Arctic Yearbook 2014 | Page 440

Arctic Yearbook 2014 440 private information, states could for instance conclude to be militarily superior over their opponent, an issue which might increase their calculated probability to win or which could cause and underestimation of the opponent’s willingness to fight (ibid.: 390). Consequently, the higher the levels of private information, the less sure each side can be of the other’s minimum threshold for war and the more dangerously and riskily is any attempt to increase one’s own outcome within a bargaining situation. Finally, Fearon argues that the outbreak of interstate armed conflict might be the result of possibly existing commitment problems in which states consider themselves unable to uphold a previously reached agreement (ibid.: 401). Due to the limited scope of this article as well as the focus on CSBM’s military information exchanges and measures of verification, the impact of this aspect cannot sufficiently be addressed, but forms an interesting point of departure for further research. As the aspect of indivisible issues at stake has been refuted, this article will consequently focus on the impact of CSBMs to reduce the amount of private information on military capabilities in interstate bargaining situations. Defining the Concept of Confidence- and Security-Building Measures The OSCE’s Forum for Security Co-operation (FSC) defines CSBMs as “a comprehensive set of [...] information exchanges, means for compliance and verification, and different forms of military co-operation [which] aim to reduce the risk of conflicts, increase trust among the OSCE participating States, and contribute to greater openness and transparency in the field of military planning and military activities” (2011: 2). Military CSBMs thus differ from non-military Confidence-Building Measures (CBMs) as they are understood to focus on hard security issues of the first security dimension (OSCE - CPC 2012: 5) whilst CBMs rather address the “political, economic, environmental, social or cultural fields” (ibid.: 9) of mainly intrastate security (ibid.: 5): CSBMs CBMs Focus Military Non-Military Addressed Security Dimensions Politico-Military Political, Economic, Environmental, Social, Cultural Conflict Dimension Interstate Intrastate Table 1: Differentiation between CSBMs and CBMs (based on OSCE - CPC 2012: 5 ff.). While this article focuses on the reduction of private information on military capabilities, this constraint is not to neglect the “mutually reinforcing manner” (ibid.: 11) and possible spillover effects from an additional implementation of non-military CBMs, but rather a concession to the article’s limited scope. Confidence- & Security-Building Measures in the Arctic