Contentious Collaboration: Great Power Cooperation in the Balkans.

This project combines social theories concerning communicative action and the influence of culture on states’ security policies to examine multinational crisis management in the Balkans through the 1990s. By examining how the United States, Russia, Great Britain, Germany, and France collaborated in response to the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo I have been able to isolate specific, security-related cultural incompatibilities that contributed to their inability to collaborate quickly and effectively. My central claim is that each state possesses a distinct ‘security-related culture? that provides state leaders with understandings about which actions are possible, appropriate, and favorable. How these understandings are articulated in different institutional settings account for whether collaboration will proceed effectively or contentiously.? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]