JOURNAL OF CONFLICT RESOLUTIONStone / GAME THEORY The Use and Abuse of Game Theory in International Relations THE THEORY OF MOVES

The author argues that the theory of moves, which has gained popularity in recent years as an alternative to game-theoretic analysis of strategic interaction, is fundamentally flawed. The theory’s adherents argue that it makes theoretical progress by endogenizing the structure of games and introducing new ways of ana-lyzing repeated interactions. The author analyzes the theory of moves from a game-theoretic perspective and challenges its theoretical claims. The author then reanalyzes several recent articles that have used the theory of moves, showing that its application to empirical cases is strained and that game theory can provide models that do a better job of fitting the stories the authors tell about them. The theory of moves seeks to offer a new way of analyzing the 2 × 2 games that have become a ubiquitous feature of how we think about international relations. In particu-lar, they hope to inject a dynamic element into game theory, which Steven Brams (1994) and his collaborators regard as an essentially static enterprise (Zeager and Bascom 1996, 471). Brams believes that he has developed a powerful new tool for reanalyzing the strategic situations that international relations specialists have consid-ered important in our field and that his approach is able to capture nuances of politics that game theory cannot. Brams claims that (1) the theory of moves generates ne