Description:

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 talk tries to remedy this shortcoming.

Marina Henke 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, at extreme levels of social embeddedness, what she calls over-embeddedness, social ties can foster information bias and distrust thus ultimately increasing the likelihood of bargaining failure.

Using over 50 original testimonies of key political and military officials as well as Turkish documents many of them translated into English for the very first time, this talk uses US-Turkish bargaining failure over the Iraq intervention in 2003 to illustrate and test this theory.

Marina Henke is an assistant professor of international relations and the co-chair of the War & Society Working Group at the Buffett Institute. Marina holds a PhD in politics and public policy from Princeton University and master's degrees in development studies and international political economy from Sciences Po Paris and the London School of Economics. Her research focuses on military interventions and peacekeeping.