This edited volume explores how the tools of economic statecraft can be employed to promote peace between states and peace between governments and non-state actors. The editors, Steven Lobell and Norrin Ripsman, frame the volume around an expansive conceptualization of economic statecraft and a series of questions related to the types, targets, timing, and utility of economic statecraft in promoting bilateral and regional peace. The volume brings together an impressive array of scholars that take on the volume’s questions through studying peacemaking efforts primarily in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. Together, the volume’s chapters succeed in illustrating the challenges policymakers face in utilizing the tools of statecraft to broker and then preserve peace amongst adversaries. As a number of authors find, the tools of economic statecraft are often of limited utility or may even be counterproductive. In some cases, though, the volume’s authors find reasons to be optimistic about the role that economic incentives and economic interdependence can play in peacemaking. Rather than being the final word on the subject, this volume should spark a lively research agenda that will continue to explore how economic statecraft can be employed to foster peace.
Whereas the book’s title invokes the more general term “political economy,” Lobell and Ripsman frame the volume around a novel conceptualization of economic statecraft. They start off by offering a traditional (i.e., David Baldwin, Economic Statecraft, 1985) definition for the term as “the deliberate and active manipulation of economic incentives and disincentives in order to achieve a desired policy payoff from a target state,” but then go on to add that their definition also includes “the generation of economic interdependence between states to create more passive effects over time” (p. 3). Frustratingly, no justification is given for why the volume defines economic statecraft so broadly.
Progressing through the book’s chapters, the reason why economic statecraft was defined so broadly becomes clearer. While some chapters explicitly explore the impact of traditional mechanisms of economic statecraft, other chapters explore peacemaking through the lens of commercial liberalism. For example, Jean-Marc Blanchard’s chapter explicitly invokes commercial liberalism in discussing the role of economic interdependence in influencing the fractious relationship between Japan and China after World War II. Edward Mansfield and Jon Pevehouse adopt a similar framework in their quantitative study of how preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and bilateral trade influence the likelihoods of states becoming involved in militarized conflicts with one another. As Peter Dombrowski notes in the concluding chapter, “the role of economic statecraft is relatively undertheorized and empirically deemphasized” in a number of chapters (p. 231). In large part, that conclusion can be drawn because the focus of the book is split between efforts to examine the role of economic incentives versus those chapters that explore the effects of enhancing economic interdependence. As such, the expansive definition of economic statecraft offered at the onset of the book could represent a post-hoc effort to bring the book’s disparate chapters under a common umbrella.
This is potentially problematic for several reasons. Given that the editors justify their volume by arguing that too few studies have sought to explore the nexus between economic statecraft and peacemaking (p. 1), it would seem premature to jettison the original concept of economic statecraft before the limits of Baldwin’s (1985) original definition had been explored. Fundamentally changing the definition of economic statecraft in the volume also potentially interferes with its authors’ ability to offer cumulative insights applicable to general study of economic statecraft in other realms. By incorporating fundamental elements of commercial liberalism, it could also be argued that portions of the volume involve expropriating the insights of a well-developed research agenda and repackaging it as something new.
As a number of the contributors are self-conscious of, intentionality represents the key line of demarcation that distinguishes their efforts to study the effects of economic interdependence as a product of statecraft from more general studies of conflict and interdependence. In her chapter on the transition to peaceful relations between France, Germany, and Poland, Galia Press-Barnathan draws a line between decisions to forge deeper levels of economic interdependence driven by primarily political versus economic motivations. According to Press-Barnathan, France’s decision to support the European Community with Germany does not qualify as economic statecraft because economic concerns dominated France’s decision-making with respect to the treaty (p. 57). William Norris similarly recognizes this potential issue with respect to China’s economic relations with its neighbors. Citing China’s economic penetration of the Russian Far East, Norris writes, “It is important to recognize that sometimes states may not be deliberately seeking to use economic statecraft, but the commercial actors’ pursuit of ‘normal’ economic activity might, nonetheless, produce security externalities for the states involved” (p. 170). Scott Kastner and Margaret Pearson further complicate the issue of intentionality in a fascinating chapter that explores how engagement strategies with overt peacemaking intentions can backfire. Their chapter suggests that policymakers should mask or downplay government policies designed to promote peace through engagement. While it is easy to make intentionality a qualification for whether economic interdependence is a product of economic statecraft or not, distinguishing it in the real world is far more difficult—and more so if policymakers have strategic incentives to mask their intentions. Having intentionality be a qualifying criterion for whether increasing levels of interdependence constitutes economic statecraft would suggest, for example, that Mansfield and Pevehouse’s (otherwise very good) chapter does not fit the bill. Even in its expanded form, then, the definition of economic statecraft offered by Lobell and Ripsman cannot quite capture all of the volume’s contributions.
What appears to most unite the chapters of this volume is a problem-centric orientation on how policymakers can forge and preserve peace between adversaries. Such adversarial relations can be between governments and non-state actors, countries at war with one another, or countries caught up in the midst of counterproductive rivalries. One of the prominent themes of the volume relates to the clear challenges involved in peacemaking, whether policymakers seek to rely on economic incentives, the promotion of interdependence, or other means. Policymakers face dilemmas in not only deciding which tool of statecraft is most appropriate, but they also must determine which parties should be targeted and when the most opportune time to target them is. Ripsman and Lobell do an excellent job of framing those challenges in their introduction and encouraging the volume’s contributors to remain mindful of them throughout their chapters.
The volume succeeds in providing nuanced insights into the factors that influence whether economic incentives or interdependence-based strategies can be successful peacemaking strategies across a myriad of settings. None of the authors argue that the use of economic incentives or engagement-based strategies are sufficient on their own to achieve peace, but some would argue they can play a decisive role within the right context. The concluding chapter by Dombrowski provides an important self-awareness to the volume by summarizing its cumulative insights, critically discussing its shortcomings, and presenting an agenda for future research.
In sum, The Political Economy of Peacemaking is a thought-provoking book that encourages readers to immerse themselves in the challenges of promoting peace through statecraft. There is a lot to learn from the contributions in this volume and it promises to spawn an interesting debate over what constitutes economic statecraft and the future of its research agenda.
