punishment (or cost imposition) approach works by inducing a vulnerable state to capitulate by imposing costs: pain and loss. It succeeds when the attacker is able to impose more costs than the target is able or willing to bear in order to protect whatever the attacker is demanding. Crucially, the target’s ability to defy the attacker includes not only its indigenous capacity for resistance, important as that is, but its ability to secure relief from third parties. When the target is subject to intolerable costs and lacks foreign support—or believes that any such support will prove
...more
