000			01629cam a2200157 4500
100	1		_aPISCHEDDA Costantino
700			_aCHEON Andrew
245			_aDoes plausible deniability work?: _b assessing the effectiveness of unclaimed coercive acts in the Ukraine war/ _cPischedda Costantino and Andrew Cheon
260			_c2023
520			_aStates conduct unclaimed coercive acts, imposing costs on adversaries to signal resolve but denying (or not claiming) responsibility. Some scholars posit that unclaimed acts have considerable potential to coerce targets, while containing escalation risks. Others suggest that unclaimed coercive efforts tend to fail and trigger escalation. We assess these competing perspectives about the effects of unclaimed attacks with a vignette experiment exposing US-based respondents to a scenario where, after Russia warns of unpredictable consequences if NATO continues providing weapons to Ukraine, an explosion occurs at a NATO base in Poland used to funnel weapons to Ukraine. Intelligence agencies and independent analysts identify Russia as the likely culprit, while not ruling out the possibility of an accident. We randomize whether Russia claimed or denied responsibility for the explosion and find that unclaimed acts have lower coercive leverage than claimed ones, but the two do not significantly differ in escalation risk.
650			_aUKRAINE WAR
773			_aContemporary Security Policy: _gVol 44, No 3, July 2023, pp345-371
598			_aUKRAINE
856			_uhttps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13523260.2023.2212464/ _zclick here for full text
945			_i70174-1001 _rN _sY
999			_c43244 _d43244