Dissertation Defense: Jacob Jaffe
Candidate: Jacob Jaffe
Major: Government
Advisor: Daniel Nexon, Ph.D.
Title: The Causes of Existential International Emnity
In this dissertation, I undertake three closely linked research projects. First, I make the case for fundamentally restructuring the literature on international rivalries, or cases of long-lasting conflict between states. Although I find flaws in all existing empirical and theoretical arguments for using ‘rivalry’ as a distinct variable in international relations scholarship, a careful analysis of the statistics and intuitions marshalled in support of those arguments yields compelling grounds for adopting a modified variable. This variable is the degree of inconsistency between states’ preferences, considered in isolation from the strategies chosen by states to realize their preferences. I label this kind of inconsistency ‘enmity,’ refer to its extensiveness as its ‘breadth,’ and describe the broadest enmities as ‘existential’ ones.
Second, I propose a research agenda for a rivalry literature reoriented toward investigating the broadening of enmity. I propose three explanatory models of enmity broadening: a stochastic model, drawing largely on structural realism, depicts enmities as accumulations of unrelated disagreements. A spiral model, drawing largely on social constructivism, suggests that initial disagreements spur increasingly hostile states to find additional areas of disagreement. And an ideological model, drawing on a new approach that views actors’ political preferences as reflections of their underlying philosophies, explains particularly broad enmities as reflections of deep-seated philosophical inconsistencies between states.
Third, I demonstrate the practicality of my proposed research agenda by conducting a case study to test these explanatory models. In the case study, I trace the processes responsible for the emergence and broadening of several Arab-Israeli enmities, and conclude that my ideological model best accounts for these enmities: the stochastic model cannot explain why distinct Israeli and Arab societies emerged at all, and the spiral model cannot explain why low-level rural conflict resulted in broader enmities between urban policymakers. However, the ideological model fills these gaps in the other models’ historical accounts by explaining Arab leaders’ preferences as the result of their understanding of Zionism as the implementation of a philosophical principle – an unnatural, unspiritual materialism – that threatened their existence and thus inclined them toward the broadest possible enmity with an emerging Israel.