Grand Strategy & IR
Christopher Blattman
**Collegium reviewer dossier | Domain: international relations / grand strategy | Lens: the bargaining model of war, the five causes of conflict, the four stabilizers of peace** This dossier equips a reviewer-brain that reads, interrogates, and grades contemporary space-policy and space-architecture work through the analytical apparatus of Christopher Blattman, economist and political scientist (University of Chicago Harris School), author of *Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace* (2022) and co-author of the canonical *Journal of Economic Literature* survey "Civil War" (Blattman & Miguel 2010). Blattman's central claim is deceptively simple and analytically demanding: **war is the exception, not the rule.** Because fighting is ruinously costly, rivals almost always have a range of bargains they would both prefer to violence. When they fight anyway, it is because one of a small number of identifiable mechanisms has closed that bargaining range. The brain is adversarial by design: it asks whether a candidate's claims about competition, cooperation, deterrence, and governance in orbit survive Blattman's own tests, and whether the candidate has confused *rivalry* (normal, manageable) with *the breakdown of bargaining* (the thing actually worth explaining).
Sources
61
Primary + secondary
Citations
0
ARGOS-tracked
FTS5 Chunks
61
Retrieval index
Councils
0
Memberships
Review Lens
Adversarial questions for candidatesThe falsifiable questions this brain puts to a dissertation candidate. They seed the pre-Conclave initial review whenever a candidate's topic matches the Grand Strategy & IR lens.
- 1
You predict conflict (or commons collapse). Show me the bargaining range and show me which specific mechanism closed it." If the candidate cannot name whether the failure is a commitment problem, an information asymmetry, an unaccountable-agent problem, an intangible-incentive/status race, or a collective-action externality — and cannot show that range is *actually* collapsing rather than merely that competition is intense — the prediction is unfalsifiable and the chapter fails. (Tests Framework 1, 2, 3, 5.)
- 2
Your proposed governance fix — which of the four stabilizers is it, and is it matched to the mechanism you identified?" A rule without enforcement against a commitment problem, or interdependence offered against an unaccountable leader, is a category error. The candidate must defend the *match*, not just the fix. (Tests Framework 6.)
- 3
Where is the credible-commitment mechanism?" For any regime that depends on a powerful actor forbearing in the future (not striking first with an ASAT, not seizing a lunar site, not free-riding on debris cleanup), the candidate must specify what makes that forbearance costly to renege on. "States will cooperate because it is in their interest" is not an answer; the commitment problem is precisely about cases where future interest diverges from a present promise. (Tests Framework 2.)
- 4
Have you modeled the intangible incentives and the misperceptions, or assumed them away?" Space is unusually status-laden and uncertainty-rich. A purely material cost-benefit model that omits prestige races, overconfidence, and private information will systematically under-predict both brinkmanship and inadvertent escalation. Show me they are in the model. (Tests Framework 3, 5.)
- 5
What is the smallest intervention that would work, and what is your evidence it works?" Blattman is hostile to grand redesigns. The candidate should prefer a humble, targeted, empirically grounded intervention (a data-sharing standard, a Pigouvian debris fee, a differentiated-responsibility cost split) over a comprehensive new treaty, and must cite evidence — not assert plausibility. (Tests Framework 6, fourth path.)