World Politics: Interests, Interactions, Institutions CH 5-6

Alliances

institutions that help their members cooperate military in the event of a war.

Balance of power: a situation in which the military capabilities of two states or groups of states are roughly equal.

Bandwagon Effect

a strategy in which states join forces with the stronger side in a conflict.

NATO

an alliance formed in 1949 among the US, Canada, and most of the states of Western Europe in response to the threat posed by the Soviet Union. The alliance requires members to consider an attack on one of them as an attack on all of them.

Warsaw Pact

a military alliance formed in 1955 to bring together the Soviet Union and its Cold War allies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. It dissolved on May 31, 1991 with the collapse of the USSR.

League of Nations

a collective security organization founded in 1919 after WWI. Ended in 1946—was replaced by the UN.

Collective Security Organizations

broad based institutions that promote peace and security among their members. Ex: UN and League of Nations.

Genocide

intentional and systematic killing aimed at eliminating an identifiable group of people, such as an ethnic group or religious group.

Humanitarian Interventions

interventions designed to relieve humanitarian crises stemming from civil conflicts or large-scale human rights abuses.

Security Council

the main governing body of the UN, identifies threats to the international community and prescribes the organizations response, including military and/or economic sanctions.

Permanent 5 (P5)

the five permanent members of the UN Security Council: The US, Great Britain, France, Russia (USSR) and China.

Veto Power

the ability to prevent the passage of a measure through a unilateral act, such as a single negative vote.

Peace-Enforcement Operation

a military operation in which force is used to make and/or enforce peace among warring parties that have not agreed to end their fighting.

Peacekeeping Organization

an operation in which troops and observers are deployed to monitor a ceasefire or peace agreement.

Separatism

the desire to create an independent state on territory carved from an existing state.

Irredentism

the desire to detach a region from one country and attach it to another, usually because of shared ethnic or religious ties.

Proxy War

a conflict in which two opposing states "fight" by supporting opposite sides in war, such as the government and rebels in the third state.

Insurgency

a military strategy in which small, often lightly armed units engage in hit-and-run attacks against military, government, and civilian targets.

Terrorism

the use or threatened use of violence against noncombatant targets by individuals or nonstate groups for political ends.

Extremists

actor whose interests are not widely shared by others; individuals or groups that are politically weak relative to the demands they make.

Asymmetric Warfare

armed conflict between actors with highly unequal military capabilities, such as when terrorists or rebel groups fight strong states.

Coercion

a strategy that induces policy change by imposing or threatening to impose costs, usually pain or other harm, on the target.

Provocation

a strategy of terrorist attacks intended to provoke the target government into making a disproportionate response that alienates moderates in the terrorists' home society or in other sympathetic audiences.

Spoiling

a strategy of terrorist attacks intended to sabotage a prospective peace between the target and moderate leadership from the terrorists' home society.

Outbidding

a strategy of terrorist attacks designed to demonstrate a capability for leadership and commitment relative to another, similar terrorist group.