Although international relations scholarship emphasizing the role of social constructs such as norms and culture has established a beachhead in the area of security studies, 1 it has yet to take on another bastion of the rational materialist approach: studies of coercive international bargaining. Scholarship in this area, ranging from the work of Thomas Schelling to James Fearon, has long argued that bargaining outcomes re ect the material costs and bene ts faced by participants in negotiations. 2 Participants can in uence outcomes, these models assume, only through tactics such as credible threats and side payments that reshape the material context of negotiations.The assumption of rational materialism has been entrenched in the study of coercive international bargaining for the same reason it was widely adopted in the area of security studies: because international relations scholars in both areas have bought into the view that the anarchic nature of the international system forces nations to operate in a self-help world: trust no one and concentrate on the all-important aim of maintaining your security by maximizing your own relative power. Given this starting point, studies of coercive international bargaining have naturally focused on the concrete, material context of negotiations: the overall power resources of each side,