Taking Resolve Seriously: Three Theories of Willpower in International Politics.

Resolve is a ubiquitous concept in IR theory, used to explain everything from why states win wars to how they prevail during crisis bargaining, from theories of audience costs to analyses of asymmetric conflicts. Despite its prominence, the concept remains heavily undertheorized, and is often used in inconsistent ways. I connect the IR literatures on resolve to a growing body of work on willpower and self-control from elsewhere in the social sciences to suggest that there have been two types of "stories" social scientists can tell about resolve - an inside, dispositional account, and an outside, situational one - but that neither one is sufficient by itself, and that taking resolve seriously requires us to think about the phenomenon in an interactionist manner that connects the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]