Allen, Susan Hannah and Tiffny Vincent. 2011.”Bombing to Bargain? The Air War
for Kosovo.” Foreign Policy Analysis 7(1): 1-26.
ABSTRACT
Given the prominence of air power as a foreign policy tool, we attempt to clearly link the military process of dropping munitions on the target state to the accompanying diplomatic process between the attacker and the adversary. To explore the connection between the two processes, we look at the 1999 NATO bombing campaign over Kosovo, which allows us to isolate the influence of air power. Why were 78 days of NATO bombing needed to convince Milošević to make concessions? Comparing expectations from both bargaining models and traditional coercive models, we find that the intensity of bombing, the duration of bombing, and mediation were important predictors of the Serbian government’s behavior during the Kosovo crisis.
