Oriana Skylar Mastro, The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime
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Oriana Skylar Mastro, The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime (Cornell University Press, 2019), 216 p., $39.95 (Hardback) Kai He 1 # Journal of Chinese Political Science/Association of Chinese Political Studies 2020
Human history is a history of war. How a war ends has been an intriguing and crucial question for scholars to answer in the fields of International Relations (IR) and Security Studies. Talking or negotiating in wartime is one of the key steps to terminate a war between two belligerents. When and how states talk to the enemy, however, is an understudied topic. Oriana Skylar Mastro’s new book, The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime, fills this scholarship gap by providing “the first comprehensive framework for understanding when and how states incorporate talking with the enemy into their war-fighting strategies” (6). Mastro identifies two types of state negotiating behavior in wartime, “open diplomatic posture”—talk to the enemy, and “closed diplomatic posture”—refuse to negotiate. The “costly conversations thesis” introduced in the book argues that policymakers will make a decision on which one to choose based on their calculations of the strategic costs associated with negotiations. The “strategic costs of conversation” are determined by two factors: the likelihood of adverse inference—whether the enemy will interpret weakness from an open diplomatic posture; and the enemy’s strategic capacity— how the enemy may change its strategy in response to such an interpretation. Mastro concludes that “only if a state thinks that it has adequately demonstrated strength and resiliency to avoid adverse inference and that its enemy does not have the capacity to prolong, escalate, or intensify the war in response will it choose an open diplomatic posture” (7). In order to test this “costly conversations thesis,” Mastro conducts four case studies: China in the Korea War, China in the Sino-Indian War, India in the Sino-Indian War, and North Vietnam in the Vietnam War. Through examining how policymakers in different countries calculated the “cost of conversation” formulated by the “likelihood of adverse inference” and “the enemy’s strategic capacity”, Mastro explains the variations of diplomatic posture in these four cases. In particular, China and North Vietnam changed their diplomatic postures from closed to open in the Korean War and * Kai He [email protected]; [email protected]
1
Griffith Asia Institute and Center for Governance and Public Policy, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia
K. He
the Vietnam War respectively. In the Sino-Indian War, China kept an open diplomatic posture but India refused to talk throughout the whole process. The Costs of Conversation makes two scholarly contributions to the field. First, the book paves a new path in the study of negotiation in wartime. Talking is not cheap and useless in wartime. States have to calculate the strategic costs associated with talking before make a decision on whether to meet the enemy on the negotiati
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