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How do adversaries communicate? How do diplomatic encounters shape international orders and determine whether states go to war? Diplomacy, from alliance politics to nuclear brinkmanship, almost always operates through a few forms of signaling: choosing the scope of demands on another state, risking a breach in relations, encouraging a protégé, staking one's reputation, or making a diplomatic approach all convey specific sorts of information. Through rich history and analyses of diplomatic network data from the Confidential Print of the British Empire, Trager demonstrates the lasting effects that diplomatic encounters have on international affairs. The Concert of Europe, the perceptions of existential threat that formed before the World Wars, the reduction in Cold War tensions known as détente, and the institutional structure of the current world order were all products of inferences about intentions drawn from the statements of individuals represented as the will of states. Diplomacy explains how closed-door conversations create stable orders and violent wars

Two broad traditions of scholarship can be distinguished in the vast literature on the diplomacy of conflict. The diplomatic communication tradition takes the difficulty of credible communication between adversaries as its central problem and analyzes the conditions for informative costly, costless, and inadvertent signals as well as the effects on conflict processes of these different forms of communication. A body of empirical work, focused particularly on public coercive diplomacy and alliances, also belongs to this approach. The other tradition is the rhetorical-argumentative, which focuses on rhetorical style, justificatory argument, and the effects of modes of discourse. These traditions have offered very different insights and, in some areas, complement and reinforce each other.

Two broad traditions of scholarship can be distinguished in the vast literature on the diplomacy of conflict. The diplomatic communication tradition takes the difficulty of credible communication between adversaries as its central problem and analyzes the conditions for informative costly, costless, and inadvertent signals as well as the effects on conflict processes of these different forms of communication. A body of empirical work, focused particularly on public coercive diplomacy and alliances, also belongs to this approach. The other tradition is the rhetorical-argumentative, which focuses on rhetorical style, justificatory argument, and the effects of modes of discourse. These traditions have offered very different insights and, in some areas, complement and reinforce each other.

How does the scope of costless threats convey information about resolve to adversaries? Analysis of a model similar to Fearon demonstrates that higher demands increase perceptions of a state's resolve to fight for more favorable outcomes when bargaining is such that both sides share in the benefits of avoiding conflict, in contrast to the ultimatum game, and making a credible high demand does not lead to a favorable outcome with certainty. Interestingly, compromise offers will be made even though they increase an adversary's perception that the compromising state would be willing to make an even greater concession. In contrast to many other signaling mechanisms described in the literature, signaling of this sort does not depend on risking war and often reduces the probability of conflict.

AbstractStates often negotiate with each other over more than one issue at the same time. This article presents a model of multidimensional international crisis bargaining. Unlike unidimensional bargaining, with two issue dimensions states can send costless signals about their resolve that have dramatic effects on other states' beliefs and actions. One reason is that when states claim a willingness to fight over an issue they in fact are not willing to fight over, they may lose the opportunity to get what they really want without conflict. As a result, when there is a chance that adversaries may each be willing to fight over two issues, the states can even sometimes convey with certainty when they will fight for both issues. The model also leads to some surprising comparative statics, for example, decreases in the probability that the target is willing to fight can increase the probability of war.