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 2

EM OT ION A L CHOICES
How the Logic of Affect Shapes Coercive Diplomacy

Rob i n M ar k w i c a
Emotional Choices
How the Logic of Affect Shapes
Coercive Diplomacy

R O B I N MA R K W I C A

1
 3
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For my family
 Acknowledgments

Many individuals and institutions have helped me during the research and
writing of this book. I owe an immense debt to my university supervisor, Yuen
Foong Khong, and my college adviser, John Darwin. With their advice and
patience they have supported me above and beyond their obligations. Their
extraordinary knowledge of history, psychology, and international relations
has been invaluable, and their erudition, wit, and graciousness will continue to
be a source of inspiration to me. I am also deeply grateful to a number of other
scholars at Oxford who read various incarnations of the manuscript or its
components, and whose comments and suggestions rescued me from many a
pitfall: Anne Deighton, Louise Fawcett, Andy Hurrell, Eddie Keene, Neil
MacFarlane, Kalypso Nicolaïdis, and Carsten Schulz. I would like to express
a particular debt of gratitude to Janina Dill, Rosemary Foot, Cetta Mainwaring,
Carlotta Minnella, and Nina Silove, who have gone to extraordinary lengths to
support me and this project.
Nuffield College has been a wonderful community that soon became my
home away from home. For their advice, help, and companionship, I wish
to thank my fellow Nuffielders Evrim Altintas, Nancy Bermeo, Sarah von
Billerbeck, Johanna Boersch-Supan, Stuart Bone, David Elliott, Geoff Evans,
Christian Fastenrath, Maciej Godek, Tiang Boon Hoo, Richard Johnson, Lee
Jones, Ana Lopez Garcia, Iain McLean, Anja Neundorf, Rod Oakey, Sergi
Pardos, David Pettinicchio, Silke Schneider, Maria Sironi, Duncan Snidal,
Thees Spreckelsen, Dingeman Wiertz, Stephanie Wright, and Caleb Yong.
For their assistance in ordering countless books and inter-library loans, I am
very grateful to the outstanding librarians of Nuffield College and the Middle
East Centre, including Mastan Ebtehaj, Clare Kavanagh, Liz Martin, Helen
Matthews, Tula Miller, Michelle Mumford, Tessa Richards, and Ed Smithson.
I am also indebted to other colleagues and friends in Oxford for their advice
and support. I especially thank Richard Caplan, Martin Ceadel, Raphael
Espinoza, Sabina Espinoza, Jonathan Fisher, Todd Hall, Debbie Hockley,
Alessandro Iandolo, Nick Lees, Nicola Leveringhaus, Marga Lyall, Gabi
Maas, Michael Manulak, Andrew Melling, Aaron Mertz, Kai Möller, Philipp
Podsiadlowski, Sandeep Sengupta, Steffen Weishaupt, and Jennifer Welsh.
I would like to thank Jane Ledig-Rowohlt, who created a scholarship
fund covering tuition fees and living expenses for doctoral students at the
University of Oxford. Without her generosity, I would not have been able to
carry out this project. I am also very grateful to Gertrud and Michael Klett
whose foundation kindly funded the final phase of my doctorate. Moreover,
 Acknowledgments vii
I would like to express my gratitude to the John F. Kennedy Presidential
Library for supporting me with a Marjorie Kovler fellowship to conduct
research in its holdings. Special thanks to archivists Sharon Kelly and Stephen
Plotkin for their superb guidance through the records. Grants from Nuffield
College and the Rothermere American Institute enabled me to do research at
the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and at the Conflict Records
Research Center (CRRC). I am grateful for the help of Rachael Altman and
Jay Patton from the Bush Library and of Christopher Alkhoury, Stephanie
Glass, and especially David Palkki from the CRRC. They alerted me to
important sources and provided valuable advice. A research fellowship with
Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences enabled me to
discuss my ideas and to refine my arguments. For this opportunity I am
particularly grateful to Akira Iriye, Joseph Nye, Stephen Peter Rosen, and
Stephen Walt. Stephen Jensen and Julian Yolles have my gratitude for wel-
coming me into the community of Richards Hall. Thanks are due to the
European Association for American Studies and the German Academic Exchange
Service, which supported my stay at Harvard. Moreover, I am very grateful
to Ulrich Krotz and Brigid Laffan, who kindly gave me the opportunity to
complete this book in the exceptionally beautiful and stimulating environment
of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European Univer-
sity Institute.
For their advice and comments on the project, I owe a profound debt to
Dan Batson, Christine Cheng, Dov Cohen, Jean Decety, Helena Flam, Phil
Haun, Peter Katzenstein, Dacher Keltner, Simon Koschut, David Motadel,
Robert Pastor, Svetlana Savranskaya, Todd Sechser, Christoph Strupp, Julia
Wagner, and especially Steve Hopgood. Without their advice, this would have
been a much poorer book. Nadja Klopprogge and Franziska Zach provided
superb research assistance. Moreover, I am grateful to the trustees of Oxford’s
Cyril Foster and Andrew Mellon funds for financing my trips to annual
meetings of the American Political Science Association, the British Inter-
national Studies Association, and the International Studies Association. The
feedback I received at these conferences was very useful. In addition, my
sincere thanks go to the members of the Constructivist Emotion Research
Network for their valuable input, in particular Karin Fierke, Todd Hall, Regina
Heller, Johanna Kißler, Simon Koschut, Andrew Ross, Christian von Scheve,
Ty Solomon, and Reinhard Wolf.
At Oxford University Press, my great appreciation is due to Dominic Byatt,
Lisa Eaton, and Olivia Wells for their guidance, patience, and encouragement
throughout the publication process. Many thanks also to Charles Lauder, Jr.,
for his excellent copyediting. I could not have hoped for a more competent
and supportive editorial team. Furthermore, I am heavily indebted to the three
anonymous reviewers, whose feedback greatly improved the manuscript.
I very much appreciate their willingness to share their impressive knowledge
viii Acknowledgments
and ideas with me. Engaging with their questions and suggestions has been a
rewarding intellectual experience. I will keep their generosity in mind and
hope to pass it on to others.
Finally, I wish to thank a great collection of family, friends, and mentors
back home whose encouragement and help have been critical over the years:
Nadja Althaus, Daniel Eltinger, Ben Gotthardt, Clemens Häusler, Ingrid
Lang, Heidi Lanz, Martina Lanz, Alfred Markwica, Gerti Markwica, Chris
Munteanu, Manuel Schlosser, Uta Spellenberg, Barbara Strohal, and Maren
Strohal. For their love and unstinting support I am grateful to my family in
Leonberg and Oxford.
 Contents

List of Figures xi
List of Tables xii
List of Abbreviations xiii

1. Introduction 1
Existing Explanations of Coercive Diplomacy Outcomes 9
The Logic of Affect 15
Case Selection 29
The Focus on Political Leaders 32
Outline of the Book 34
2. The Logic of Affect 36
An Affective Revolution in International Relations 37
Ontological and Epistemological Assumptions 52
How Culture Shapes Emotions 58
How Emotions Influence Decision-Making 66
The Link to Political Leaders and Coercive Diplomacy 83
Emotion Regulation and Individual Disposition 92
Conclusion 94
3. Inferring Actors’ Emotions 95
Psychological Techniques for Inferring Emotion 97
Inferring Emotions and Their Intensity from Texts 100
Contextualizing Emotions 104
Tracing the Influence of Emotions on Decision-Making 115
Methodological Limitations 122
Conclusion 124
4. The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 126
Background: Missiles to Cuba 129
Limiting the Confrontation, Monday, October 22 139
Escalating the Crisis, Tuesday, October 23 144
Turning Around the Arms Ships, Tuesday, October 23 149
Deterring the US Administration, Wednesday, October 24 151
Contemplating a Trade, Thursday, October 25 154
Trading Away the Missiles, Friday, October 26 162
Adding a Further Condition, Saturday, October 27 164
Accepting Kennedy’s Terms, Sunday, October 28 166
Conclusion 175
x Contents

5. The Gulf Conflict, 1990–1 179

Background: Invading Kuwait 181
Annexing Kuwait 197
Talking Peace and Taking Hostages 206
Seeking a Dialogue with the Bush Administration 211
Canceling Iraqi–US Talks 217
Defying Coercive Diplomacy, December 1990 220
Defying Coercive Diplomacy, January 1991 231
Accepting the Soviet Ceasefire Plan 241
Withdrawing from Kuwait 245
Conclusion 252
6. Conclusion 257
Assessing the Explanatory Power of the Logic of Affect 258
Comparing the Case Studies 261
Implications for Policy-Makers 264
Suggestions for Future Research 273

Bibliography 279
Index 343
 List of Figures

1.1 How the Five Key Emotions Shape Target Leaders’ Decision-Making 19
2.1 The Influence of Emotions on Decision Processes 67
 List of Tables

1.1 Three Action Models 28

2.1 Five Key Emotions in Coercive Diplomacy 88
3.1 Inferring the Five Key Emotions 103
3.2 The Relevance of the Five Key Emotions in Decision-Making 122
4.1 Nikita Khrushchev’s Major Decisions in the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 128
4.2 Relevance of the Five Key Emotions in Nikita Khrushchev’s
Decision-Making in the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 177
5.1 Saddam Hussein’s Major Decisions in the Gulf Conflict, 1990–1 181
5.2 Relevance of the Five Key Emotions in Saddam Hussein’s
Decision-Making in the Gulf Conflict, 1990–1 255
 List of Abbreviations

AFP Agence France-Presse

AP Associated Press
AVPRF Foreign Policy Archive of the Russian Federation
BCE before the common era
CC Central Committee
CIA US Central Intelligence Agency
CPCz Czechoslovak Communist Party
CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union
CRRC Conflict Records Research Center
CWIHP Cold War International History Project
DCI US Director of Central Intelligence
DDI US Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
DEFCON US Defense Condition
FBI US Federal Bureau of Investigation
FBIS US Foreign Broadcast Information Service
fMRI functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States
GHWBL George H. W. Bush Presidential Library
INA Iraqi News Agency
IR International Relations
IRBM intermediate-range ballistic missile
JFK John F. Kennedy
JFKL John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
KCLMA King’s College London Military Archives
KGB Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee on State Security)
NARA US National Archives and Records Administration
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NSC US National Security Council
NSF National Security Files
OAS Organization of American States
OPEC Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries
PLO Palestine Liberation Organization
xiv List of Abbreviations
RCC Iraq’s Revolutionary Command Council
RFK Robert F. Kennedy
RGANI Russian State Archive of Contemporary History
UN United Nations
UPI United Press International
US United States of America
USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
WMD weapons of mass destruction
 1

Introduction

In coercive diplomacy, states threaten the use of military force to get actors to
change their behavior. It is a strategy that seeks to “persuade” targets to
comply rather than “bludgeon” them into doing so, according to Alexander
George.1 This form of forceful persuasion has long been a popular instrument
in international relations, because it holds the promise of achieving an
opponent’s acquiescence without incurring the cost in blood and treasure of
military intervention. The large majority of coercive threats are issued by
powerful states against considerably weaker targets.2 It would seem intuitive
that a coercer’s military superiority renders coercive diplomacy particularly
effective.3 In the words of the war theorist Carl von Clausewitz, “when one
force is a great deal stronger than the other, an estimate may be enough. There
will be no fighting: the weaker side will yield at once.”4 The historical record,

1
See Alexander L. George, Forceful Persuasion: Coercive Diplomacy as an Alternative to War
(Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1991), 5, emphasis omitted. See also
Alexander L. George, David K. Hall, and William E. Simons, The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy:
Laos, Cuba, Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971). For definitions of the related notions of
“compellence” and “strategic coercion,” see Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1966), 71–2, and Lawrence Freedman, “Strategic Coercion,” in Lawrence
Freedman, ed., Strategic Coercion: Concepts and Cases (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998),
15–18, respectively. This study focuses on the use of coercive threats, which seek to modify a
target’s past or ongoing behavior, rather than on deterrent threats, which try to dissuade a target
from initiating a certain action in the future. In practice, however, these two approaches often
intersect and blend. See Lawrence Freedman, Deterrence (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), 111.
2
Major powers targeted minor ones in 85 percent of coercive threat episodes in the twentieth
century. See Todd S. Sechser, “Militarized Compellent Threats, 1918–2001,” Conflict Manage-
ment and Peace Science 28:4 (2011), 387.
3
The roles of “coercer” and “target” frequently do not remain stable in practice. Targets may
turn into coercers, coercers can transform into targets, or they may be both at the same time.
Some readers may associate these terms with connotations of dominance and passivity, respect-
ively. The actual actors in question can view themselves and the other party quite differently,
however. On occasion, it may not even be clear to them which of them is a coercer or target. This
study thus uses these words as technical terms. See Robert Jervis, How Statesmen Think: The
Psychology of International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 91.
4
Carl von Clausewitz, On War, translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, abridged with
an Introduction and Notes by Beatrice Heuser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 39.
For a contemporary expression of this view, see Branislav L. Slantchev, “Feigning Weakness,”
2 Emotional Choices
however, raises strong doubts about this assumption. Taking into account
cases from the past two centuries, quantitative studies put the strategy’s
success rate at only 17 to 36 percent.5 When targets refused to accede, coercers
generally resorted to war.
Numerous prominent examples bear out the curious failure of military might
to afford success in coercive diplomacy. As early as in the fifth century BCE,
Thucydides recounted how the inhabitants of the small island of Melos in
the Aegean Sea rebuffed imperial Athens’ call to give up their neutrality in
the Peloponnesian War, only to be subdued and enslaved.6 In 200 BCE, the
Macedonians were crushed at the Battle of Cynoscephalae after they repudiated
the Roman emperor’s demand to leave the Greek cities in peace.7 The might
of the British fleet failed to persuade Tsar Nicholas I to withdraw his troops
from the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, resulting in
the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853 and the Russian empire’s
dramatic defeat.8 In the past two decades, the sole remaining superpower
also had to learn how intransigent much weaker actors can be. Serbian leader
Slobodan Milošević, for example, ignored US appeals to end his campaign of
ethnic cleansing against Kosovo Albanians in 1999, triggering the resort
to force by the United States.9 The Taliban in Afghanistan rejected
the George W. Bush administration’s demand after September 11, 2001, to
turn the al-Qaeda leadership over for trial, and were then attacked by US and

International Organization 64:3 (2010), 360: “The stronger an actor is, the worse the expected
war outcome for the adversary, and the more that adversary should be prepared to concede in
order to avoid it.”
5
Peter Viggo Jakobsen’s review of 36 cases of US and European coercive diplomacy from
1990 to 2008 shows that coercers achieved their goal in just 17 percent of cases. Barry Blechman
and Stephen Kaplan find that of 28 instances that they identify as US compellence between 1946
and 1974, success was achieved in only 18 percent after 3 years. Examining 67 compellence
episodes from 1823 to 1973, Walter Petersen puts the success rate at 24 percent. Phil Haun
identifies 19 cases of US coercive diplomacy from 1964 to 2011 and finds that 32 percent of them
worked out. Todd Sechser’s investigation of 163 coercive threat episodes by states whose military
expenditures were higher than those of the target from 1918 to 2001 computes a success rate of
36 percent. See Peter Viggo Jakobsen, “Coercive Diplomacy,” in Alan Collins, ed., Contemporary
Security Studies, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 296; Barry Blechman and
Stephen Kaplan, Force without War: US Armed Forces as a Political Instrument (Washington,
DC: Brookings Institution, 1978), 89, 91–2; Walter Petersen, “Deterrence and Compellence:
A Critical Assessment of Conventional Wisdom,” International Studies Quarterly 30:3 (1986),
283; Phil Haun, Coercion, Survival, and War: Why Weak States Resist the United States
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 6; Sechser, “Militarized Compellent Threats,
1918–2001,” 389–90.
6
See Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Martin Hammond (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 307.
7
See F. W. Walbank, Philip V of Macedon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2014 [1940]), 132–3, 137.
8
See Orlando Figes, The Crimean War: A History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 143–5.
9
See David L. Phillips, Liberating Kosovo: Coercive Diplomacy and U.S. Intervention
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 107.
 Introduction 3
allied forces.10 When Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya refused to
terminate his assault of the rebel-held city of Benghazi, he was confronted
with air strikes from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).11
In all of these cases, the coercers enjoyed military superiority. The targets,
however, defied their demands—and paid dearly for it. This puzzling behavior
inspires the central question of the present book: Why and under what
conditions do political leaders reject coercive threats from stronger opponents,
and when do they yield? The existing literature has mostly used rationalist or
constructivist action models to explain targets’ decision-making. A standard
rational choice approach suggests that actors follow a “logic of consequences”:
They give in to coercive threats only if acquiescence entails lower costs or
more benefits than resistance.12 A constructivist perspective posits that target
leaders adhere to a “logic of appropriateness”: They are likely to accept (reject)
a coercer’s demands if compliance is (not) in line with their norms about
proper conduct given their identities.13
Most rationalists and constructivists take a cognitivist perspective. Their
analyses concentrate on people’s thoughts and beliefs, and they treat choice
behavior as a conscious and reflective process. Agents are assumed to make
their decisions on the basis of calculation and deliberation. Cumulative
research in neurology, however, indicates that merely about 2 percent of
the brain’s activities operate at the level of conscious reflection. The remaining
98 percent are taken up by unconscious appraisals and affect.14 Human choice
is thus strongly shaped by automatic processing. Moreover, neuroscientists
have found that reflective deliberation tends to be preceded by emotion.15

10
See Martha Crenshaw, “Coercive Diplomacy and the Response to Terrorism,” in Robert
J. Art and Patrick M. Cronin, eds, The United States and Coercive Diplomacy (Washington, DC:
US Institute of Peace Press, 2003), 335–7.
11
See Christopher S. Chivvis, Toppling Qaddafi: Libya and the Limits of Liberal Intervention
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 67.
12
See, for example, Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1996), 16; Schelling, Arms and Influence, 150; Todd S. Sechser,
“Winning without a Fight: Power, Reputation, and Compellent Threats in International Crises,”
PhD dissertation (Stanford: Stanford University, 2007); Branislav L. Slantchev, Military Threats:
The Costs of Coercion and the Price of Peace (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2011). For the standard comparative account on the logics of consequences and appropriateness,
see James March and Johan Olsen, “The Institutional Dynamics of International Political
Orders,” International Organization 52:4 (1998), 943–69.
13
See Richard Ned Lebow, Coercion, Cooperation, and Ethics in International Relations
(New York: Routledge, 2007), 18, 125, 229; David L. Rousseau, Identifying Threats and Threat-
ening Identities: The Social Construction of Realism and Liberalism (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2006); Leonard J. Schoppa, “The Social Context in Coercive International Bargaining,”
International Organization 53:2 (1999), 307–42.
14
See David D. Franks, “Emotions and Neurosociology,” in Jan E. Stets and Jonathan
H. Turner, eds, Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions, vol. 2 (New York: Springer, 2014), 267.
15
See Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 53, 128; Elizabeth A. Phelps, “Emotion and Cognition:
Insights from Studies of the Human Amygdala,” Annual Review of Psychology 57 (2006), 43–4.
4 Emotional Choices
“We generally feel before we think and, what is even more surprising, we often
act before we think,” as Janice Gross Stein points out.16 Emotions tend to be
ontologically prior to conscious reflection and shape our lives in profound
ways. They inform us what we like and what we loathe, what is good and bad
for us, and whether we do right or wrong. They give meaning to our relation-
ships with others, and they generate physiological impulses to act.17 This does
not mean that emotions are restricted to the realm of the unconscious, of
course. Humans may become cognizant of their emotions, and they can try to
regulate them. They experience emotions at different levels of conscious
awareness and with varying degrees of intentional control.18
The basic argument of the present book is that emotions play a significant
role in foreign policy decision-making in general and in target leaders’
responses to coercive diplomacy in particular. They shape choice behavior in
powerful and predictable ways. If we wish to understand under what condi-
tions actors accept or reject a coercer’s demands, we need to take their
emotional experience into consideration. That experience, however, is outside
the scope of standard rationalist and constructivist models.
What is “emotion”? This study conceives of emotion as a transient, partly
biologically based, partly culturally conditioned response to a stimulus, which
gives rise to a coordinated process including appraisals, feelings, bodily reac-
tions, and expressive behavior, all of which prepare individuals to deal with the
stimulus. People can experience emotions at different degrees of intensity
ranging from subtle sensations to extreme arousal.19 The term “feeling” refers
to the direct, subjective, and typically conscious experience of emotion.20

16
Janice Gross Stein, “Fear, Greed, and Financial Decision-Making,” in James W. Davis, ed.,
Psychology, Strategy and Conflict: Perceptions of Insecurity in International Relations (New York:
Routledge, 2013), 88, emphasis in original.
17
See E. J. Horberg, Michael W. Kraus, and Dacher Keltner, “Pride Displays Communicate
Self-Interest and Support for Meritocracy,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 105:1
(2013), 24; David Matsumoto and Linda Juang, Culture and Psychology, 3rd edn (Belmont:
Wadsworth, 2004), 258.
18
See Andrew A. G. Ross, Mixed Emotions: Beyond Fear and Hatred in International Conflict
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 20.
19
See Carroll E. Izard, “The Many Meanings/Aspects of Emotion: Definitions, Functions,
Activation, and Regulation,” Emotion Review 2:4 (2010), 367; Richard S. Lazarus, “From
Psychological Stress to the Emotions: A History of Changing Outlooks,” Annual Review of
Psychology 44 (1993), 16; David Matsumoto, ed., The Cambridge Dictionary of Psychology
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 179; David Matsumoto and Linda Juang,
Culture and Psychology, 5th edn (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2013), 207. For an account of the genesis
of this definition, see Chapter 2 of the present study.
20
See Géradline Coppin and David Sander, “Theoretical Approaches to Emotion and Its
Measurement,” in Herbert L. Meiselman, ed., Emotion Measurement (Amsterdam: Elsevier,
2016), 15; Antonio R. Damasio, “William James and the Modern Neurobiology of Emotion,”
in Dylan Evans and Pierre Cruse, eds, Emotion, Evolution, and Rationality (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 5; Christopher L. Heavey, Russell T. Hurlburt, and Noelle L. Lefforge,
“Toward a Phenomenology of Feelings,” Emotion 12:4 (2012), 769.
 Introduction 5
Compared to the relatively short-lived character of emotions and feelings,
“moods” are more durable. Whereas emotions are triggered by something or
someone, moods are not necessarily related to a specific stimulus.21 Finally,
the present book treats “affect” as an umbrella term that encompasses all of
these phenomena.22
How do we best theorize the role of emotion in decision-making? One
option would be to integrate it into rational choice theory. A few scholars have
tried to do so and assert that emotions enter into utility calculations as
independent variables.23 I have decided to avoid such an approach because
the logic of consequences is not able to account for the social nature of
emotions. Although emotions are felt by individuals, anthropologists and
psychologists have shown that they cannot be isolated from the social envir-
onment in which they arise. They are inextricably intertwined with people’s
cultural ideas and practices. A better way to conceptualize the influence of
emotions on choice behavior might thus be to incorporate them into the logic
of appropriateness. In the past few years, several constructivists have produced
valuable studies about how norms and identities shape emotions and
how emotions, in turn, help to constitute these social constructs.24 I have

21
See Dacher Keltner and Jennifer S. Lerner, “Emotion,” in Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert,
and Gardner Lindzey, eds, Handbook of Social Psychology, 5th edn, vol. 1 (Hoboken: Wiley,
2010), 318; Gerben A. Van Kleef, Astrid C. Homan, and Arik Cheshin, “Emotional Influence at
Work: Take It EASI,” Organizational Psychology Review 2:4 (2012), 312.
22
See Jennifer S. Lerner et al., “Emotion and Decision Making,” Annual Review of Psychology
66 (2015), 801; Van Kleef, Homan, and Cheshin, “Emotional Influence at Work,” 312. A growing
number of International Relations scholars use the term “affect” not as an umbrella term but
draw on affect theory to denote it as an “inner state” and non-conscious bodily action. For an
overview of affect theory, see Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds, The Affect Theory
Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). For International Relations scholarship
employing this notion of affect, see Linda Åhäll and Thomas Gregory, “Security, Emotions,
Affect,” Critical Studies on Security 1:1 (2013), 117–20; Janice Bially Mattern, “On Being
Convinced: An Emotional Epistemology of International Relations,” International Theory 6:3
(2014), 589–94; Marcus Holmes, “Believing This and Alieving That: Theorizing Affect and
Intuitions in International Politics,” International Studies Quarterly 59:4 (2015), 707.
23
See, for example, Gary S. Becker, Accounting for Tastes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1996), 231–7; Lisa J. Carlson and Raymond Dacey, “The Use of Fear and Anger to Alter
Crisis Initiation,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 31:2 (2014), 168–92; Robert H. Frank,
Passions within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions (New York: Norton, 1988); Jack
Hirshleifer, “The Affections and the Passions: Their Economic Logic,” Rationality and Society 5:2
(1993), 185–202; Roger D. Petersen, “Identity, Rationality, and Emotion in the Processes of State
Disintegration and Reconstruction,” in Kanchan Chandra, ed., Constructivist Theories of Ethnic
Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 388, 397, 403–17, 421. For a different approach, see
Roger D. Petersen, Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentieth-
Century Eastern Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
24
See, for example, Jean-Marc Coicaud, “Exploring the Nexus of Emotions/Passions, Values
and Rights in International Affairs,” in Yohan Ariffin, Jean-Marc Coicaud, and Vesselin Popovski,
eds, Emotions in International Politics: Beyond Mainstream International Relations (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 137–67; Todd H. Hall, “Sympathetic States: Explaining
the Russian and Chinese Responses [to] September 11,” Political Science Quarterly 127:3 (2012),
369–400; Emma Hutchison, Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions after
6 Emotional Choices
nevertheless decided against following their example, because the logic of
appropriateness has difficulty capturing the embodied, dynamic, and to some
extent involuntary nature of emotion. Constructivism is traditionally geared
toward theorizing self-reflective behavior and ideational forces in social life.25 Its
constitutive form of explanation is “static” and atemporal, as Alexander Wendt
points out.26 This is why it cannot accommodate the fluent and ever-changing
nature of affective experience.
I submit that to grasp not only the social but also the physiological and
dynamic character of emotion in decision-making, it is necessary to develop
an additional action model at the individual level of analysis. Drawing on
research in psychology and sociology, this book introduces the logic of affect,
or emotional choice theory, into the field of International Relations (IR).27 The
theory serves as a means to organize, explain, and predict the ways in which
emotions shape decision-making.28 It is applied to two significant episodes of
coercive diplomacy: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s choice behavior in

Trauma (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Emma Hutchison and Roland
Bleiker, “Emotional Reconciliation: Reconstituting Identity and Community after Trauma,”
European Journal of Social Theory 11:3 (2008), 385–403; K. M. Fierke, Political Self-Sacrifice:
Agency, Body, and Emotion in International Relations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2013); Simon Koschut, “Emotional (Security) Communities: The Significance of Emotion
Norms in Inter-Allied Conflict Management,” Review of International Studies 40:3 (2014),
533–58; Simon Koschut, “The Power of (Emotion) Words: On the Importance of Emotions for
Social Constructivist Discourse Analysis in IR,” Journal of International Relations and Develop-
ment (2017), <https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-017-0086-0>; Ross, Mixed Emotions.
25
For similar critiques, see Erik Ringmar, “How the World Stage Makes Its Subjects: An
Embodied Critique of Constructivist IR Theory,” Journal of International Relations and Devel-
opment 19:1 (2016), 101–25; Andrew A. G. Ross, “Coming in from the Cold: Constructivism and
Emotions,” European Journal of International Relations 12:2 (2006), 200, 209; Ty Solomon,
“Embodiment, Emotions, and Materialism in International Relations,” in Linda Åhäll and
Thomas Gregory, eds, Emotions, Politics and War (New York: Routledge, 2015), 58–9. Even
constructivists who reject the view that social reality is made up of “ideas all the way down” have
generally locked material matters up in an undertheorized “rump materialism.” For the classic
example, see Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 109–13, 130–4.
26
See Alexander Wendt, “On Constitution and Causation in International Relations,” Review
of International Studies 24:5 (1998), 105. Likewise, another expert, Petri Ylikoski, notes that
“constitution does not take time.” It does “not make sense to talk about processes in the case of
constitution,” because the relation between properties and their component parts is “synchron-
ous.” See Petri Ylikoski, “Causal and Constitutive Explanation Compared,” Erkenntnis 78:2
(2013), 282, my emphasis.
27
For stylistic reasons, this book uses the terms logic of affect and emotional choice theory
interchangeably. “International Relations” will be capitalized when referring to the discipline and
lower-cased when referring to the subject matter.
28
Some specialists are skeptical about the idea of developing an emotion-based paradigm.
See, for example, Emma Hutchison and Roland Bleiker, “Theorizing Emotions in World
Politics,” International Theory 6:3 (2014), 509; Reinhard Wolf, “Emotionen in den internatio-
nalen Beziehungen: Das Beispiel Ressentiments,” in Karl-Rudolf Korte, ed., Emotionen und
Politik: Begründungen, Konzeptionen und Praxisfelder einer politikwissenschaftlichen Emotions-
forschung (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2015), 194–5.
 Introduction 7
the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s
decision-making during the Gulf conflict in 1990–1.29
The logic of affect is not an oxymoron. After two decades of research,
neuroscientists and psychologists have shattered the orthodox view that
“passions” stand in opposition to rationality. Their work suggests that the
capacity to feel is a prerequisite for reasoned judgment and rational behavior.
Moreover, they have found that each discrete emotion, such as fear, anger, or
sadness, has a logic of its own. They are associated with specific “appraisal
tendencies” and “action tendencies” that guide judgment and choice selection
in systematic ways. An emotion’s appraisal tendencies influence what and how
we think, while its action tendencies affect what we want and do.30 People who
are angry, for example, tend to make optimistic risk estimates and feel
impulses to confront the source of anger with the aim of removing it.31 In
short, when actors “follow” the logic of affect, they perceive, think, and decide
on the basis of emotions and their appraisal and action tendencies.
Emotional choice theory posits that target leaders’ decision-making is
shaped by the dynamic interplay between their emotions, norms, and iden-
tities. The core of the theory consists of a series of propositions about how
the appraisal and action tendencies of five key emotions—namely fear, anger,
hope, pride, and humiliation—tend to influence target leaders’ choice
behavior. The propositions specify the affective conditions under which
these actors are likely to accept or reject a coercer’s demands.32 The available
psychological scholarship indicates that the general outlines of the five key
emotions’ appraisal and action tendencies tend to be similar across the globe.
The influences of these emotions on decision-making can thus be analyzed

29
Janice Gross Stein provides a classic definition of “crisis” as “a threat to basic values that
simultaneously creates a sense of urgency and uncertainty among policy makers.” See Janice
Gross Stein, “Crisis Management: Looking Back to Look Forward,” Political Psychology 29:4
(2008), 554. Jutta Weldes reminds us that crises are not ontologically given. They are always
constructed by someone. See Jutta Weldes, “The Cultural Production of Crises: U.S. Identity and
the Missiles in Cuba,” in Jutta Weldes et al., eds, Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities and
the Production of Danger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 35–62. See also
Jack Holland, “Constructing Crises and Articulating Affect after 9/11,” in Åhäll and Gregory,
eds, Emotions, Politics and War, 167–81.
30
See Jennifer S. Lerner and Dacher Keltner, “Beyond Valence: Toward a Model of Emotion-
Specific Influences on Judgement and Choice,” Cognition and Emotion 14:4 (2000), 477; Jennifer
S. Lerner and Dacher Keltner, “Fear, Anger, and Risk,” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 81:1 (2001), 146–59; George Loewenstein and Jennifer S. Lerner, “The Role of Affect
in Decision Making,” in Richard J. Davidson, Klaus R. Scherer, and H. Hill Goldsmith, eds,
Handbook of Affective Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 621.
31
See Marija Spanovic et al., “Fear and Anger as Predictors of Motivation for Intergroup
Aggression: Evidence from Serbia and Republika Srpska,” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations
13:6 (2010), 726; Michal Reifen Tagar, Christopher M. Federico, and Eran Halperin, “The Positive
Effect of Negative Emotions in Protracted Conflict: The Case of Anger,” Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology 47:1 (2011), 157–8.
32
For a summary of these propositions, see the section on “The Logic of Affect,” this chapter.
8 Emotional Choices
systematically by the logic of affect. At the same time, however, affective
experience and expression vary not only from one social group to the next
but also between individuals. This is why this book situates emotions in the
context of decision-makers’ personal dispositions as well.
Why does this matter? The United Nations (UN) Security Council has the
responsibility to maintain and restore international peace, and to protect
populations from crimes against humanity if national authorities fail to do so.33
When it wishes to rein in aggressors, coercive diplomacy represents a prom-
ising instrument because it avoids the costs and risks associated with military
intervention.34 Explaining failures and successes of this threat-based strategy
is, therefore, an important task. The more we know about its strengths and
risks, the better we are able to improve it. Besides refining our understanding
of coercive diplomacy as a tool in international security, this book contributes
to three thriving and partly interrelated bodies of IR scholarship: first, the
recent renaissance in the study of leaders and their role in foreign relations;35
second, the new upsurge of research into diplomacy and diplomatic encoun-
ters;36 and finally, the burgeoning literature on affect and emotions in world
politics,37 which represents the beginning of a veritable affective revolution in

33
See United Nations, Yearbook of the United Nations 2007, vol. 61 (New York: United
Nations, 2011), 1543; Jennifer M. Welsh, “The Security Council and Humanitarian Interven-
tion,” in Vaughan Lowe et al., eds, The United Nations Security Council and War: The Evolution
of Thought and Practice since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 558.
34
See Alexander L. George, “Coercive Diplomacy: Definition and Characteristics,” in Alexander
L. George and William E. Simons, eds, The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy (Boulder: Westview Press,
1994), 9; Robert Jervis, “Force in Our Times,” International Relations 25:4 (2011), 403. For an
account deeply skeptical of coercive diplomacy’s efficacy, see Sumit Ganguly and Michael R. Kraig,
“The 2001–2002 Indo-Pakistani Crisis: Exposing the Limits of Coercive Diplomacy,” Security
Studies 14:2 (2005), 290–324.
35
See, for example, Yael S. Aronoff, The Political Psychology of Israeli Prime Ministers: When
Hard-Liners Opt for Peace (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Jeff D. Colgan,
“Domestic Revolutionary Leaders and International Conflict,” World Politics 65:4 (2013),
656–90; Sarah E. Croco, “The Decider’s Dilemma: Leader Culpability, War Outcomes, and
Domestic Punishment,” American Political Science Review 105:3 (2011), 457–77; Matthew
Fuhrmann and Michael C. Horowitz, “When Leaders Matter: Rebel Experience and Nuclear
Proliferation,” Journal of Politics 77:1 (2015), 72–87; Michael C. Horowitz, Allan C. Stam, and
Cali M. Ellis, Why Leaders Fight (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Rose
McDermott, Presidential Leadership, Illness, and Decision Making (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2007); Elizabeth N. Saunders, Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military
Interventions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).
36
See, for instance, Iver B. Neumann, At Home with the Diplomats: Inside a European Foreign
Ministry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012); Iver B. Neumann, Diplomatic Sites: A Critical
Enquiry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Brian C. Rathbun, Diplomacy’s Value: Creating
Security in 1920s Europe and the Contemporary Middle East (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2014); Ole Jacob Sending, Vincent Pouliot, and Iver B. Neumann, eds, Diplomacy and the
Making of World Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
37
For a recent review, see Jean-Marc Coicaud, “Emotions and Passions in the Discipline of
International Relations,” Japanese Journal of Political Science 15:3 (2014), 485–513. For an
updated and more focused overview, see Chapter 2.
 Introduction 9
International Relations. All three research areas are combined in fruitful
recent work about the role of affect and emotions in leaders’ diplomacy and
foreign policy.38
The remainder of this Introduction is divided into five sections: The first
section outlines the existing explanations for coercive diplomacy’s low success
rate; the second section provides a summary of the logic of affect including its
main propositions. The third section explains the selection of the case studies,
and the fourth section justifies the study’s focus on political leaders. The final
section gives an overview of the chapters that follow.

EXISTING EXPLANATIONS OF COERCIVE

DIPLOMACY OUTCOMES

What prompts decision-makers to defy threats from more powerful coercers, and
when do they give in? At the risk of simplification, the answers offered in the
existing literature can be sorted into three groups: broadly rationalist accounts,
explanations drawing on cognitive psychology, and approaches inspired by
constructivist theorizing.39 This section will summarize each of them in turn.
Rational choice conceives of agents as homo oeconomicus—autonomous beings
who carefully collect, process, and evaluate information about the consequences
of alternative courses of action. Once they have rank-ordered their preferences,
they strategically select the option that enables them to reach their aims as
efficiently as possible.40 The “thin” version of this logic of consequences assumes
that actors pursue stable and ordered preferences but does not specify the content

38
See, for example, Todd H. Hall and Keren Yarhi-Milo, “The Personal Touch: Leaders’
Impressions, Costly Signaling, and Assessments of Sincerity in International Affairs,” Inter-
national Studies Quarterly 56:3 (2012), 560–73; Marcus Holmes and Keren Yarhi-Milo, “The
Psychological Logic of Peace Summits: How Empathy Shapes Outcomes of Diplomatic Negoti-
ations,” International Studies Quarterly 61:1 (2017), 107–22; Jacques E. C. Hymans, The Psych-
ology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign Policy (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2006); Jonathan Mercer, “Emotion and Strategy in the Korean
War,” International Organization 67:2 (2013), 221–52; Brent E. Sasley, “Affective Attachments
and Foreign Policy: Israel and the 1993 Oslo Accords,” European Journal of International
Relations 16:4 (2010), 687–709.
39
Some scholarship bridges these groups. Alexander George’s “abstract model” of coercive
diplomacy, for example, assumes “pure rationality” on the part of a target, but he points out that
this assumption needs to be relaxed and complemented with insights from cognitive psychology.
See Alexander L. George, “Theory and Practice,” in George and Simons, eds, The Limits of
Coercive Diplomacy, 13–14, 19.
40
See Jon Elster, Reason and Rationality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 16;
Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 27.
10 Emotional Choices
of these preferences.41 In practice, however, rationalist scholars of international
relations generally adhere to a “thick” or standard version of the model in which
actors are expected to strive for security, power, or wealth.42
Political scientists influenced by the rationalist paradigm have identified
three primary reasons why targets may reject coercive threats of force, even
when the coercer enjoys military superiority. First, they may resist because
they doubt that the coercer will carry out its threat.43 Such doubt is likely
reinforced if coercers lack sufficient domestic or international support for their
demands of a target.44 Moreover, if a government practices coercive diplo-
macy together with a coalition of states rather than on its own, any divisions
between the coalition members tend to undercut the credibility of the threat in
the eyes of a target.45 This challenge has led rationalists to devise signaling
strategies to help coercers make their warnings credible. Most of them claim
that threats conveyed in private diplomatic communications do not count
much, because targets are likely to dismiss them as bluff. Consequently, they
recommend replacing such “cheap talk” with “costly” signals.46 For example,

41
See John Ferejohn, “Rationality and Interpretation: Parliamentary Elections in Early Stuart
England,” in Kristen Renwick Monroe, ed., The Economic Approach to Politics: A Critical
Reassessment of the Theory of Rational Action (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 282; Alex
Mintz and Karl DeRouen, Jr., Understanding Foreign Policy Decision Making (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 59.
42
See, for example, Stephen Krasner, Structural Conflict: The Third World against Global
Liberalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 3; Charles S. Glaser, Rational Theory
of International Politics: The Logic of Competition and Cooperation (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2010), 4–5.
43
See, for example, Robert J. Art, “Coercive Diplomacy: What Do We Know?,” in Art and
Cronin, eds, The United States and Coercive Diplomacy, 365, 372; Alexander L. George and
William E. Simons, “Findings and Conclusions,” in George and Simons, eds, The Limits of
Coercive Diplomacy, 272; Peter Viggo Jakobsen, “Pushing the Limits of Military Coercion
Theory,” International Studies Perspectives 12:2 (2011), 165.
44
See Art, “Coercive Diplomacy,” 371; Graeme A. M. Davies, “Coercive Diplomacy Meets
Diversionary Incentives: The Impact of US and Iranian Domestic Politics during the Bush and
Obama Presidencies,” Foreign Policy Analysis 8:3 (2012), 313–31; George and Simons, “Findings
and Conclusions,” 273, 284; Peter Viggo Jakobsen, Western Use of Coercive Diplomacy after the
Cold War: A Challenge for Theory and Practice (London: Macmillan, 1998), 41–2.
45
See Daniel Byman and Matthew Waxman, Dynamics of Coercion: American Foreign Policy
and the Limits of Military Might (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Chap. 6;
Thomas J. Christensen, Worse than A Monolith: Alliance Politics and Problems of Coercive
Diplomacy in Asia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 4; Scott Wolford, “Showing
Restraint, Signaling Resolve: Coalitions, Cooperation, and Crisis Bargaining,” American Journal
of Political Science 58:1 (2014), 144–56.
46
See Robert Jervis, The Logic of Images in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1970), 82; Schelling, Arms and Influence, 150. For recent work on the efficacy of
secret threats, see Matthew A. Baum, “Going Private: Public Opinion, Presidential Rhetoric, and
the Domestic Politics of Audience Costs in U.S. Foreign Policy Crises,” Journal of Conflict
Resolution 48:5 (2004), 603–31; Shuhei Kurizaki, “Efficient Secrecy: Public versus Private Threats
in Crisis Diplomacy,” American Political Science Review 101:3 (2007), 543–58; Kristopher
W. Ramsay, “Cheap Talk Diplomacy, Voluntary Negotiations, and Variable Bargaining
Power,” International Studies Quarterly 55:4 (2011), 1003–23.
 Introduction 11
coercers are supposed to “tie their hands” by issuing public threats that
put their reputation on the line. A target would then allegedly reach the
conclusion that the coercers will stand on their position, because their domes-
tic audiences would punish them for not following through on their commit-
ment.47 Rationalists also advise coercers to underline the seriousness of their
threat by combining it with some financially and politically expensive actions.
These may include mobilizing troops, conducting military exercises, or ele-
vating alert levels.48
Second, targets may believe that the coercer will execute its threat, but they
nevertheless refuse to back down because they doubt the coercer’s long-term
resolve, i.e., its determination to prevail in a potentially long and costly armed
conflict.49 Several scholars maintain that targets’ perceptions of a coercer’s
resolve are typically influenced by the “balance of interests” between a coercer
and a target. If the interests at stake are more important to the target, it will be
more motivated and, hence, resolved to defend those interests and to reject
coercive threats. If there exists an asymmetry of motivation favoring the
coercer, on the other hand, coercive diplomacy is more likely to succeed.50
Furthermore, some experts stress that the magnitude of a coercer’s demands
plays a significant role. Alexander George advised that a coercer can try to
reduce a target’s resolve and motivation by demanding only what is essential
to safeguard the coercer’s own vital interests and by avoiding demands that
involve a target’s vital interests. If a coercer formulates expansive demands,
such as regime change or other major infringements on a target’s sovereignty,
this is likely to increase the target’s determination to resist.51

47
See James Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International
Disputes,” American Political Science Review 88:3 (1994), 577, 579, 586. For critiques of “audi-
ence costs” theory, see Jack Snyder and Erica D. Borghard, “The Cost of Empty Threats: A Penny,
Not a Pound,” American Political Science Review 105:3 (2011), 437–56; Marc Trachtenberg,
“Audience Costs: An Historical Analysis,” Security Studies 21:1 (2012), 3–42.
48
See James Fearon, “Signaling Foreign Policy Interests: Tying Hands versus Sinking Costs,”
Journal of Conflict Resolution 41:1 (1997), 68–9.
49
See Jervis, “Force in Our Times,” 408; Dianne Pfundstein Chamberlain, Cheap Threats:
Why the United States Struggles to Coerce Weak States (Washington, DC: Georgetown University
Press, 2016), 11, 13.
50
See Art, “Coercive Diplomacy,” 371, 373; George, “Theory and Practice,” 15; George and
Simons, “Findings and Conclusions,” 281; Jervis, “Force in Our Times,” 409; Jack S. Levy,
“Deterrence and Coercive Diplomacy: The Contributions of Alexander George,” Political Psych-
ology 29:4 (2008), 540; Barry Posen, “Military Responses to Refugee Disasters,” International
Security 21:1 (1996), 72–111; Stein, “Crisis Management,” 558.
51
See George, “Theory and Practice,” 15; George and Simons, “Findings and Conclusions,”
281. On the significance of the magnitude of demands, see also Michael A. Allen and Benjamin
O. Fordham, “From Melos to Baghdad: Explaining Resistance to Militarized Challenges from
More Powerful States,” International Studies Quarterly 55:4 (2011), 1043; Barry M. Blechman
and Tamara Cofman Wittes, “Defining Moment: The Threat and Use of Force in American
Foreign Policy,” Political Science Quarterly 114:1 (1999), 6–8, 10–11; Haun, Coercion, Survival,
and War, 3, 8, 32–4.
12 Emotional Choices
Third, targets may find a coercive threat credible but conclude that its
execution would weigh less heavily than the reputational costs they would
incur at home or abroad for acceding to the threat. These costs may include
damage to the target leadership’s authority in the eyes of domestic constituents
or encouragement of other states to try and practice forceful persuasion vis-à-vis
such a seeming pushover.52 Todd Sechser argues that a target is more likely to
acquiesce if coercers anticipate its reputational costs and offsets them with side
payments.53 This accords with a growing body of scholarship suggesting that
coercers should complement their threats with positive incentives in order to
increase the chances that a target will comply.54
This broadly rationalist approach to coercive diplomacy has been chal-
lenged by a number of IR experts schooled in cognitive psychology. They
criticize that rational choice models generally treat threats and signals as
objective facts that will be perceived and judged the same way by all coercers
and targets.55 In the words of Robert Jervis, “it is all well and good to talk about
credibility, punishment, and reward in the abstract, but as they work out in the
real world they depend on what the targets value, believe, and think about the
state’s behavior.”56 These thought processes tend to be influenced and distort-
ed by cognitive schemata, heuristics, and framing effects, among others.
Schemata are pre-existing beliefs that shape how people interpret new infor-
mation. If target actors are confronted with signals from a coercer that are not
consistent with these beliefs, they are likely to discount, misperceive, or
reinterpret the signals. Only when they are confronted with overwhelming

52
See Art, “Coercive Diplomacy,” 366; Todd S. Sechser, “Goliath’s Curse: Coercive Threats
and Asymmetric Power,” International Organization 64:4 (2010), 628, 638.
53
See Sechser, “Goliath’s Curse,” 627–8, 640. See also Robert J. Art, “Introduction,” in Art
and Cronin, eds, The United States and Coercive Diplomacy, 7; James W. Davis, Jr., Threats and
Promises: The Pursuit of International Influence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2000), 5; George, Forceful Persuasion, 5; Steven Greffenius and Jungil Gill, “Pure Coercion vs.
Carrot-and-Stick Offers in Crisis Bargaining,” Journal of Peace Research 2:1 (1992), 39, 51.
54
See Art, “Coercive Diplomacy,” 388–9, 397, 399; Miroslav Nincic, “Getting What You
Want: Positive Inducements in International Relations,” International Security 35:1 (2010),
138–83.
55
See George, “Theory and Practice,” 15, 19–20; Richard K. Herrmann, “Perceptions and
Image Theory in International Relations,” in Leonie Huddy, David O. Sears, and Jack S. Levy,
eds, The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013), 335; Robert Jervis, “Signaling and Perception: Drawing Inferences and Projecting
Images,” in Kristen Renwick Monroe, ed., Political Psychology (Mahwah: Erlbaum, 2002), 301;
Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost
the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Janice Gross Stein and David
A. Welch, “Rational and Psychological Approaches to the Study of International Conflict:
Comparative Strengths and Weaknesses,” in Nehemia Geva and Alex Mintz, eds, Decisionmaking
on War and Peace: The Cognitive-Rational Debate (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1997), 53.
56
Jervis, How Statesmen Think, 10, 110. See also Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception
in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).
 Introduction 13
discrepant information do they put aside their schemata.57 Heuristics refer to
cognitive short cuts that decision-makers rely on to process information.58 For
example, scholars have found that people have a heuristic tendency to judge
temporally distant threats as less likely to materialize than short-term threats.
Long time horizons increase their confidence that they will be able to manage
these threats.59 Finally, framing effects come into play when actors face the
decision of whether to accept or reject a coercer’s demand. Drawing on
prospect theory, scholars have found that target leaders who frame compliance
as a certain loss are more likely to risk a confrontation with a coercer to try and
safeguard what they already have, even if that confrontation is bound to result
in larger losses.60
Scholars inspired by constructivist theorizing likewise point to overwhelm-
ing evidence that human beings systematically violate the precepts of standard
rational choice. Experiments such as the Ultimatum Game, for instance,
document that people across the world are prepared to forgo material gains
if they believe that these gains would be based on an inappropriate distribution
mechanism. In such cases, decision-making is shaped not by material cost–
benefit calculations but by norms about proper conduct.61 Constructivists
stress that these norms tend to vary from one culture to the next. Their logic
of appropriateness conceptualizes agents as homo sociologicus—social beings
who are embedded in communities and who develop their identities in

57
See Robert Jervis, “Understanding Beliefs,” Political Psychology 27:5 (2006), 654; Jervis,
How Statesmen Think, 207–8; Janice Gross Stein, “Calculation, Miscalculation, and Convention-
al Deterrence, II: The View from Jerusalem,” in Jervis, Lebow, and Stein, eds, Psychology and
Deterrence, 60–88; Janice Gross Stein, “Political Learning and Political Psychology: A Question
of Norms,” in Monroe, ed., Political Psychology, 110; David A. Welch, Painful Choices: A Theory
of Foreign Policy Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 37.
58
See Janice Gross Stein, “Foreign Policy Decision Making: Rational, Psychological, and
Neurological Models,” in Steve Smith, Amelia Hadfield, and Tim Dunne, eds, Foreign Policy:
Theories, Actors, Cases, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 137.
59
See Ronald R. Krebs and Aaron Rapport, “International Relations and the Psychology of
Time Horizons,” International Studies Quarterly 56:3 (2012), 530–43.
60
See Davis, Threats and Promises, 34–8; Mark L. Haas, “Prospect Theory and the Cuban
Missile Crisis,” International Studies Quarterly 45:2 (2001), 241–70; Levy, “Deterrence and
Coercive Diplomacy,” 541; Gary Schaub, Jr., “Deterrence, Compellence, and Prospect Theory,”
Political Psychology 25:3 (2004), 389–411.
61
See Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social
Norms (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 100, 102, 112; Werner Güth, Rolf
Schmittberger, and Bernd Schwarze, “An Experimental Analysis of Ultimatum Bargaining,”
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 3:4 (1982), 367–88; Joseph Henrich, “Does Culture
Matter in Economic Behavior? Ultimatum Game Bargaining among the Machiguenga of the
Peruvian Amazon,” American Economic Review 90:4 (2000), 973–9; Joseph Henrich and Natalie
Smith, “Comparative Experimental Evidence from Machiguenga, Mapuche, Huinca, and American
Populations,” in Joseph Henrich et al., eds, Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experi-
ments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 134.
14 Emotional Choices
relation to significant others.62 From this perspective, target leaders’ responses
to coercive diplomacy are shaped by their social norms and self-conceptions.
If these cultural scripts stipulate resistance in the face of coercive threats, they
are unlikely to comply.63
What rationalist, cognitivist, and constructivist accounts of coercive diplo-
macy either neglect or do not examine systematically is the role that emotions
play in encounters between coercers and targets.64 James Fearon, for example,
acknowledges that “emotional commitments” may help to explain why states
wage war, but he does not make any effort to further explore this possibility
in his research.65 Robert Art, Alexander George, and Peter Viggo Jakobsen
all contend that targets will yield to a coercive threat that triggers “fear”
of unacceptable military escalation.66 Lawrence Freedman and Phil Haun
observe that coercive diplomacy may be complicated by targets’ experience
of “humiliation.”67 Even though these scholars deem fear and humiliation
important factors, however, they take their antecedent conditions and influ-
ences for granted. They examine neither how target leaders come to be afraid
or humiliated nor how these emotions shape their choice behavior.

62
See Ralf Dahrendorf, Homo Sociologicus (New York: Routledge, 1973); Martin Hollis,
Reason in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Social Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1996).
63
Some of these scholars do not necessarily identify as constructivists. Christopher Gelpi, for
example, takes an “institutionalist” approach to exploring the influence of normative ideas on
crisis bargaining. See Christopher Gelpi, “Crime and Punishment: The Role of Norms in Crisis
Bargaining,” American Political Science Review 91:2 (1997), 339–60; Christopher Gelpi, The
Power of Legitimacy: Assessing the Role of Norms in Crisis Bargaining (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003), 184, 189. See also Lebow, Coercion, Cooperation, and Ethics in Inter-
national Relations, 18, 125, 229; Rousseau, Identifying Threats and Threatening Identities;
Schoppa, “The Social Context in Coercive International Bargaining,” 312; Janice Gross Stein,
“Rational Deterrence against ‘Irrational’ Adversaries? No Common Knowledge,” in T. V. Paul,
Patrick M. Morgan, and James J. Wirtz, eds, Complex Deterrence: Strategy in the Global Age
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 76–7.
64
A few scholars informed by research in psychology took into account affective forces in
coercive diplomacy early on, but they generally conceived of them as a form of “motivated bias”
distorting perception and detrimental to decision-making. See Richard Ned Lebow, Between
Peace and War: The Nature of International Crisis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1981). For other partial exceptions, see Todd H. Hall, “We Will Not Swallow this Bitter Fruit:
Theorizing a Diplomacy of Anger,” Security Studies 20:4 (2011), 521–55; Richard Ned Lebow,
“Thucydides and Deterrence,” Security Studies 16:2 (2007), 188; Richard Ned Lebow, A Cultural
Theory of International Relations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 552;
Lebow and Stein, We All Lost the Cold War, 4, 6, 90–1, 132, 144.
65
See James D. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 49:3
(1995), 392.
66
See Art, “Coercive Diplomacy,” 372, 383; George, Forceful Persuasion, 79; Peter Viggo
Jakobsen, “The Strategy of Coercive Diplomacy: Refining Existing Theory to Post-Cold War
Realities,” in Freedman, ed., Strategic Coercion, 82.
67
See Freedman, Deterrence, 110; Haun, Coercion, Survival, and War, 11, 173. See also Art,
“Coercive Diplomacy,” 362.
 Introduction 15
According to Janice Gross Stein, the interconnectedness of emotion and
decision-making opens an important research agenda for students of inter-
national security. “Scholars will have to grapple systematically with the impact
of fear, anger, and humiliation on threat perception at the individual level of
leaders,” she notes.68 Under what conditions does fear lead to risky or to
cautious behavior, and when does humiliation result in revenge or in retreat?
Answers to these kinds of questions are “absolutely critical” to theories of
threat-based strategies.69 Even though empirical studies are “urgently needed,”
Stein notices a “lack of progress,” in part due to the thorny methodological
challenges of studying emotions outside the laboratory.70 So far, scholars have
not investigated in-depth the role of emotions in coercive diplomacy. This
book seeks to fill this void.

THE L OGIC OF AFFECT

At present, there is no emotion-based logic of choice in International Rela-

tions. What I offer here is a first step to establish an affective paradigm in the
field. The logic of affect, or emotional choice theory, proposes that individual-
level decision-making is shaped by the interaction of norms, identities, and
emotions. While norms and identities represent important long-term underlying
conditions in the decision process, emotions function as essential short-term
catalysts for change.71 Human decision-making is not only socially but also
emotionally constructed.
Before we can explain how emotions influence choice behavior, we need to
understand how they are themselves molded by the cultural milieux in which
they are embedded. The book borrows insights from sociologists in general
and symbolic interactionists in particular to delineate how actors’ identities
and social norms about the appropriate experience and expression of affect
guide their emotions. It does not specify the precise substantive content of
these cultural constructs ex ante. Given that norms and identities are bound
to vary from case to case, they need to be investigated inductively. Rather,
emotional choice theory describes the generic processes through which they
shape emotions: Norms affect emotions through what sociologist Arlie

68
Janice Gross Stein, “Threat Perception in International Relations,” in Huddy, Sears, and Levy,
eds, Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, 2nd edn, 386.
69
See Janice Gross Stein, “Psychological Explanations of International Decision Making and
Collective Behavior,” in Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse, and Beth A. Simmons, eds, Handbook
of International Relations, 2nd edn (Los Angeles: Sage, 2013), 215.
70
Stein, “Threat Perception in International Relations,” 387.
71
On the workings of catalysts, see Richard Ned Lebow, Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and
International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 96.
16 Emotional Choices
Hochschild terms “feeling rules,” which tell people how to experience emo-
tions in a given situation, and “display rules,” which instruct them how to
express emotions. Identities influence emotions above all through recognition-
seeking dynamics.72
Emotions are not only social but also bodily experiences that are tied to
an organism’s autonomic nervous system. People feel emotions physically,
often before they are aware of them.73 These corporeal processes can exert a
profound impact on human cognition and behavior. They generate or stifle
energy, making choice selection a continuously dynamic phenomenon. Only
if we capture this embodied dimension can we understand emotions and
explain how they shape decision-making. To do so, the logic of affect draws
on research in psychology in general and contemporary appraisal theories in
particular. Pioneered by psychologist Magda Arnold in the 1960s, the apprais-
al paradigm posits that emotions arise once humans identify and appraise an
event as relevant to a need, desire, value, or concern.74 Her approach became
one of the leading theoretical perspectives in emotion research from the
1980s onwards. While some early adherents viewed emotions primarily
through a cognitive lens, contemporary appraisal scholars treat physiological
reactions as integral and crucial components of emotion. They emphasize
that appraisals are not necessarily deliberate processes; they mostly operate
non-consciously and give rise to bodily changes in the organism. Cognitive
and physiological processes are closely intertwined from early perception to
choice selection.75
In sum, the logic of affect takes inspiration from sociology and psy-
chology to conceive of actors as homo emotionalis—emotional, social, and

72
See Arlie Russell Hochschild, “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure,”
American Journal of Sociology 85:3 (1979), 563–4, 566; Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed
Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, 3rd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2012), 18, 56–9.
73
See Dylan Evans and Pierre Cruse, “Introduction,” in Evans and Cruse, eds, Emotion,
Evolution, and Rationality, xiv; Jesse Prinz, “Which Emotions Are Basic?,” in Evans and Cruse,
eds, Emotion, Evolution, and Rationality, 74; Stein, “Threat Perception in International
Relations,” 387.
74
See Magda B. Arnold, Emotion and Personality, 2 vols (London: Cassell, 1960). Within the
appraisal paradigm there are several appraisal theories with some important differences, but they
all share the assumption that emotions come about as individuals evaluate events that relate to
themselves. See Paul J. Silvia and Kari M. Eddington, “Self and Emotion,” in Mark R. Leary and
June Price Tangney, eds, Handbook of Self and Identity, 2nd edn (New York: Guilford Press,
2012), 431; Rose McDermott, “The Feeling of Rationality: The Meaning of Neuroscientific
Advances for Political Science,” Perspectives on Politics 2:4 (2004), 693–5.
75
See Phoebe C. Ellsworth, “Appraisal Theory: Old and New Questions,” Emotion Review 5:2
(2013), 125; Phoebe C. Ellsworth and Klaus R. Scherer, “Appraisal Processes in Emotion,” in
Davidson, Scherer, and Goldsmith, eds, Handbook of Affective Sciences, 572–3, 585; Agnes
Moors and Klaus R. Scherer, “The Role of Appraisal in Emotion,” in Michael D. Robinson,
Edward R. Watkins, and Eddie Harmon-Jones, eds, Handbook of Cognition and Emotion (New
York: Guilford Press, 2013), 137.
 Introduction 17
physiological beings whose emotions connect them to and separate them from
significant others.76

Main Propositions of the Logic of Affect

The conceptual core of the logic of affect sets out how the five key emotions
fear, anger, hope, pride, and humiliation shape actors’ preference formation
and choice selection through their appraisal and action tendencies. This
results in a series of propositions about how these emotions influence the
decision-making of leaders whose countries are targets of coercive diplomacy.
To begin with, if target leaders’ emotions center primarily on fear of a military
attack by a coercer, this can have complex effects. One option is the classic
flight response: Target leaders are likely to back down if they believe that they
can avoid this attack by acceding to the coercer’s demands.77 A second
possibility is a fight reaction: Target leaders tend to resist if they appraise
that they have a chance of overcoming the source of the threat, if they see
conflict as inevitable, or if their cultural norms disapprove of escaping in the
face of danger.78 Finally, fearful target leaders may experience a shock and
freeze if they view fighting as hopeless and do not see an escape route. The
resulting inertia means that they are generally not in a position to comply with
the coercer’s demand to change their behavior.79
Furthermore, target leaders are less likely to acquiesce if their emotions
center primarily on anger at a coercer,80 pride in the original behavior that

76
See Helena Flam, “Emotional ‘Man’: I. The Emotional ‘Man’ and the Problem of Collective
Action,” International Sociology 5:1 (1990), 43; Ross, Mixed Emotions, 20; Thomas Schwinn,
“Individual and Collective Agency,” in William Outhwaite and Stephen P. Turner, eds, The
SAGE Handbook of Social Science Methodology (London: Sage, 2007), 302–15.
77
See Nico H. Frijda, The Emotions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 18,
72, 100; John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Evolutionary Psychology of the Emotions and
Their Relationship to Internal Regulatory Variables,” in Michael Lewis, Jeannette M. Haviland-
Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, eds, Handbook of Emotions, 3rd edn (New York: Guilford Press,
2008), 119. For a skeptical view on the idea of using the deliberate production of fear as a tool in
coercive diplomacy, see Neta Crawford, “The Passion of World Politics: Propositions on
Emotion and Emotional Relationships,” International Security 24:4 (2000), 146–9.
78
See Carmen P. McLean and Emily R. Anderson, “Brave Men and Timid Women? A Review
of the Gender Differences in Fear and Anxiety,” Clinical Psychology Review 29:6 (2009), 502;
Christine Tappolet, “Emotion, Motivation, and Action: The Case of Fear,” in Peter Goldie, ed.,
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 333.
79
See Michelle G. Craske, Origins of Phobias and Anxiety Disorders: Why More Women than
Men (Oxford: Elsevier, 2003), 21; Tappolet, “Emotion, Motivation, and Action,” 332–4.
80
See Spanovic et al., “Fear and Anger as Predictors of Motivation for Intergroup Aggression,”
726; Tagar, Federico, and Halperin, “The Positive Effect of Negative Emotions in Protracted
Conflict,” 157–8.
18 Emotional Choices
the coercer considers objectionable,81 or hope that they will get away with it.82
For these emotions tend to promote resistance and perseverance. Finally, if
target leaders feel humiliated at the hands of a coercer, their response may go
either way. They tend to withdraw if they assume that they are being justly
humbled, and if they feel mentally or physically incapacitated.83 If they view
the perceived degrading behavior as unjustified, however, and if they have
enough energy to resist, they are likely to defy the coercer’s demand and seek
revenge.84 Figure 1.1 provides a summary of these expected influences.
Even when emotions produce powerful impulses, people will not necessarily
act on them. Humans are neither slaves of the passions nor perfect manipu-
lators of their emotions, but they exert limited and varying degrees of control
over them. The logic of affect thus restricts itself to explaining and predicting
the influence of emotions on decision-making in a probabilistic fashion. These
probabilistic predictions represent a middle path between enduring covering
laws and mere historical description.85
The characteristics of the five key emotions shed some light on the puzzle
of why leaders of target states often refuse to bow to the will of stronger
coercers. For coercers face a dilemma: They must induce enough fear of a
military attack in target leaders to get them to change their behavior without
giving the impression that an attack is inevitable and without shocking the
target leaders into paralysis. At the same time, they need to avoid eliciting
anger and a sense of unjust humiliation on the part of the target leaders,
because these emotions are likely to provoke the defiant response that
coercive diplomacy is supposed to avoid.86 This is no easy feat because targets
typically get angry at demands to do or undo something against their will.
They may also feel unjustly humiliated by threats. Coercers can take steps to

81
See Jessica L. Tracy, Azim F. Shariff, and Joey T. Cheng, “A Naturalist’s View of Pride,”
Emotion Review 2:2 (2010), 169; Lisa A. Williams and David DeSteno, “Pride and Perseverance:
The Motivational Role of Pride,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94:6 (2008),
1007–8.
82
See Kevin L. Rand and Jennifer S. Cheavens, “Hope Theory,” in Shane J. Lopez and
C. R. Snyder, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University
Press Online, 2009), n.p.
83
See Walter J. Torres and Raymond M. Bergner, “Humiliation: Its Nature and Conse-
quences,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 38:2 (2010), 199; Julian
Walker and Victoria Knauer, “Humiliation, Self-Esteem and Violence,” Journal of Forensic
Psychiatry and Psychology 22:5 (2011), 726.
84
See David J. Y. Combs et al., “Exploring the Consequences of Humiliating a Moral
Transgressor,” Basic and Applied Social Psychology 32:2 (2010), 130.
85
See Richard S. Lazarus, “Progress on a Cognitive-Motivational-Relational Theory of
Emotion,” American Psychologist 46:8 (1991), 819; Rudra Sil and Peter J. Katzenstein, Beyond
Paradigms: Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010), 22, 208. For a similar approach, see Petersen, Understanding Ethnic Violence.
86
See Stein, “Threat Perception in International Relations,” 382.
 Introduction 19

If target leaders’ emotions are dominated by … …this increases the likelihood of

Fear / flight

Fear / fight

compliance with
Fear / freeze the coercer’s
demands

Anger at the coercer

Hope that they will get away with

their behavior

Pride in their behavior

non-compliance
with the coercer’s
Humiliation at the hands of the demands
coercer + physical and mental
incapacitation and/or belief that
humiliation is justified

Humiliation at the hands of the

coercer + physical and mental
strength to resist and/or belief that
humiliation is unjust

Figure 1.1 How the Five Key Emotions Shape Target Leaders’ Decision-Making

alleviate these emotions by offering positive incentives, for example. Such

measures, however, may prompt target leaders to feel pride or hope that the
opponents are not as resolved as presumed and that it may not be necessary
to comply with their demands. To overcome this dilemma, coercers not only
need to develop a good understanding of target leaders’ identities and
emotion norms. They also require empathy, i.e., the capacity to infer how
20 Emotional Choices
someone else is currently feeling and to imagine how someone will likely feel
in response to certain signals.87
Experiments have shown that humans are better at judging emotions of
those with whom they are more culturally familiar. The more culturally distant
targets are, the more difficult it will be for a coercer to empathize with them.88
What is more, psychologists have found that high-power individuals tend to be
less sensitive to the emotions of others than those with low power. They are less
willing to take someone else’s perspective and they are less able to accurately
infer their emotions. The authors of the resulting studies theorize that this is
because people who see themselves as powerful may believe that they are less
dependent on others and hence do not require an accurate understanding of
how they feel.89 Moreover, since power typically entails increased demands on
attention, power holders are thought to have limited cognitive and emotional
resources to analyze the perspectives of subordinates.90 If this finding about
participants in experiments can be transferred to leaders of states, this sheds
some further light on the puzzle of why heads of great powers often fail in their
coercive diplomacy toward weaker states. A limited ability or willingness to
empathize with supposedly inferior targets may prevent coercers from taking
their opponents’ emotions into consideration.
The rest of this section will clarify the relationship between emotion and
rationality, and explicate how the logic of affect relates to the logics of
consequences and appropriateness.

Emotion and Rationality

The term emotional choice theory and the way I contrast this action model
with the rational choice paradigm may create the impression that I cast

87
See Jean Decety, “Neuroscience of Empathic Responding,” in Stephanie L. Brown,
R. Michael Brown, and Louis A. Penner, eds, Moving Beyond Self-Interest: Perspectives from
Evolutionary Biology, Neuroscience, and the Social Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), 109; Gary D. Sherman et al., “Perceiving Others’ Feelings: The Importance of Personality
and Social Structure,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 6:5 (2015), 560. For IR
literature exploring the phenomenon of empathy, see Neta C. Crawford, “Institutionalizing
Passion in World Politics: Fear and Empathy,” International Theory 6:3 (2014), 541; Naomi
Head, “Costly Encounters of the Empathic Kind: A Typology,” International Theory 8:1 (2016),
171–99; Holmes and Yarhi-Milo, “The Psychological Logic of Peace Summits,” 107.
88
See Mina Cikara, Emile G. Bruneau, and Rebecca R. Saxe, “Us and Them: Intergroup
Failures of Empathy,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 20:3 (2011), 149; Hillary Anger
Elfenbein and Nalini Ambady, “When Familiarity Breeds Accuracy: Cultural Exposure and
Facial Emotion Recognition,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85:2 (2003), 286.
89
See Adam D. Galinsky et al., “Power and Perspectives Not Taken,” Psychological Science
17:12 (2006), 1068; Keltner and Lerner, “Emotion,” 339; Michael W. Kraus, Stéphane Côté, and
Dacher Keltner, “Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy,” Psychological Science
21:11 (2010), 1717, 1721.
90
See Galinsky et al., “Power and Perspectives Not Taken,” 1068.
 Introduction 21
emotion in opposition to rationality. This is certainly not the case. I do not see
feeling and thinking as separate or antithetical processes. What I do want to do,
however, is to challenge the monopoly that many rational choice theorists
claim over the notion of rationality. I submit that their notion of rationality is
problematic not for what it includes, but for what it omits. It leaves out
important intellectual and affective capacities that put humans in a position
to make reasoned decisions.91 In the following paragraphs, I will first propose
a conceptualization of rationality that transcends the narrow rationalist view.
Next, I will characterize the relationship between rationality and emotions,
suggesting that emotions may both help and hinder decision-makers. Finally,
I will explain why neither an objectivist nor a purely subjectivist orientation is
helpful to gauge whether emotions may have been a source of rationality or
irrationality in a given situation. I will instead advocate a pragmatic approach
that focuses not only on an individual’s self-perception but also on the
observations of eyewitnesses in her social group.
If we wish to begin to fathom the complexity of rationality, we need to try
and take its multifaceted nature into account. Rationality has not only an
instrumental dimension but also an epistemic, reflective, and affective facet.
The instrumental facet of rationality is a normative assumption about which
means an agent should choose to realize her aims and preferences as efficiently
as possible.92 This is how rational choice theorists conceive of rationality.
When actors depart from the optimum prescribed by their means–ends
model, their behavior is deemed instrumentally irrational.93 Whereas the
instrumental facet of rationality is concerned with rational action, its second,
epistemic facet relates to rational thought.94 Epistemic rationality represents a
theoretical assumption about how an agent should think in order to form

91
See Jervis, How Statesmen Think, 3; Karen Jones, “Gender and Rationality,” in Alfred
R. Mele and Piers Rawling, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Rationality (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 304.
92
See Jon Elster, “Emotional Choice and Rational Choice,” in Goldie, ed., Oxford Handbook
of Philosophy of Emotion, 263; Keith E. Stanovich, Decision Making and Rationality in the
Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4. Instrumental rationality is sometimes
also referred to as “practical” or “strategic” rationality.
93
See Ronald de Sousa, Why Think? Evolution and the Rational Mind (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), 7; Keith Stanovich, Rationality and the Reflective Mind (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2010), 4. Pointing to the cognitive limits of human beings, Herbert Simon
famously proposed the notion of “bounded rationality.” He suggests that actors are less
than fully rational; they merely “satisfice” rather than “maximize” their utility. His approach
nevertheless adheres to the basic premise that rationality is a normative assumption about
which means agents should choose to realize their aims and preferences. See Herbert A. Simon,
Models of Bounded Rationality, vol. 3, Empirically Grounded Economic Reason (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1982), 295.
94
See de Sousa, Why Think?, 121; Alfred R. Mele and Piers Rawling, “Introduction: Aspects of
Rationality,” in Mele and Rawling, eds, Oxford Handbook of Rationality, 3.
22 Emotional Choices
beliefs that are commensurate with the information available to her.95
It requires accurate perception, sound information processing, and consistent
reasoning.96 When actors do not meet these requirements, their thinking is
considered epistemically irrational.97 The instrumental and epistemic facets of
rationality tell actors how to reach their goals efficiently and on the basis of
sound reasoning, but they fail to grasp why people adopt these goals in the first
place.98 This leads us to the third, reflective facet of rationality, which involves
the ability of humans to reflect on their beliefs, preferences, and behavior in
light of their values.99 Constructivists generally conceive of rationality along
these lines. The process of what Amartya Sen calls “reasoned self-scrutiny” on
the basis of normative convictions may prompt actors to change their minds
and to make new choices accordingly.100 There are two kinds of reflective
irrationality: First, people may behave contrary to what their reasoned reflec-
tion suggests. Second, “a person can fail to do what he would decide to do if he
were to reason and reflect on what is to be done,” Sen notes.101
The fourth facet of rationality involves agents’ affective experience. Trad-
itionally, scholars in Europe and North America drew a sharp distinction
between rationality and emotions. They not only regarded them as two
separate processes—one located in the mind, the other in the heart—they
also viewed them as being in constant tension. While rationality was seen as a
means to achieve progress and human betterment, the “passions” were
deemed irrational impulses that undermine logical thinking and moral judg-
ment.102 From the 1980s onward, however, this received wisdom began to
be challenged by a number of scholars. Evolutionary psychologists theorized
that emotions can, in fact, help humans to make rational choices. By func-
tioning as heuristic short-cuts, for example, they may enable individuals to
focus attention on the key aspect of a challenge and to navigate rapidly
through a complex and often dangerous world.103

95
See Stanovich, Decision Making and Rationality in the Modern World, 5–6, 90. Epistemic
rationality is sometimes also referred to as “theoretical” or “evidential” rationality.
96
See Richard Samuels and Stephen P. Stich, “Rationality and Psychology,” in Mele and
Rawling, eds, Oxford Handbook of Rationality, 285.
97
See Stanovich, Rationality and the Reflective Mind, 7.
98
See Amartya Sen, Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 40;
Stanovich, Decision Making and Rationality in the Modern World, 5.
99
See Sen, Rationality and Freedom, 32, 36; Stanovich, Decision Making and Rationality in
the Modern World, 5.
100
Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009), 195.
101
Sen, Rationality and Freedom, 228.
102
See Peter N. Stearns, “History of Emotions: Issues of Change and Impact,” in Lewis,
Haviland-Jones, and Feldman Barrett, eds, Handbook of Emotions, 3rd edn, 17–31.
103
See Tooby and Cosmides, “The Evolutionary Psychology of the Emotions and Their
Relationship to Internal Regulatory Variables,” 133; Paul Slovic et al., “Rational Actors or
Rational Fools: Implications of the Affect Heuristic for Behavioral Economics,” Journal of
Socio-Economics 31:4 (2002), 331–2; Hideki Ohira, “The Somatic Marker Revisited: Brain and
 Introduction 23
This line of research received support from neuroscientists in the 1990s.
When Antonio Damasio and his colleagues examined people who had suf-
fered damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain
responsible for managing emotions, they noticed an unusual pattern of symp-
toms. These patients did not show any deficits in their reasoning abilities, but
they could look at the most cheerful or gruesome photos without feeling
anything.104 Given that the brain damage had virtually erased their emotion-
ality, the traditional perspective on affect would predict that they should now
be able to make highly efficient decisions on the basis of pure logical thinking.
The patients, however, performed disastrously in gambling tasks, betraying
indecisiveness and poor judgment.105 The inability to feel was associated with
what seemed to be suboptimal and outright irrational decisions. This led
Damasio and his team to conclude that rational behavior depends on the
capacity to experience emotions. The emotions triggered in a given situation
help people to narrow down the options for action by approving the beneficial
ones and by abandoning those that are detrimental.106 Rather than being
separate faculties, let alone polar opposites, rationality and emotion are neuro-
logically intertwined. According to this perspective, emotion is an intrinsic and
necessary part of rational decision-making.107
These revolutionary findings in psychology and neuroscience demolished
the old orthodoxy that affect always undermines rationality. As they were
being received and taken up by philosophers and social scientists, the
pendulum of academic discourse began to swing in the opposite direction.
Many scholars started to argue that emotions are inherently a source of good
judgment and enhanced decision-making.108 More recently, some researchers

Body in Emotional Decision Making,” Emotion Review 2:3 (2010), 246; Kirsten G. Volz and
Ralph Hertwig, “Emotions and Decisions: Beyond Conceptual Vagueness and the Rationality
Muddle,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 11:1 (2016), 107. For valuable observations about
the gendered dimension of rationality and emotion, see J. Ann Tickner, A Feminist Voyage
through International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 8, 103, 163, 171.
104
See Antoine Bechara, Hanna Damasio, Daniel Tranel, and Antonio R. Damasio, “Decid-
ing Advantageously before Knowing the Advantageous Strategy,” Science 275:5304 (1997),
1293–5; Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
(New York: Avon, 1994), xii; Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are
Divided by Politics and Religion (London: Allen Lane, 2012), 33.
105
See Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist
Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108:4 (2001), 824; Haidt, The Righteous
Mind, 34.
106
See Damasio, Descartes’ Error, xii–xiii, 53; Baba Shiv, George Loewenstein, Antoine
Bechara, Hanna Damasio, and Antonio R. Damasio, “Investment Behavior and the Negative
Side of Emotion,” Psychological Science 16:6 (2005), 438.
107
See Franks, “Emotions and Neurosociology,” 268–9.
108
Margaret Archer treats them as trustworthy “commentaries” in choice behavior, for
example. Gerd Gigerenzer asserts that “gut feelings” are infused with the “intelligence of the
unconscious.” And Martha Nussbaum regards emotions as “forms of evaluative thought” that
are “part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning.” See Margaret S. Archer, Structure,
24 Emotional Choices
have sought to develop a more nuanced view. They agree that at the most basic
level, the ability to feel seems to be necessary to rationality, and affect may be
conducive to decision-making. At the same time, however, they point to
further evidence indicating that emotion can also distort judgment109 and
that neurologically impaired emotional processing may also be associated with
what could be considered advantageous decision-making.110 Emotion “can
undermine rationality even while it is necessary to rationality,” as Jonathan
Mercer points out.111 Damasio and his associates recognized this when they
complemented their earlier work with further studies on the “negative side” of
emotions.112 The present book subscribes to this post-revisionist perspective.
It maintains that emotional choice theory can help to explain both deviations
from rationality and optimal decision-making.113
This raises the question of how we are supposed to evaluate the degree of
rationality or irrationality of actors’ behavior. Scholars taking an objectivist
approach would first develop an objective rational baseline to determine what
would be the rational thing to do in any given situation and then compare

Agency and the Internal Conversation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
26–7; Gerd Gigerenzer, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious (New York: Viking,
2007), 19; Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 11, 1.
109
See Ronald de Sousa, “Emotion,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014), avail-
able at <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/emotion/> (accessed December 12,
2015), n.p.; Evans and Cruse, “Introduction,” xvii; Loewenstein and Lerner, “The Role of Affect
in Decision Making,” 635–6; Rebecca K. Ratner and Kenneth C. Herbst, “When Good Decisions
Have Bad Outcomes: The Impact of Affect on Switching Behavior,” Organizational Behavior and
Human Decision Processes 96:1 (2005), 25; Gaurav Suri, Gal Sheppes, and James J. Gross,
“Emotion Regulation and Cognition,” in Robinson, Watkins, and Harmon-Jones, eds, Handbook
of Cognition and Emotion, 196.
110
See Ralph Hertwig and Kirsten G. Volz, “Abnormality, Rationality, and Sanity,” Trends in
Cognitive Sciences 17:11 (2013), 547–9; Michael Koenigs and Daniel Tranel, “Prefrontal Cortex
Damage Abolishes Brand-Cued Changes in Cola Preference,” Social Cognitive and Affective
Neuroscience 3:1 (2008), 1–6.
111
See Jonathan Mercer, “Human Nature and the First Image: Emotion in International
Politics,” Journal of International Relations and Development 9:3 (2006), 299. According to
Emma Hutchison and Roland Bleiker, “emotions accompany so-called ‘rational’ actions as
much as ‘irrational’ ones, positive experiences as much as negative.” See Emma Hutchison and
Roland Bleiker, “Grief and the Transformation of Emotions after War,” in Åhäll and Gregory,
eds, Emotions, Politics and War, 215.
112
See Shiv et al., “Investment Behavior and the Negative Side of Emotion,” 435–9.
113
For similar approaches in psychology, see Lerner et al., “Emotion and Decision Making,”
799, 816; Volz and Hertwig, “Emotions and Decisions,” 101–16. For similar approaches in IR, see
Holmes, “Believing This and Alieving That,” 707; Richard Ned Lebow, “Greeks, Neuroscience,
and International Relations,” in Daniel Jacobi and Annette Freyberg-Inan, eds, Human Beings in
International Relations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 135; Mercer,
“Human Nature and the First Image,” 296; Roger D. Petersen, Western Intervention in the Balkans:
The Strategic Use of Emotion in Conflict (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 27;
Jonathan Renshon, Julia J. Lee, and Dustin Tingley, “Emotions and the Micro-Foundations of
Commitment Problems,” International Organization 71, Supplement (2017), S200.
 Introduction 25
agents’ thinking, feeling, and actions against this ideal standard.114 The more
people approximate (deviate from) this rational baseline, the more rational
(irrational) they are assumed to be.115 I will discard this method because
researchers’ ideas about which decision would be rational may differ substan-
tially from those of actual decision-makers. Moreover, I reject the objectivist
premise that agents exist in an objective reality independent of the subjective
orientations of scholars.
A subjectivist approach, on the other hand, would suggest that a person’s
level of rationality can be established only by the person herself.116 I will also
refrain from such a purely subjectivist perspective, because individuals may
not be able or willing to recognize irrational behavior as such. Instead, I will
widen my focus and propose that an actor’s degree of rationality can be best
appraised by herself and by eyewitnesses in her social group. Understanding
evaluations of the degree of rationality from within a cultural community
makes it possible to uncover the intersubjective meanings attached to them.117
If the actor or close observers view her behavior as (ir)rational, this would
open up the possibility that it may, indeed, be so.

The Relationship among the Logics of Consequences,

Appropriateness, and Affect

How does the logic of affect relate to the logics of consequences and appro-
priateness? In foregrounding the emotion-based paradigm, this book does not
advocate a rejection or replacement of the traditional action models. Rather,
it acknowledges that each logic of choice captures important elements of
political life. Homo emotionalis is designed to offer a useful complement in
the spirit of model pluralism. The logics of consequences, appropriateness,
and affect should be seen as ideal types that do not come about in pure form in
social reality. They are deeply interwoven in practice, and each decision

114
For advocates of the use of “objective” rational baselines, see Amitai Etzioni, The Moral
Dimension: Toward a New Economics (New York: Free Press, 1988), 145; Glaser, Rational Theory
of International Politics, 3; Andrew H. Kydd, “Methodological Individualism and Rational
Choice,” in Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal, eds, The Oxford Handbook of International
Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 438. For a perceptive critique of the rational
baseline approach, see Jonathan Mercer, “Rationality and Psychology in International Politics,”
International Organization 59:1 (2005), 89.
115
See Duncan Snidal, “Rational Choice and International Relations,” in Carlsnaes, Risse, and
Simmons, eds, Handbook of International Relations, 2nd edn., 88.
116
See Itzhak Gilboa, Rational Choice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 5; George
Loewenstein, “Out of Control: Visceral Influences on Behavior,” Organizational Behavior and
Human Decision Processes 65:3 (1996), 289.
117
See Vincent Pouliot, “Practice Tracing,” in Andrew Bennett and Jeffrey T. Checkel, eds,
Process Tracing: From Metaphor to Analytic Tool (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2015), 243.
26 Emotional Choices
process is shaped to some extent by instrumental, normative, and emotional
motivation.118
Emotions are omnipresent and permeate both homo oeconomicus and homo
sociologicus to varying degrees of intensity. Damasio’s neurological research
indicates that affective experience is a critical precondition for instrumental
rationality. People’s pursuit of their preferences is generally toned by emotion.
Conversely, how we experience and express affect is colored by more or less
intuitive utility considerations. We often try to generate and display what we
consider useful feelings, and we attempt to suppress and hide disadvantageous
ones.119 Likewise, affect plays a role in normative action and reflective ration-
ality. On the one hand, emotions endow cultural symbols with meaning and
the authority to regulate decision-making. If we feel strongly about norms we
are particularly likely to adhere to them. Rules that cease to resonate at an
affective level often come to lose their prescriptive power.120 On the other
hand, culture molds what people feel. “Social structure regulate[s] emotional
experience from within the feeling subject through the very framing and
interpretation of emotions,” as Eva Illouz and her colleagues explain.121
Given that instrumental and normative motivation is so deeply imbued
with affect, some readers may wonder why one should establish homo emo-
tionalis as an additional action model. I make the case that it is useful for
heuristic purposes to distinguish among the logics of consequences, appro-
priateness, and affect, and to use them pragmatically as analytic lenses to
examine choice behavior.122 A single action model is unlikely to be able to
grasp the complexity of human decision-making. The empirical question to be
asked is thus not whether agents follow one logic of choice or the other, but
which of these logics plays the greatest role in a decision process and how the
interplay between them unfolds over time.123 This interplay may be charac-
terized by five main patterns: First, since humans generally feel before they
think, the logic of affect may lead them to prioritize one of the other two action

118
See Flam, “Emotional ‘Man,’” 39, 51; Thomas Risse, “‘Let’s Argue!’: Communicative
Action in International Relations,” International Organization 54:1 (2000), 18.
119
See Uwe Schimank, Handeln und Strukturen: Einführung in die akteurstheoretische
Soziologie, 3rd edn (Weinheim and Munich: Juventa, 2007), 114–15.
120
See Jon Elster, “Emotion and Action,” in Robert C. Solomon, ed., Thinking about Feeling:
Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 155–8;
Hutchison, Affective Communities in World Politics, xi; Jonathan H. Turner and Jan E. Stets,
The Sociology of Emotions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 292.
121
See Eva Illouz, Daniel Gilon, and Mattan Shachak, “Emotions and Cultural Theory,” in
Stets and Turner, eds, Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions, vol. 2, 223. See also Jon Elster,
Strong Feelings: Emotion, Addiction, and Human Behavior (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999),
106–8, 113–14.
122
For a similar approach, see James Fearon and Alexander Wendt, “Rationalism v. Con-
structivism: A Skeptical View,” in Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse, and Beth A. Simmons, eds,
Handbook of International Relations (London: Sage, 2002), 52–3.
123
See Risse, “‘Let’s Argue!,’” 18.
 Introduction 27
models. Affective experience may prompt decision-makers to engage primar-
ily in strategic goal-seeking or to comply with their normative obligations in a
given situation.124 Second, homo emotionalis may infuse the logic of conse-
quences or the logic of appropriateness and inform actors how to adjudicate
between different strategic goals or between distinct norms, respectively.125
Third, the logic of affect may constrain or reinforce decision-making that is
motivated chiefly by one of the conventional logics of choice. Fourth, emo-
tional choice may itself become the predominant action model shaping
decision-making. When emotions become the principal forces influencing
choice behavior, they may override or be supported by one or more of the
other logics of choice.126 At high levels of intensity, emotions may “invade or
overwhelm” and “connect or separate individuals against their will,” as Helena
Flam observes.127 In such instances, the logic of affect may be able to illumin-
ate behavior that seems difficult to comprehend from the standpoint of
existing rationalist and constructivist approaches. Finally, emotional choice
theory will lose its explanatory power when actors manage to express unfelt
emotion or stifle felt emotion to achieve their goals or to comply with social
norms.128 Such strategic or normative behavior is best explained by homo
oeconomicus or homo sociologicus, respectively. The logic of affect cannot
shed any light on it, because it is limited to accounting for the influence of
experienced emotion.129
In practice, these five patterns in the interplay between the logic of affect
and the logics of consequences and appropriateness continuously alternate
and merge with each other. For instance, some psychological studies suggest
that individuals who simulate an emotion for instrumental or social reasons
may come to feel it over time.130 This is likely to give rise to the emotion’s

124
See Rose McDermott, Risk-Taking in International Politics: Prospect Theory in
American Foreign Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 181.
125
See Petersen, Understanding Ethnic Violence, 3; Roger D. Petersen and Sarah Zukerman,
“Anger, Violence, and Political Science,” in Michael Potegal, Gerhard Stemmler, and Charles
Spielberger, eds, International Handbook of Anger: Constituent and Concomitant Biological,
Psychological, and Social Processes (New York: Springer, 2010), 570.
126
I thank Helena Flam for helping me to think through these issues.
127
Flam, “Emotional ‘Man,’” 43.
128
See ibid., 46–7; Schimank, Handeln und Strukturen, 117.
129
This does not mean that this strategic or normative behavior is free of emotions, of course.
If an actor manages to express unfelt anger for instrumental reasons, for example, the logic of
affect will not be able to account for this emotional display, but it may be able to explain some of
the underlying felt emotions. The actor may feel proud of her good anger-performance or hope
that her strategy will succeed, for instance.
130
See Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Commu-
nication and Emotional Life (New York: Times Books, 2003), 36; Marwan Sinaceur and Larissa
Z. Tiedens, “Get Mad and Get More than Even: When and Why Anger Expression is Effective in
Negotiations,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 42:3 (2006), 320.
28 Emotional Choices
appraisal and action tendencies, which, in turn, shape the construction of
preferences, judgment, and choice selection. In such instances, homo oecono-
micus or homo sociologicus makes some room for homo emotionalis. If these
actors later get desensitized, they will stop experiencing the emotion for the
time being but may continue to express it on strategic or normative grounds.
Much of the explanatory power then shifts back to the logic of consequences
or appropriateness. Due to these continuous transformations and transitions,
we are bound to find numerous cases where we need a combination of action
models to account for an agent’s decision-making trajectory. By employing all
three logics of choice at different times and in conjunction with each other, it
may be possible to develop a more nuanced understanding of how humans
feel, think, and decide. Such a multidimensional perspective will enable us to
explain a broader spectrum of decision-making.131 Table 1.1 outlines and
compares the main features of the three action models under consideration
in this study.

Table 1.1 Three Action Models

Homo oeconomicus Homo sociologicus Homo emotionalis

Theoretical perspective Rationalist Social constructivist Socioemotional

Logic of choice
Main drivers
View of rationality
View of agents
View of self-control
View of structures
Form of explanation1
1
For an elaboration on the different forms of explanation and a summary of process analysis, see Chapter 3.
constructivist
Logic of Logic of Logic of affect
consequences appropriateness
Pursuit of utility, Norms, identities, Affect and emotions
cost–benefit and other in combination with
calculations intersubjective ideas culture
and practices
Instrumental, Reflective Instrumental, epistemic,
epistemic reflective, and affective
Autonomous being Social being Emotional, social, and
physiological being
Assumed Assumed Limited
Generally materialist Generally ideational Biological and
physiological as well as
cognitive and cultural
Causal analysis Constitutive analysis Process analysis

131
See Flam, “Emotional ‘Man,’” 39, 51; Annette Freyberg-Inan and Daniel Jacobi, “Conclu-
sion: Toward an International Political (Post-)Anthropology,” in Jacobi and Freyberg-Inan, eds,
Human Beings in International Relations, 324.
 Introduction 29

CASE S ELECTION

The value of emotional choice theory ultimately depends on whether it enhances

our understanding of human decision-making. To assess the model’s analytic
power, it is applied in two detailed historical case studies: Nikita Khrushchev’s
response to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and Saddam Hussein’s decision-
making during the Gulf conflict in 1990–1. Harry Eckstein has advised that a
theory can be shown to be strong and generalizable if its propositions are
confirmed with “hard” cases that, ex ante, look least likely to corroborate
them.132 Given that both the Cuban missile crisis and the Gulf conflict are
commonly associated with high emotional tension, some readers may regard
them as “easy” tests for a theory about the role of affect in strategic interaction.
This would, indeed, be so if the aim of this study were to explore whether emotions
matter in coercive diplomacy. The primary goal, however, is to show how and to
what extent they matter. The two crises can thus serve as productive cases because
they are likely to bring into sharp relief the workings of emotions.133
The missile crisis and the Gulf conflict have been selected as cases for three
main reasons. First, both are viewed as classic instances of forceful persuasion
in the IR literature. Scholars have used the missile crisis as a foundational case
study to theorize strategic interaction between states. Thomas Schelling and
Alexander George, for example, referred to the episode at length to illustrate
their concepts of compellence and coercive diplomacy, respectively. Both
authors viewed John F. Kennedy’s approach as an example par excellence of
a success in crisis bargaining.134 Over the years, students as well as practi-
tioners of security policy have regularly turned to this apparent role model
to learn lessons about the formulation of threats and the provision of in-
centives.135 In the Gulf conflict, on the other hand, the George H. W. Bush
administration and its international allies did not manage to get Saddam
Hussein to recall his troops from Kuwait without the use of force. The
crisis has become a standard example of coercive diplomacy failure in the
strategic studies literature.136 Precisely because both cases have achieved such

132
See Harry Eckstein, Regarding Politics: Essays on Political Theory, Stability, and Change
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 158.
133
For a similar approach, see Ross, Mixed Emotions, 6.
134
See Schelling, Arms and Influence, 40–1, 57–8, 60–5, 80–7, 94–8, 279–82; George, Forceful
Persuasion, 31–8; Alexander L. George, “The Cuban Missile Crisis: Peaceful Resolution through
Coercive Diplomacy,” in George and Simons, eds, The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy, 111–32.
135
For overviews of the evaluation of the crisis over the years, see Dominic D. P. Johnson and
Dominic Tierney, Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 17, 99; Lebow and Stein, We All Lost the Cold
War, 291; Jutta Weldes, Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile
Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 16.
136
See Richard K. Herrmann, “Coercive Diplomacy and the Crisis over Kuwait, 1990–1991,”
in George and Simons, eds, The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy, 229–64; Stanley A. Renshon,
30 Emotional Choices
a canonical status, it is useful to investigate whether the logic of affect can help
to account for the variation in their outcomes and to see whether the findings
invalidate or confirm the lessons drawn in existing studies.
Second, tracing the emotions of leaders requires a substantial source base
that includes not only eyewitness accounts but also records of their confiden-
tial deliberations at the time of the crisis. Unfortunately, it is generally difficult
to obtain this material for targets of forceful persuasion. The missile crisis and
the Gulf conflict are rare exceptions in this respect because there is a rich body
of sources available to explore Nikita Khrushchev’s and Saddam Hussein’s
decision-making. The Russian material ranges from autobiographical reflec-
tions by Khrushchev and other Soviet policy-makers to archival records and
oral history interviews. The Kremlin archives have released important gov-
ernment files, such as protocols of the Presidium of the Central Committee,
the Soviet Union’s top decision-making body. In the case of the Gulf conflict,
the study relies on media sources, oral history interviews, and internal Ba‘ath
regime files captured by US armed forces during the War in Iraq in 2003.
Copies of about 1,200 records, including tapes of internal leadership discus-
sions and meetings with foreign visitors, intelligence reports, and other
government files are now held at the Conflict Records Research Center at
the National Defense University in Washington, DC. These documents of
policy-making at the heart of power in Moscow and Baghdad provide a unique
opportunity to explore the feeling and thinking of the top decision-makers in
these two crises.137
Finally, both the Cuban missile crisis and the Gulf conflict comprised
different phases during which the target leaders took a number of distinct
decisions. These periods display substantial within-case variation in their

“Introduction,” in Stanley A. Renshon, ed., The Political Psychology of the Gulf War: Leaders,
Publics, and the Process of Conflict (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), xvii; Janice
Gross Stein, “Deterrence and Compellence in the Gulf, 1990–91: A Failed or Impossible Task?,”
International Security 17:2 (1992), 147–79. Officially, President George H. W. Bush defined
success in coercive diplomacy toward Baghdad as his primary goal. Some authors, however,
argue that he came to purposefully work toward failure of this strategy in order to be able to wage
war against Iraq. By January 1991, he had allegedly reached the conclusion that Saddam
Hussein’s military needed to be substantially decimated in order to reduce its threat to the
region. See, for example, Haun, Coercion, Survival, and War, 70. This hypothesis deserves further
exploration on the basis of archival research, but it does not cause any problems for the setup of
the present study. What matters for our purpose is how the Iraqi leadership interpreted US
statements and actions.
137
This material was first examined by the Institute of Defense Analysis on behalf of the US
Department of Defense. Electronic copies of about 1,200 records filling around 34,000 pages
were then passed on to the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC) at the National Defense
University in Washington, DC. This study benefits greatly from the CRRC’s transcripts and
translations of the tapes. Whether the participants in these sessions knew that they were being
recorded is often not clear. See Kevin M. Woods, David D. Palkki, and Mark E. Stout, The
Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant’s Regime, 1978–2001 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), xiv, 2, 3–5, 8.
 Introduction 31
rhetoric and behavior, which is useful for the assessment of the role of emotion
and alternative explanations.138 It would be difficult to treat these phases as
separate mini-case studies, however, because the choices that the policy-
makers made over time are unlikely to be independent from each other. The
affective experience surrounding each decision is bound to be shaped to some
degree by emotional memories of past decisions. As Martha Nussbaum points
out, the “content of emotions arrives embedded in a complex narrative
history, without mentioning which one frequently cannot give an account of
the full specificity of the emotion itself.”139 To gain an understanding of a
leader’s emotions during an episode of coercive diplomacy, it is thus necessary
to take into consideration their historical context.140 The case studies will,
therefore, start out with an in-depth analysis of the developments leading up
to the beginning of crisis bargaining.
Emotional choice theory is, in principle, designed to be applicable to any
instance of forceful persuasion in any era and region of the world. It may
also be used to examine other cases of foreign policy decision-making. The
primary goal of the book, however, is to establish whether the theory
presents a fruitful analytical lens to examine the choice behavior of the
Soviet and Iraqi leaders in the Cuban missile crisis and the Gulf conflict,
respectively. If the resulting account were persuasive, it would be reasonable
to assume that the logic of affect may also be able to illuminate target
leaders’ decision-making in other instances of coercive diplomacy.141
Given that this study is based on only two case studies, there is an inherent
risk of extrapolating features to a class of events that are, in fact, unique to a
specific case or subgroup. This is why I will follow Alexander George’s
advice to formulate only conditional generalizations that are bounded by
scope conditions.142 Experts agree that both Nikita Khrushchev and Saddam
Hussein wielded supreme power in their choice behavior.143 The findings
from the case studies should thus be transferred only to target leaders

138
See Alexander L. George and Timothy J. McKeown, “Case Studies and Theories of Organ-
izational Decision Making,” Advances in Information Processing in Organizations 2 (1985), 29–30;
Todd H. Hall, Emotional Diplomacy: Official Emotion on the International Stage (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2015), 41.
139
Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 179.
140
See Ja Ian Chong and Todd H. Hall, “One Thing Leads to Another: Making Sense of East
Asia’s Repeated Tensions,” Asian Security 13:1 (2017), 20; Lebow, Forbidden Fruit, 41.
141
See Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in
the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 110; Ted Hopf, Social Construction of
International Politics: Identities and Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2002), 29, 268.
142
See George and Simons, “Findings and Conclusions,” 267–8.
143
See Horowitz, Stam, and Ellis, Why Leaders Fight, 55; Joseph Sassoon, Anatomy
of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2016), 191.
32 Emotional Choices
who enjoy a similar level of domestic authority. Any wider extrapolations
would require further empirical analysis.144

THE F OCUS ON POLITICAL LEADERS

In concentrating on the emotions of top political leaders, the book follows

Alex Mintz and Karl DeRouen’s argument that these individuals are “critically
important” in shaping their governments’ foreign policy at times of crisis.145
The reasoning is that crises often erupt and develop quickly, and policy
responses tend to be developed behind closed doors at the highest level of
political power. As a result, even a top leader in a democratic system is
frequently in a position to take momentous decisions without strong domestic
checks and balances.146 Rationalist accounts typically treat these decision-
makers as interchangeable subjects. They claim that any leader would make
similar choices in response to the same domestic and external constraints and
incentives.147 The logic of affect takes into consideration actors’ heterogeneity,
including their agency and personal disposition.148 That it focuses on top
decision-makers does not mean that it subscribes to an individualist ontology,
however. Rather, it assumes that actors are formed in the course of the
relationships they have with others. Consequently, emotions are not locked
up in the hearts of autonomous individuals, but they are in a continuous

144
For similar approaches to the issue of generalization, see Steven Bernstein et al., “Social
Science as Case-Based Diagnostics,” in Richard Ned Lebow and Mark Irving Lichbach, eds,
Theory and Evidence in Comparative Politics and International Relations (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), 237; Lebow, Between Peace and War, 6; Richard Ned Lebow, Constructing
Cause in International Relations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 9.
145
Mintz and DeRouen, Jr., Understanding Foreign Policy Decision Making, 19. For similar
views, see Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack, “Let Us Now Praise Great Men: Bringing
the Statesman Back In,” International Security 25:4 (2001), 107–46; Lebow, Forbidden Fruit, 23,
103–4. For a recent skeptical examination, see Robert Jervis, “Do Leaders Matter and How
Would We Know?,” Security Studies 22:2 (2013), 153–79.
146
See also Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, D. Alex Hughes, and David G. Victor, “The Cognitive
Revolution and the Political Psychology of Elite Decision Making,” Perspectives on Politics 11:2
(2013), 373.
147
See, for example, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita et al., The Logic of Political Survival
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Giacomo Chiozza and H. E. Goemans, Leaders and
International Conflict (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Jessica L. Weeks,
“Strongmen and Straw Men: Authoritarian Regimes and the Initiation of International Conflict,”
American Political Science Review 106:2 (2012), 326–47.
148
For similar approaches, see Horowitz, Stam, and Ellis, Why Leaders Fight; Lebow,
A Cultural Theory of International Relations; McDermott, Presidential Leadership, Illness, and
Decision Making.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
I’m sure. And while we are on the subject of room, Miss Fewkes, will
you let me know how much you will charge me for the bedroom only,
as I shan’t be wanting the sitting-room after this week.”
“Oh, but I don’t particularly care to let the bedroom by itself,” Miss
Fewkes objected. “I haven’t another bedroom vacant, and what use
would the sitting-room be to anybody by itself? Perhaps you’d prefer
to give up both rooms?”
Nancy hesitated. Then she plunged.
“Certainly, Miss Fewkes. I really wanted to give them up some
time ago. They’re very expensive and very uncomfortable, and not
overclean.”
“Well, I shan’t argue about it, Miss O’Finn,” said Miss Fewkes
haughtily. “Because I wouldn’t soil my lips by saying what I think of a
person who behaves like you do. But I do know a little about the
prerfession, having been in it myself, and if you are what you pretend
to be, which I don’t think, all I can say is the prerfession has changed
for the worse since my day.”
With this she snapped out of the room, as a little wooden cuckoo
snaps back into his clock.
Nancy sat down and wrote to Mrs. Pottage.

5 Blackboy Passage,
Soho.
Friday.
Dear Mrs. Pottage,
I’m rather worried what to do with Letizia while I am
looking for work. I wonder if you’d look after her for a week
or two? I have a very unpleasant landlady here who hates
children, and so I must get a new room until I find an
engagement. Don’t ask me to come to Greenwich too,
because, dearest Mrs. Pottage, I simply couldn’t. But
Letizia’s different, and if you wouldn’t mind having her with
you for a little while it would be such a weight off my mind.
You must please charge me whatever you think is fair. I
 haven’t the least idea, so I must leave that to you. I leave
here on Monday, and if you will let me know by then what
time will suit you I will bring Letizia to Greenwich station, if
you’d be kind enough to meet us. I haven’t told Letizia
herself that she may be going to stay with you, because I
don’t want to disappoint her if you can’t manage it, and of
course I will perfectly understand if you can’t.
Yours affectionately,
Nancy O’Finn.

Nancy felt more cheerful when she had posted this letter.
Early on Sunday morning the Kinos left Blackboy Passage.
“You won’t change your mind at the last minute and let us take the
kid?” Mr. Kino asked.
Nancy shook her head.
“It would be a weight off your shoulders, wouldn’t it?” he pleaded.
“Yes, but it would be a terrible weight on my mind,” said Nancy.
“Dear Mr. Kino, I couldn’t let her be adopted, I couldn’t really.”
Yet when the Kinos had gone, and Nancy was sitting by the
window, listening to the church bells and to the occasional footsteps
of people clinking along the frozen Sabbath streets and to the
emptiness of Soho without the distant roar of traffic, she began to
wonder if she ought not to have accepted the Kinos’ offer. She tried
to make up her mind to put on her things and take Letizia to the late
Mass in the Soho Square church; but the dejection reacted on her
energy, and she felt incapable of getting up from her seat, of doing
anything except stare out of the window at the grey March sky or
look with a listless resentment at Miss Fewkes’s pictures of girls in
sunbonnets cuddling donkeys over gates or of girls in furs feeding
robins in the snow. She even lacked the energy, when the morning
had passed and it was nearly two o’clock, to ring and ask when Miss
Fewkes proposed to serve dinner. And when dinner did arrive, with
everything cooked so badly as to make it nearly inedible, she did not
feel that she could be bothered to protest.
 “Muvver,” said Letizia, “why has my gravy got spots of soap in it?”
“Because it’s getting cold, my dear. So eat it up quickly before it
gets any colder.”
“But, muvver, when I put it into my mouf, it all sticks to the top of it
and won’t come off.”
“Don’t go on grumbling, there’s a good little girl. If you don’t like it,
don’t eat it.”
“Well, I won’t,” said Letizia decidedly.
A rice-pudding, which tasted like a dry sponge wrapped up in old
leaves, caused Letizia many sighs before she could swallow even a
mouthful, and some bananas which looked as if the greengrocer had
tried to reshape them after they had been driven over by the traffic of
Covent Garden all day, did nothing to help matters. As for the coffee,
it might have been smeared on a boy’s fingers to stop him from
biting his nails, but it was never meant to be drunk.
One of the reasons for Miss Fewkes’s perpetual bad temper was
an inclination on the part of visitors to the lower basement of the
house to ring Miss Fewkes’s bell and so fetch her downstairs
unnecessarily to open the front door. This being the second Sunday
of the month, Louisa had been allowed to go out, and Miss Fewkes
was in her tiny little bedroom in the roof of the house when her bell
rang twice. The idea of going all the way downstairs only to find that
a visitor had arrived for the people in the basement did not appeal to
the little woman. So she opened the bedroom window and, peering
out over the sill, perceived upon the steps below an exceedingly
bright cerise bonnet belonging to what was apparently a respectable
middle-aged woman.
“Who are you ringing for?” Miss Fewkes called down in her
rasping voice.
The cerise bonnet bobbed about for a while until at last it
discovered from what window it was being addressed, when it
looked up and shouted back:
 “What’s it got to do with you who I’m ringing for? If you’re the
servant here, just you come down and open the door the same as
what I would if anybody rung my front bell.”
“Do you want Mr. and Mrs. Blanchit?” Miss Fewkes called down.
“Because if you do, it’s the broken bell by the area gate and kindly
ring that.”
“Do I want who?” the cerise bonnet shouted back.
“Mr. and Mrs. Blanchit!”
“No, I don’t, you saucy old outandabout! What next are you going
to ask? You just come down and open the door the same as I should
myself.”
Miss Fewkes slammed her window down and left the cerise
bonnet on the steps. After ringing about a dozen times, it went down
the steps again and standing in the middle of the pavement shouted
“Hi!” several times in rapid succession. A small boy blowing a mouth-
organ stared at the cerise bonnet for a moment, stopped his tune,
and asked it if it had lost anything.
“What ’ud I be staring up at the top story of a house for, you saucy
little image, if I’d have lost anything—unless I’d dropped my umbrella
out of a balloon, and which I haven’t?... Hi!”
On hearing the cerise bonnet begin to shout again, the small boy
put the mouth-organ in his pocket and looking up in the air shouted
“Hi!” too. Two little girls dragging behind them a child of doubtful sex
smeared with barley sugar stopped to gaze, and then three more
small boys arrived on the scene and proceeded to augment the duet
of “Hi!”
A policeman, who had been lured from Dean Street into Blackboy
Passage by the noise, inquired of the cerise bonnet what its need
was.
“Can’t you get into your house, mum?”
“No, I can’t. I want to visit a lady friend of mine who lives at 5
Blackboy Passage, and when I rung the bell a female like a potted
shrimp poked her head out of a top-floor window and asked me if I
wanted Mr. and Mrs. Blanchit.”
“Mr. Blanchit lives at number five,” one of the small boys
volunteered. “Down in the basement, he lives.”
“Well, what’s that got to do with you, you pushing little eel? I don’t
want the man. I want to see my lady friend.”
“Perhaps you’ve got the wrong number,” the policeman suggested.
“Wrong number be ... well, I won’t say what I was thinking,
because it doesn’t always do.”
It was at this moment that Letizia, who had been trying vainly for
an hour after dinner to make her mother play with the gilded
antelopes, decided to look out of the window.
“Muvver! Muvver!” she shouted, clapping joyful hands. “I can see
Mrs. Porridge in the street, and she’s talking to a policeman.”
Nancy jumped up, and ran to the window.
“Why, so it is! Dear, dear Mrs. Pottage! I’ll go down and open the
door.”
“There you are!” Mrs. Pottage exclaimed triumphantly to the
policeman after she had embraced Nancy. “Didn’t I tell you my lady
friend lived here?”
The policeman strode off with a good-natured smile: the small boy
took the mouth-organ out of his pocket and, after watching the
policeman safely through the archway of the Tavern, resumed his
interrupted tune. The two little girls, without looking to see if the
sugar-smeared neutral was ready to be dragged on again, moved
forward on their way. The three other small boys discovered a new
method of wearing out boots and set off to practise it. Mrs. Pottage
and Nancy retired into Number Five. Blackboy Passage was once
more abandoned to its Sabbath emptiness and silence.
“Well, you do live in a Punch and Judy show and no mistake,” Mrs.
Pottage declared, as she followed Nancy up the stairs, the jet bugles
of her best bonnet tinkling and lisping as she moved.
 “My landlady doesn’t like being called down to open the door; and
the girl’s out,” Nancy explained.
“Landlady you call her? Skylady I should call her. That is if I called
her a lady at all, and which I most certainly never shouldn’t not if I
lived to be as old as Methussalem.”
Letizia was waiting at the head of the stairs to welcome Mrs.
Pottage, into whose outspread arms she flung herself in a rapture of
welcome.
“Mrs. Porridge! Mrs. Porridge!”
“My heart’s jool!”
“Oh, Mrs. Porridge, where have you been? I didn’t know where
you could be, and I went to a circus and touched an ephelant on his
trunk and it was all hot and I saw a little friend who the baby Jesus
liked and I saw my big grannie and the wolf didn’t eat her at all and I
saw two aunts and they smelt all funny like the inside of a dirty-
cloves basket and we had rice-pudding for dinner and it sticked my
teef togevver, and I’ve got two golden auntylopes and they eat
apples made of soap.”
“My good gracious, if you haven’t been going it,” Mrs. Pottage
declared, with a critical glance round the sitting-room of the lodgings.
“Poky! Very poky! And not at all clean. Why, that grate don’t look as if
it had been swept since the fire of London, and, oh, dear, oh, dear,
just look at the dust on those pictures! If a water pipe burst in this
house you’d have weeds growing on the frames. Well, I suppose I
haven’t got to tell you who I’ve come to fetch?”
Nancy smiled.
“I knew you wouldn’t fail me.”
“Yes, but wait a minute. I didn’t at all like the tone of that letter you
wrote me.”
Nancy looked worried.
“Not at all I didn’t like it. Yes, I see myself sending in a bill for that
blessed infant’s keep. Why, you might as well ask me to charge you
for the sun shining in at your windows.”
Nancy saw that she had genuinely hurt the good soul by
mentioning money in connection with Letizia’s visit.
“Dear Mrs. Pottage, you could hardly expect me to plant her down
on you without at least offering to pay, but I won’t offend you by
arguing further. You know exactly how I feel about your kindness, my
dear soul.”
“Kindness be ... oh, dear, now that’s twice in the last half hour I’ve
nearly said that word. It comes of keeping company with Mr. Currie.
Let me see, you won’t have heard of him, because he’s only been
courting me since I gave the go-by to Watcher and Hopkins. He’s a
very hasty-tempered man, and his language is a bit of a coloured
supplement. Mrs. Bugbird passed the remark to me I’d really have to
mind my p’s and q’s, and I said it wasn’t my p’s and q’s I had to look
out for, it was my b’s and d’s. Of course, Mrs. Bugbird herself didn’t
mind. Oh, no, she’s a very broad-minded woman. In fact her father,
so she’s often told me, used to preach regularly at street corners
against any kind of religion at all. But I shan’t keep this Currie
hanging around much longer. No, he gets me into bad habits, and
the next time he proposes marriage will be the last. Besides, even if I
liked him, I don’t like his business which is fried fish. Fancy me in a
fried-fish shop for the rest of my life! Why, I’d sooner marry an
engine driver and live in a railway station. Well, an engine driver did
propose to me once. But I saw he had the habit of driving too much,
and that would never have suited me. Why, even of a Sunday
afternoon he wasn’t happy if he couldn’t walk me round Greenwich
Park at sixty miles an hour. I remember once just for a joke I started
whistling the same as an engine might, and everybody stopped and
begun staring, and which made him a bit annoyed. In fact he thought
I was touched in my head, and that Sunday was his last. Well, he’s
the only one of all my many who didn’t wait for me to say ‘no’
definite, but went and hooked it himself. And going back to the
subject of my language this last month, it wouldn’t do at all if
Letichia’s coming home with me, so I think I’ll drop him a p.c. and not
wait for the third time of asking.”
 “Am I coming home with you, Mrs. Porridge?” Letizia asked,
clapping her hands.
“You’re coming home with me this blessed afternoon just as soon
as your dear ma’s packed up your tiddlies. Your friend Mrs. Bugbird
will be popping in, and we’ll have a sprat tea together. And dear
Aggie Wilkinson’s dancing about on her pore crutches, because
you’re coming home to your Mrs. Porridge.” She took Nancy aside,
and continued in a lower voice. “I read between the lines of your
letter, dearie, and I knew you didn’t want to come near Greenwich.
So I just skipped into my Sunday best and come along to fetch her.
She can stay as long as you like. I’d say she could stay for ever.
Only she wants a better bringing-up than what a woman like me
could give her.”
“Oh, but I’m sure to get an engagement very soon, Mrs. Pottage,
and then of course she’ll go on tour again with me. I wouldn’t have
bothered you now, if I hadn’t thought you’d be glad to have her for a
while, and if I hadn’t wanted to leave these rooms as soon as
possible.”
“And I don’t blame you. I’d sooner live in a dustbin. But where are
you going when you leave here?”
“Oh, I shall find somewhere to-morrow. I’m so glad you did come
to-day for Letizia. It will make it ever so much easier for me. The only
thing I’m worrying about is the luggage.”
“Well, why don’t you let me take what luggage you don’t want
down to Greenwich, and then when I bring you Letichia, I can bring
you your luggage at the same time. There’s no sense in travelling a
lot of luggage round with you like a peacock’s tail. We can just pop
what you don’t want into a four-wheeler and take it to London
Bridge.”
Nancy hesitated. She was wondering if she had enough money
left to pay the cab now, and Miss Fewkes’s bill to-morrow morning.
However, if she hadn’t, she could visit the pawnbroker early and
pledge some odds and ends, so she decided to accept Mrs.
Pottage’s offer.
 “Now who’s going to fetch the four-wheeler?” Mrs. Pottage wanted
to know when the packing was finished. “Shall I give a holler to Her
Landladyship upstairs?”
“Ask Miss Fewkes to fetch a cab?” Nancy exclaimed. “Why,
she’d....” Words failed her to express what Miss Fewkes would do.
“But what is this Miss Fewkes?” demanded Mrs. Pottage
indignantly. “Three ha’porth of nothing from what I could make out of
her. Still, rather than create a row on a Sunday afternoon I’ll go and
fetch the four-wheeler myself. I’ll stand in Shaftesbury Avenue till
one comes along. There’s one thing, the police won’t be so likely to
take me for a kerbstone fairy as what they would Lady Fewkes. Oh,
dear, oh, dear! Well, I’m bothered if some people nowadays don’t
give theirselves as much airs as if they was Margate, Ramsgate, and
Brighton all rolled into one.”
In about ten minutes Mrs. Pottage returned, followed by a burly old
cab-driver in a dark blue beaver coat with treble capes and a shiny
bowler hat.
“I’ve brought a most obliging driver along with me,” she
proclaimed. “The first cab I got, the fellow wouldn’t leave his horse at
the corner to come and help down with the luggage. Afraid of his
horse, he said. ‘I suppose you’re afraid it’ll fall down and never stand
up again if you left go of the reins?’ I said. ‘Never heard of a horse
running away, I suppose,’ he answers back very sarcastic. ‘What?’
said I, ‘that pore skelington run away? Why, it couldn’t walk away. It
might fade away, yes. And if it didn’t run away of itself, I’m sure
nobody wouldn’t ever run away with it. Not even a cats meat man,
and they’ll run away with anything as looks a little bit like flesh and
blood. But that horse of yours don’t. That horse of yours looks more
like a clothes-horse than a real animal. Only I’d be very afraid to
hang a towel on its back for fear it might break in half under the
weight.’ And with that I walked on and found this driver who’s been
most obliging, I’m sure.”
The cabman touched his hat in acknowledgment of the flattery,
and asked which piece they wanted down first.
 But now a greater obstacle to the departure of the luggage than an
unwilling cab-driver presented itself, for Miss Fewkes appeared, her
tow-coloured hair elaborately done as it always was on a Sunday
afternoon to resemble a brand-new yacht’s fender from which state it
gradually wore away during the stress of the week.
“And what is the meaning of this?” she demanded, folding her
arms.
Nancy explained why her luggage was going away this afternoon.
“Then perhaps you’ll pay my weekly bill, Miss O’Finn, before you
remove your boxes?” said Miss Fewkes.
“My bill will be paid to-morrow morning before I leave.”
“Yes, but I’m not in the habit of permitting my lodgers to remove
their luggage until their bills are paid,” Miss Fewkes insisted.
Mrs. Pottage gasped.
“Well, of all the impudence I ever did hear! Well, I passed the
remark to the policeman that you looked like a potted shrimp, but
shrimp sauce is more what you ought to be called.”
“It’s easy to see what you are,” Miss Fewkes spat out venomously.
“The sort of woman you are is plain to any one who’s sharp and has
eyes.”
At this point, the burly cab-driver, who was evidently afraid of
being involved in this feminine dispute, retired downstairs until the
matter was settled.
“It is easy to see what I am,” Mrs. Pottage agreed. “Because I’m a
decent-made woman. But it’s far from easy to see what you are, let
me tell you, very far from easy, because you aren’t as big as a
second helping of underdone mutton at an eating-house. You may
have eyes. So’s a needle. You may be sharp. So’s a needle. And I
wouldn’t care to look for you in a haystack any more than what I
would a needle, and that’s the solid truth I’m telling you. You asked
for it, ma’am, and now you’ve had it, and if you’ll kindly stand on one
side you won’t get carried out with the luggage like a speck of dust
off of your own dusty banisters.”
 “This luggage don’t leave my house before my account’s been
settled,” Miss Fewkes shrilled. “Not if I have to fetch in a policeman
to you.”
“Fetch a policeman?” Mrs. Pottage jeered. “Well, for a woman who
looks like last night’s buttonhole or a sucked sweet as a kid’s spat
out on the pavement, you’ve got a tidy nerve.”
Nancy thought that it was time to interfere, because she did not
want Letizia to be frightened by the quarrel.
“I’m quite willing to pay your bill, Miss Fewkes, if you suspect that
I’m trying to give you the slip,” she said.
“Not at all,” Mrs. Pottage interposed. “It’s beyond reason giving in
to such as she. Let her call this policeman we’ve heard so much
about, and it’s my opinion he’ll laugh in her face, that is if he could
tell it was her face, which I don’t think.”
“You vulgar, impertinent woman,” Miss Fewkes ejaculated.
“Yes, thank goodness I am a woman,” Mrs. Pottage retorted. “And
thank goodness you can reckonise me as such, which is more than
what I could reckonise you, not if I was looking at you with two
telescopes at once. Why, if I was you I’d be afraid to go out alone in
case I got took by a showman for a performing flea. It’s a nine days’
wonder you never got pecked up by a sparrow; but there, I suppose
even a sparrow knows what isn’t good for him.”
To what heights of invective Mrs. Pottage might have risen was
never to be known, because Nancy insisted on paying Miss Fewkes
her bill, which enabled her to retreat to her own room and cease to
oppose the departure of the luggage.
“But there, perhaps it’s as well,” conceded Mrs. Pottage. “Or I
might have been tempted to say something a bit rude.”
With the aid of the good-natured cabman the luggage was put on
the four-wheeler; and an hour later Nancy waved farewell to Letizia
and her hostess at London Bridge Station.
 CHAPTER XVII
THE TWO ROADS
On Monday morning with a lighter heart than she had known for
many weeks Nancy left Miss Fewkes. She had ten shillings and a
few odd coppers when she stepped out of the tall thin house in
Blackboy Passage, carrying her dressing-case in her hand; but she
had not to worry about Letizia at present, and the removal of this
anxiety had revived her confidence in being soon able to get a
“shop.” Meanwhile, she had to find a cheap room somewhere. This
proved to be much less easy than she had expected. At first all the
owners of the houses announcing apartments seemed to regard her
with equal suspicion.
“I don’t keep the kind of room you want,” said one.
“I wouldn’t mind taking you in myself,” said another. “But my
husband don’t like having women in the house.”
“If you’re looking for gay rooms,” said a third with brutal directness,
“you’d better try the other side of Oxford Street. You won’t find
anything to suit you round here. We have to be too careful of the
police.”
When at last Nancy did reach a quarter where landladies
appeared less dismayed by the prospect of letting to a single
woman, she found that the most exorbitant prices were asked in
every house.
“Two pounds a week for a bedroom only,” said one. “Or if you have
a latchkey, three pounds.”
“But why should I pay a pound a week for a latchkey?” Nancy
asked in astonishment.
“Well, if you have your own latchkey, I shouldn’t make any extra
charge for the gentlemen you brought home. Otherwise I’d have to
charge you five shillings a head.”
Nancy laughed.
“But I don’t want to bring gentlemen home with me. I’m on the
stage,” she explained.
The stolid countenance of the woman with whom she was
negotiating did not change its expression.
“If you don’t want to bring men back, you don’t want a room in my
house.”
With this she slammed the door in Nancy’s face, obviously
annoyed at the waste of her time.
Another landlady was quite distressed by the suggestion that
Nancy should have a bedroom for ten shillings a week.
“A nice-looking girl like you doesn’t want to come down to that,”
she exclaimed. “You trust your luck a bit, my dear. Why don’t you
take my two nice rooms on the ground floor and cheer up? They’ve
always been lucky rooms to girls like you. The last one who had
them got off with a wine-merchant somewhere up North, and he’s
fitted her out with a lovely little flat of her own. He only comes up to
London for a day or two every month, so she has a nice easy time of
it. I’m sure I don’t know whether it’s me or my rooms, but certainly
I’ve seen a lot of luck come the way of girls like you.”
At last after a peregrination of various apparently economical
quarters Nancy found a tiny garret at the top of a tumbledown house
in Unicorn Street, which joined Red Lion Square to Theobalds Road.
This was the third time in succession that she had taken lodgings in
a thoroughfare for foot passengers only, and superstition began to
suggest a hidden significance in this collocation. The third time? It
might be from here that she would discover the main thoroughfare of
her future life.
Unicorn Street was dark and narrow, and the upper portions of
several of the houses overhung the pavement so far as almost to
meet. These relics of London before the Great Fire had by this date
already been condemned, although they were not actually pulled
down for another ten years. The majority of the shops belonged to
second-hand booksellers, whose wares seemed as tattered and
decrepit as the mouldering old houses above. Their trade was mostly
done from shelves outside the shops containing books labelled at
various prices from one penny to a shilling. There were of course
other books inside, but these were usually stacked anyhow in
tottering heaps and simply served to replenish the shelves and
boxes on the contents of which, when the weather allowed it, seedy
men of various ages browsed slowly, humping their backs from time
to time like caterpillars when they thought they had caught sight of a
rarity. Mr. Askin, the owner of the shop high above which Nancy
found her cheap room, resembled the English idea of an elderly
German professor before the war destroyed that pleasantly
sentimental conception. His lanky white hair hung over his collar like
greasy icicles; he wore blue glasses, carpet slippers, and a frock
coat; he even smoked a long china pipe. The prospect of seeing his
shop pulled down to make way for blocks of eligible offices did not
disturb him, because he had made up his mind that within two years
he was going to be drowned. As he apparently never moved a yard
away from his shop, Nancy was puzzled by this confident belief, and
ventured to ask him on what it was based.
“Have you studied the effects of the moon?” he inquired
contemptuously.
Nancy admitted that she never had.
Whereupon he put his forefinger against his nose and said very
solemnly:
“Then don’t meddle in what you don’t understand. If I say I’m going
to be drowned before two years are out, then it means I’ve studied
the question and come to my own conclusions and resigned myself
to what must be. And that’s that, isn’t it? So try and not talk so silly,
young lady.”
Mr. Askin had bought enough books, according to his calculations,
to outlast him and leave a trifle over for his widow. These had at one
time filled every room in the house; but as soon as they were sold
the empty rooms were furnished with a few odds and ends and let.
The top stories were now completely void of books, which was how
Nancy managed to rent one of the garrets in the roof for the sum of
seven shillings a week. The other garret was inhabited by Maudie
Pridgeon, the Askins’ maid-of-all-work, who could not do enough for
Nancy once she heard she was a real actress.
“Oh, Miss O’Finn,” she begged. “I wonder if you’d be kind enough
to hear me recite The Lighthouse-Keeper’s Daughter some
afternoon, and tell me if I’ve got a chance to get on the stage myself.
It’s the dream of my life. I may not be a Sarah Burnhard or an Elling
Terry, but it’s in me, Miss O’Finn. I feel shore it’s in me. Sometimes I
feel I could burst with what’s in me. I was afraid it might be wind for a
time after I’d been reading about some medicine or other. But it ain’t,
Miss O’Finn, it’s acting. It is reelly. So some time, when we have a
moment to ourselves, I do wish you’d hear me recite and give me a
bit of good advice. And of course I can rely on you not to say a word
to Mrs. Askin about my ambishing or she might pass some nasty
remark about it. She never moves out of the back room behind the
shop herself, and she’d never believe as I might be a star hiding my
light under a bushel.”
The reason why Mrs. Askin never moved out of that back room
was her profound conviction that all men were thieves, and collectors
of old books the greatest. So, day in day out, she sat in a flocculent
armchair which at night was turned into her bedstead, watching with
a suspicious eye the behaviour of prospective customers. She was a
dark unwieldy woman with a hairy chin, a profusion of tufted moles,
and what was almost a heavy moustache. It was agreed when
Nancy took the garret that she was not to expect any cooking to be
done for her; and when she saw the Askins’ meals being prepared in
that back room and Mr. and Mrs. Askin and Maudie each eating a
disgusting plateful balanced on different heaps of incredibly dusty
books, she did not regret the arrangement. She managed to make
her own garret fairly clean; and though it was perishingly cold up
there under the ancient roof, though the bed was hard and the rats
scampered round inside the raw-boned plaster walls, she had the
satisfaction of feeling perfectly sure that nowhere in London could
she be lodged more cheaply. The solitude of the long, long evenings
when she used to go to bed at eight o’clock in order to keep warm
was immense; and yet she liked it, for she seemed, high up in this
garret, to be as near to Bram as she could reach on earth. There
was no blind to the decayed window of the dormer and, blowing out
her candle, Nancy used to lie for hours staring out at the tawny
London sky, while beneath her pillow Bram’s watch was always
ticking, his watch that she had never allowed to run down. And once
in sleep he held her in his arms, and once she woke with his kisses
warm upon her lips; but mostly when she dreamed of that beloved
lost one it was of running with him along endless platforms to catch
fantastic and unattainable trains, and of acting with him in nightmare
plays without having studied the part in which she was being
suddenly called upon to appear. Meanwhile, it seemed that the
tangible and visible world was fast dissolving into an unstable dream
when Nancy, after three weeks of pawnshops and agents’ offices
and of apparently being as far away as ever from any engagement,
was persuaded by Maudie to hear her recite The Lighthouse-
Keeper’s Daughter and was asked at the end of it to advise her
about a dramatic future.
“I think you said it very well, Maudie,” Nancy assured the little
maid, whose cheeks were flushed and whose eyes were flashing
with excitement. “But I must really advise you to give up all idea of
the stage as a profession. Look at me. I am an experienced actress
and yet I can’t get an engagement. I’ve been trying ever since
January, and now it’s nearly April. All the managers say I’m too tall;
and you know, Maudie dear, you’re just as much the other way,
aren’t you? You and I want special parts written for us, that’s the
trouble.”
The little maid’s eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, Miss O’Finn,” she sobbed, “you’ve been and gone and
shattered my life’s ambishings with them words. You see, when I’m
reciting I feel as if my head was going through the ceiling, but of
course what you feels and what you is ain’t the same, is they? Still,
it’s always the darkest hour before the dawn, they say, and I’ve still
got my young man. When I see him on Sunday night I’ll tell him as
I’ve given up my life’s ambishings, and he can start saving up for
merridge as soon as he likes. It’s broke my heart, but he’ll be happy.
He was always afraid he’d lose me, Miss O’Finn. He never could
believe I’d remain a simple milkman’s wife when I become famous,
and on’y last week he let a lovely double-bed go by because he
didn’t want to have it on his hands and me out of his reach.”
A few days after Nancy had destroyed Maudie’s dramatic
ambitions she received a letter from Mrs. Pottage.

3 Starboard Alley,
Greenwich.
April 1st
!
My dear Mrs. Fuller,
Its’ a nice day to choose to write a letter to any one but
there you won’t get it till April 2nd so you won’t think any
one’s sending you a live mouse or any silly joke like that.
Well, here we are as well as we can be thank God—
Letitsha is in the pink there’s no doubt about it and so am I
but this is not what I am writing about. Last week we had
the Lights of Home company at the Royal and Mr. Plimmer
who was acting in it was lodging with me and this week
they finished and he’s staying on with me because he
says he’s never been so comfortable in his life but he’s
took a great fancy to Letitchia and that’s a fact—He raves
about her and I won’t say I’m surprised because she’s
been on the Top of her Form and making us all laugh fit to
Bust. Mrs. B. says she’s laughed a lot in her life and which
is a fact but she don’t think she ever laughed so much as
what she has this week. She split her stays one afternoon
—They went off like a Cannon—Talk about a royal Salute
—And Mr. Plimmer says she’s a born actress and ought to
be on the boards without delay—well, he’s taking out a
company himself in a drama he’s written something after
the stile of East Lynne well about the same as far as I can
see only a bit more East in it from what I can make out
and he wants Letissia for the child and you for the Mother.
 He’ll write plenty of stuff for her because he says She’ll
Knock Them. Well, I’m bound to say I think she will and
Mrs. B’s convinsed of it: So I gave him your address and
he’s going to pop up to London to-morrow if you’ll make
arrangements to be in I’ve given him your address. What a
voice that Kid has he said to me Mrs. Pottage. Good God
it would reach to the back row of the gallery in any theatre.
Well I hope this’ll be the end of all your troubles and which
I think it will dearie—
Letitsia sends her love and so do I and I hope this is an
end of all your worries even if it is April Fools Day. Mrs. B.
sends all the best and so do I.
Your loving old
Johanna Pottage.

Here was a most unmistakable turning out of this long lane, Nancy
thought, a turning at so sharp an angle that the prospect of taking it
alarmed her imagination, so far did it seem likely to lead Letizia and
herself away from the direction in which Bram and she had been
travelling together. Nancy’s mind went back to her own appearance
at the age of six in Green Bushes. Her mother was no longer alive to
witness that first performance of a squeaky-voiced little boy in the
old-fashioned melodrama, of which she could remember nothing
except the hazy picture of the heroine dressed in a Fenimore Cooper
get-up as she came running down the bank, gun in hand. Her father
had made arrangements for her to live with the baggage man and
his wife during that tour. She had liked Mr. Ballard, a big fat man with
a very much waxed moustache, but little Mrs. Ballard with her cold
hooked nose, pink and half-transparent at the tip, had been
antipathetic. She could see her now sighing and sewing all day. If
Letizia did go on the stage as a child, she should not act away from
her mother at any rate. It would always have to be a joint
engagement.
Maudie interrupted Nancy’s pictures of the past by coming up to
say that a gentleman was down in the shop and wanted to see her.
 “I didn’t know if you’d have liked me to have brought him up here,
Miss O’Finn? I hope I done right in asking him to wait a minute in the
shop?”
“Good gracious, yes, Maudie! He couldn’t come up here. I’ll be
down very soon.”
Nancy looked at the card: Rodney Plimmer. “Custody of the Child”
Company. Evidently that was the play he was presently going to take
out on tour. Nancy put on her hat and coat, for if she was going to
talk business with Mr. Plimmer they would certainly have to talk
elsewhere than in Unicorn Street.
The actor was turning over the pages of one of Mrs. Askin’s
tattered folios when she came down into the shop.
“Now don’t tell me you’ve got another appointment, Miss O’Finn,”
he said. “I’ve been hoping you would come out to lunch with me.”
“Oh, no, I haven’t any appointment, and I’ll be delighted to lunch
with you.”
“Capital! Then, if you’re ready, shall we wend our way toward
some little place where we can talk far from the madding crowd?”
There was nothing remarkable about Mr. Plimmer’s appearance.
The clean-shaven face, the full mobile lips, the tendency toward
sleekness, the suggestion that his clothes were being worn with a
little too much of an air, the moist impressionable eyes, all these
traits were sufficiently familiar to Nancy among the men of her
profession.
“Now, have you any prejudices on the subject of restaurants?” Mr.
Plimmer inquired with rich voice and elaborate manner.
“None whatever.”
“You don’t pine for music and such like gaieties?”
She shook her head.
“Then, let me see.” He paused with such dramatic abruptness in
the middle of the pavement that an errand-boy who was just behind
bumped into his broad back. “Why don’t you look where you’re
going, my lad?” he asked with exaggerated dignity.
“Why don’t you look where you’re stopping?” the errand-boy
retorted and hurried on, whistling indignantly.
“Self-possession is nine points of the law,” said Mr. Plimmer. “By
the way, that’s not bad, eh, Miss O’Finn? I think I’ll note that down as
rather a good line.” He took out a small pocket-book, and entered the
remark. “A word in the hand is worth two in the head,” he observed
with a smile; and as he did not bother to enter this line under the
other Nancy supposed that he used it frequently.
“Then, let me see,” said Mr. Plimmer, returning to the original
attitude which had provoked this diversion. “I have it! Kettner’s.
You’ve no prejudice against Kettner’s?”
“None whatever. I’ve never been there,” Nancy replied.
“Never been to Kettner’s? Oh, then of course we must go to
Kettner’s. No music at Kettner’s. And if there’s one thing I hate it’s
chops and sonata sauce.”
Mr. Plimmer blinked his moist eyes as if he were dazzled by the
brilliancy of his own wit.
“And now what about a hansom?”
The drive from the corner of Theobalds Road to Kettner’s was a
strain on Nancy, because Mr. Plimmer was evidently extremely
nervous in hansoms and talked all the time of the close shaves he
had had when driving in them. If ever their driver showed the least
audacity in passing another vehicle, Mr. Plimmer would draw in his
breath with a hiss, or put his hand out over the apron as if he would
seize the too urgent horse by the tail and stop his going too fast.
However, Kettner’s was reached in safety, and Mr. Plimmer was no
sooner on the pavement than he recovered all his suave composure
so that he entered the restaurant with the air of knowing exactly
where to go and what to order, whenever he should choose to eat in
London.