dilemma, which simply assume that it is always modeled as a Prisoner's Dilemma when, in fact, this is a rare form of the security dilemma. This mistake has been at the root of much confusion in the security dilemma literature about its causal weight in explanations of international conflict and war. Ibid., 169. Jervis, "Was the Cold War a Security Dilemma?" 41. Ibid., 56. Kydd, Trust and Mistrust in International Relations. See Fearon, "Rationalist Explanations for War," 404. Charles Glaser, Rational Theory of International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 55–92. Ibid., 70. Jervis, Perception and Misperception, chap. 3; and Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1962), chap. 1. John D. Steinbruner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision: New Dimensions of Political Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 88–124. Jervis, Perception and Misperception, 71, 75. Cognitivists claim that, under conditions of complexity and uncertainty, people operate according to the "cognitive miser" model, using devices such as rigid belief systems, cognitive biases, heuristics, and other shortcuts to simplify choice and assessment. See Jervis, Perception and Misperception; Deborah Welch Larson, Origins of Containment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); and Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, eds., Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). For the "cognitive miser" model, see Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor, Social Cognition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), 15. Kydd, Trust and Mistrust in International Politics, esp. chap. 3. One is tempted to say that, in all stock transactions, either the buyer or seller is wrong about the future price of the stock. This is not true, however, for all stock trades. The seller and the buyer can agree about the future price of the stock, be correct, and still make the transaction. This is because it is possible that the seller, like the buyer, thinks that the stock will rise but chooses to sell anyway because, inter alia, he or she believes that another stock will rise even higher or faster or both than the one s/he is selling. A margin call can also explain agreement among traders about the future price of a stock. Arie Kruglanski and Donna Webster, "Motivated Closing of the Mind: 'Seizing' and 'Freezing,'" Psychological Review 103, no. 2 (April 1996): 263–83. Jervis, Perception and Misperception, 187 ff. See also Kruglanski and Webster, "Motivated Closing of the Mind." David Dequech, "Bounded Rationality, Institutions, and Uncertainty," Journal of Economic Issues 35, no. 4 (December 2001): 918; and Paul Davidson, "Is Probability Theory Relevant for Uncertainty? A Post Keynesian Perspective," Journal of Economic Perspectives 5, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 129–43, esp. 135 ff. Learning does not necessarily translate to a reduction of uncertainty—acquiring information might actually increase uncertainty. But it is fair to say that the risk model associates learning with reduction of uncertainty. See fn 82 below. Robert Jervis, "Perceiving and Coping with Threat," in Psychology and Deterrence, eds., Robert Jervis, Richard New Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 1985): 13–33, at 24–27. Mercer, "Rationality and Psychology in World Politics." In fact, however, even IR scholarship on motivated bias is strangely affect-free. Analysts have tended to treat threat perceptions as a two-level game of competing material interests, arguing that "motivated" biases arise when domestic political considerations trump international imperatives. So affect is doubly marginalized. See, for example, Benjamin Fordham, "The Politics of Threat Perception and the Use of Force: A Political Economy Model of U.S. Uses of Force, 1949–1994," International Studies Quarterly 42, no. 3 (September 1998): 567–90. Also, for example, Raymond Cohen, Threat Perception in International Crisis (Ann Arbor: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979); Theodore G. Hopf, Peripheral Visions: Deterrence Theory and American Foreign Policy in the Third World, 1965–1990 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); and Deborah Welch Larson, Origins of Containment: A Psychological Explanation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). Robert A. Burton, On Being Certain (New York, NY: St Martin's Press, 2008), 3. As Randall Bausor remarks, "[S]ince the sum of all assigned probabilities equals unity … it is not possible for something not imagined to actually occur, which means all possible contingencies must have been considered." Randall Bausor, "The Rational-Expectations Hypothesis and the Epistemics of Time," Cambridge Journal of Economics 7, no. 1 (March 1983): 7. Also Dequech, "Bounded Rationality," 915; and Beckert, "Economic Sociology and Embeddedness." Winston Churchill, My Early Life: 1874–1904 (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 232. Thanks to a reviewer for pointing us to this quote. The distinction between risk and uncertainty is associated especially with Frank Knight, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (New York, NY: Harper and Row, Harper Torchbook, [1921] 1965). John Maynard Keynes, "The General Theory of Employment," Quarterly Journal of Economics 51, no. 2 (February 1937): 209–23, and Daniel Ellsberg, "Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms," Quarterly Journal of Economics 75, no. 4 (November 1961): 643–69. Cf. Jacqueline Best, "Ambiguity, Uncertainty, and Risk: Rethinking Indeterminacy," International Political Sociology 2, no. 4 (December 2008): 355–74. Knight, "Risk, Uncertainty and Profit"; David Dequech, "Fundamental Uncertainty and Ambiguity," Eastern Economic Journal 26, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 40–60; and Davidson, "Is Probability Theory Relevant?" 136. Kirshner, "Rationalist Explanations for War?" 150. On fundamental uncertainty, see Dequech, "Fundamental Uncertainty"; and Keynes, "General Theory," esp. 213–14. We focus here on the indeterminacy of the future, but present intentions—even our own, much less the intentions of others—are indeterminate as well. What we intend does not tell us with certainty what we will do; there is a gap between intending and acting. To the extent that the state of the world today includes actors' intentions, then, it is inherently unknowable. See, for example, Jacqueline Best, "Ambiguity, Uncertainty, and Risk," 355–74; Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., "Intentions as Emergent Products of Social Interactions," in Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition, eds., Bertram Malle, Louis Moses, and Dare Baldwin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 105–22. Cf. Rathbun, "Uncertain about Uncertainty." For example, Kenneth Abbott and Duncan Snidal, "Hard and Soft Law in International Governance," International Organization 54, no. 3 (2000): 421–56; and Barbara Koremenos, "Contracting around International Uncertainty," American Political Science Review 99, no. 4 (November 2005): 549–65. For example, part of Kier Leiber's criticism of the causal power of the offense-defense balance is that the balance is simply unknowable before the fact. See Lieber, "Grasping the Technological Peace." On the implications of neorealism's discounting of the future see Steve Brooks, "Dueling Realisms," International Organization 51, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 445–77; cf. Michael Williams, "Hobbes and International Relations: A Reconsideration," International Organization 50, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 213–36, on epistemic indeterminacy and Hobbes' state of nature. Barbelet quoted in Jocelyn Pixley, "Emotions and Economics," in Emotions and Sociology, ed. Jack Barbalet (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 79. The categories are adapted from David Dequech, who himself derives them from Keynes. Yet, it is recognized that new information could undermine or change particular probabilities or show the irrelevance of probability calculations altogether. David Dequech, "Expectations and Confidence Under Uncertainty," Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics 21, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 415–30; and Bill Gerrard, "Beyond Rational Expectations: A Constructive Interpretation of Keynes' Analysis of Behaviour Under Uncertainty," The Economic Journal 104, no. 423 (March 1994): 327–37. Economists debate the precise meaning of weight in Keynes' thinking. Some refer to it as a "second order probability," that is, the probability of subjective probabilities being accurate. We remain agnostic about whether this fully captures Keynes' notion of weight. For a brief discussion see Marcello Basili and Carlo Zappia, "Keynes' Non-numerical Probabilities and Non-additive Measures," Journal of Economic Psychology 30, no. 3 (June 2009): 419–30, at 424. The notion of weight resonates with Kirshner's criticism of the assumptions of bargaining theories of war noted above, at fn 34. Ambiguity aversion and uncertainty aversion differ from risk aversion. Both risk seeking and risk averse decision makers prefer risks they know over risks they do not know. See Ellsberg, "Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms." On risk aversion see Barry O'Neill, "Risk Aversion in IR Theory," International Studies Quarterly 45, no. 4 (December 1997): 617–40. Terror Management Theory (TMT) develops this idea as a fear of death or mortality—the ultimate unknown unknown. See Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, "A Terror Management Theory of Social Behavior," in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 24, ed. Mark Zanna (New York, NY: Academic Press, Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1991): 93–159. The idea of ontological security originates in psychology and sociology, but recent IR scholarship has begun to explore it as well. We rely on Jennifer Mitzen, "Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma," European Journal of International Relations 12, no. 3 (September 2006): 341–70. See also Jef Huysmans, "Security! What do you Mean? From Concept to Thick Signifier," European Journal of International Relations 4, no. 2 (December 1998): 226–55; Catarina Kinnvall, "Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Security," Political Psychology 25, no. 5 (October 2004): 741–67; Ian Manners, "European [Security] Union: From Existential Threat to Ontological Security" (IIS Working Paper, 2002); and Brent Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008). A useful overview of the IR literature on ontological security is provided in Paul Roe, "The 'Value' of Positive Security," Review of International Studies 34, no. 4 (September 2008): 777–94. Following mainstream practice, by agency we refer here to rational agency. See Jack Barbalet, Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure: A Macrosociological Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On a closer look it is not clear that in the case of states, that is, corporate actors, physical security can meaningfully be distinguished from ontological security. It could very well be "identity all the way down." But we will remain agnostic about their separability for now. The link between uncertainty, identity insecurity, and routines is supported empirically in various areas of social psychology, such as anxiety/uncertainty management theory (AUM) and terror management theory (TMT). For citations, see Mitzen, "Ontological Security," 348–49. For recent experimental evidence that both supports that link between uncertainty and anxiety and finds that anxiety affects threat perception, see Joshua Kertzer and Kathleen McGraw, "Uncertainty, Attributions, and Foreign Policy Preferences: A Fractional Factorial Experiment" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the APSA, Washington, DC, September 2010). Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (New York, NY: Polity Press, 1991). Keynes, "General Theory," 215. Cf. Ted Hopf, "The Logic of Habit in International Relations," European Journal of International Relations 16, no. 4 (December 2010): 539–61. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. See Roe, "Positive Security." Keynes, "General Theory," 215. "… our desire to hold Money as a store of wealth is a barometer of the degree of our distrust of our own calculations and conventions concerning the future. Even though this feeling about Money is itself conventional or instinctive, it operates, so to speak, at a deeper level of our motivation. It takes charge at the moments when the higher, more precarious conventions have weakened. The possession of actual money lulls our disquietude. …" See Davidson, "Is Probability Theory Relevant?" 141, for a discussion of hoarding by the elderly in similar terms. Barak Mendelsohn, "Sovereignty Under Attack: The International Society Meets al Qaeda Network," Review of International Studies 31, no. 1 (January 2005): 45–68. We thank the editors for pointing this out. We do not mean to suggest it is impossible to be rational in the pragmatic sense, only in the strict sense of rationality that SEU is based on. On this distinction see Beckert, "Economic Sociology and Embeddedness." Ibid., 773 ff. Awareness of uncertainty is a crucial premise of the "precautionary principle," the idea—applied most often to environmental governance—that in situations where precise likelihoods of outcomes cannot be known, but some are so hazardous or catastrophic that they must be avoided at all costs, policy makers should design and implement strategies to protect against them. Blainey, Causes of War, 54. For a critique, see Fearon, "Rationalist Explanations for War," 392–93.