Multilateral Negotiations

For war to occur at least one of the two parties must see a net potential gain from war under certain circumstances and second, there must be a barrier to make negotiation so difficult that a “credible agreement cannot be reached.” Multilateral settings, consisting of three or more states, must try to come to an agreement with the possibility of alleviating a common problem, however, the outcome is not always successful. The outcome depends on the specifications of the negotiation process and many other factors. One solid aspect in the failure of multilateral negotiations is when one state has more information than the others (asymmetric information). Asymmetric information can come in a variety of sources such as the amount of strength a …show more content…
Liberals, however, believe that it is morally defensible to use constrained and proportional armed forces to protect one’s country, however, as one country builds up its weaponry, other countries are building weapons that are bigger and stronger, thus forming an “arms race” making the threat of war a competition. Constructivists believe that popular ideas have meaningful consequences, though they complement the liberal emphasis on institutional and normative paths to …show more content…
St. Augustine believed that a Christian could honorably serve God while fighting a just war. However, if Christians are to be commanded, by the government, to fight in an immoral war they must do it in a justifiable manner. According to Thomas Aquinas, the war should only be fought for the common good to prevent a greater evil than that being fought against. It should be fought for a just purpose not self-gain, with peace as the central purpose. With multilateral and bilateral agreements at the forefront of war, we must consider what the study of international relations brings forth to us, that is, the empirical law of the “democratic peace theory”. The theory suggests that democracies are reluctant to engage in armed conflict with other formally identified democracies as a way to discourage state-sponsored violence. Immanuel Kant’s work, “Perceptual Peace”, tells us that peace is a reasonable outcome of the interaction of states with a republican form of government. He believes the republican constitution “gives a favorable prospect for the desired consequence, i.e., perpetual peace.