Which Security Dilemma? Mitigating Ethnic Conflict: The Case of Croatia

Since the beginning of the cold war, the concept of the security dilemma has been fundamental to International Relations (ir) literature. Although often contested, the basic nature of the concept, according to Barry Posen, rests upon the notion that the actions of a state to enhance its own security produce reactions that, can make another less secure. ¹ This action-reaction dynamic is predicated on an "inadvertency" of the first state's behavior. Hence, Robert Jervis remark that "most of the ways in which a country seeks to increase its security have the unintended effect of decreasing the security of others." ² "Unintended consequences" implies that decision makers find themselves in security predicaments that are not of their own making. In this regard, Charles Glaser identifies the concept as "the key to understanding how in an anarchical international system states with fundamentally compatible goals still end up in competition and war. ³