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Rather than study all varieties of military intervention, the authors chose to study the very specific subclass of “protracted interventions.” These are interventions that proved longer, more costly, and less successful than had been anticipated when undertaken.

The designation of the subclass was determined by the research problem. Their objective was to understand better how states entered into such interventions and why they became prolonged and costly. The authors provide a detailed statement regarding the importance of prolonged military interventions. These tend to be “seminal events” due to their domestic and international consequences. They are a persistent phenomenon. Ideology plays a role that exacerbates the phenomenon, particularly during the Cold War, but there are alternative explanations as well.

Three explicit criteria were employed for selecting appropriate cases. The cases chosen cover a spectrum of protracted interventions. The authors do not hold these cases to be a representative sample of all protracted wars and, quite appropriately, the findings are not extrapolated to characterize the entire universe of protracted interventions.

The study was explicitly designed in accordance with the procedures of the structured, focused type of comparative case study; it utilized a set of standard questions to ask of each case and also employed process-tracing.

LISA L. MARTIN, COERCIVE COOPERATION: EXPLAINING MULTILATERAL ECONOMIC SANCTIONS. PRINCETON, N.J.: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1992.

The author focuses on a well-defined, quite circumscribed subclass of instances in the post-World War II period of efforts by states to cooperate in imposing economic sanctions. 614 She contrasts cases in which states did or did not cooperate in imposing economic sanctions. Several research objectives were formulated: (1) Under what conditions do states cooperate to impose economic sanctions? (2) What are the ways in which institutions can contribute to and facilitate such cooperation—what are the underlying causal mechanisms? (3) What different types of cooperation problems can be identified and differentiated?

The dependent variable in the study is the level of cooperation given by other states to the initiator of sanctions; this is determined by the number of countries that also invoke sanctions. The author proposes the additional question of whether such cooperative efforts prove to be successful.

Martin effectively uses existing theories from the neorealist and neoliberal schools to identify five relevant independent variables. She argues that these two schools can be combined to explain a greater class of events. A multi-method research strategy is employed that combines and skillfully coordinates game theory, a large-N statistical study of some ninety-nine instances of attempts at sanctions cooperation, and four well-chosen case studies. These cases were selected to highlight the effects of three factors: motivation, costs, and bipolarity. They included U.S. unilateral sanctions on behalf of human rights in Latin America, European Community sanctions against Argentina in the Falkland Islands war, Western technology export sanctions against the Soviet Union following the invasion of Afghanistan, and the attempted gas-pipeline sanctions during the Polish crisis in 1982. Two of the cases involved bipolarity and two did not; two of the cases involved international institutional support and two did not; two of the cases had significant costs to the sanctions initiator, two did not.

The author uses the four case studies to assess the hypotheses generated by the large-N study and also, she emphasizes, to establish causal relationships. Of particular interest for the present study’s emphasis on the importance of process-tracing is the author’s argument on behalf of her multi-method research strategy:

I cannot, however, fully address many of the most interesting questions about cooperation through