Friends in Need: Burden-Sharing in the Gulf War

Who contributes to alliances and why? Is a state's relative capabilities the major factor in determining participation? How do perceived threats, dependence on other alliance members, domestic politics and learned experience from analogous situations matter? For the most part, questions like these have been answered by using NATO as the example. Being the most well-known and long-standing alliance in contemporary history, NATO has always been regarded as the standard. While this is understandable, given NATO's role during the Cold War period, this reliance on NATO as a model has resulted in a gap in our understanding of burden-sharing more generally. Alliances will be looser and more ad hoc in the post-Cold War international system than they were between 1947 and 1991. The editors of this collection recognize this situation and the key policy issues it raises with regard to multilateral conflict management. In Friends in Need, the authors assembled study alliances in a more general sense, using the coalition that was established to deal with the Gulf War as their example. Looking individually at all of the countries that took part in the coalition, the authors provide a richly-detailed study of alliances and the way they work now. Friends in Need: Burden-Sharing in the Gulf War is an indispensable book for those individuals seeking to understand multilateral conflict management at the end of the twentieth century.