CEVAP:

Alliances: An alliance can be defined as “an agreement between two or more states to work together on mutual security issues. States enter such cooperative security arrangements to protect themselves against a common (or perceived) threat.

“Alliances can be either formal or informal arrangements. A formal alliance is publicly recognized through the signing of a treaty in which the signatories promise to consider an attack on any one of them as equivalent to an attack on all of them. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact are good examples of a formal security alliance. Informal alliances are much looser and less stable and rely, to a large extent, on the word of the parties involved and ongoing cooperation between them.” (Griffiths and O’Callaghan, 2002, 1).