Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book builds on existing realist, liberal, and rationalist concepts of balancing, bandwagoning, hiding, commitment problems, and asymmetric information to craft explanations about how states respond to potential threats. It claims that commitment problems are a necessary cause of all balancing. Commitment problems are an important rationalist explanation of conflict in the international system. The book explores the impact of uncertainty surrounding the value of delay in balancing. It is tempting to think about the decision to balance or indeed to bandwagon or hide as a onetime decision, but this is not the case. The book explores what drives states to bandwagon with potential challengers. Bandwagoning is often seen as the opposite side of the coin from balancing and thus to understand balancing behavior it is necessary to have a firm grasp on bandwagoning as well.