Power Plays

Reviews / Votes

'The success of the World Trade Organization in ensuring free trade has inadvertently shifted states' coercive strategies toward other areas like foreign aid, regulation, and military intervention. This is just one of the many insights in Allison Carnegie's excellent book, which challenges much of what we thought we knew about international institutions and international cooperation. Power Plays - with its mix of formal modeling, careful data analyses, and country case studies - will quickly become required reading among scholars of international relations.' David A. Singer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 'Allison Carnegie shows, with both quantitative and qualitative evidence, that multilateral institutions - particularly the World Trade Organization (WTO) but others as well - help states credibly to commit not to extort concessions from partners after international agreements that generate costly investments. Power Plays is a theoretically original and methodologically convincing addition to the literature on multilateral institutions and the world political economy.' Robert Keohane, Princeton University, and author of After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy 'In this concise and theoretically sophisticated book, Allison Carnegie explains the dynamics of trade as a tool of coercive diplomacy. Bringing together insights from international political economy, security, and international organization, she shows how the WTO reduces economic underinvestment between states that are vulnerable to coercive diplomacy, and how reducing the coercive use of trade shifts international pressure towards other methods. This book is a nuanced and important work for all students of international relations.' Susan D. Hyde, Yale University