Fog of war
Explaining Support for Combatants during Wartime: A Survey Experiment in Afghanistan
Jason Lyall, Graeme Blair & Kosuke Imai
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
How are civilian attitudes toward combatants affected by wartime victimization? Are these effects conditional on which combatant inflicted the harm? We investigate the determinants of wartime civilian attitudes towards combatants using a survey experiment across 204 villages in five Pashtun-dominated provinces of Afghanistan — the heart of the Taliban insurgency. We use endorsement experiments to indirectly elicit truthful answers to sensitive questions about support for different combatants. We demonstrate that civilian attitudes are asymmetric in nature. Harm inflicted by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) is met with reduced support for ISAF and increased support for the Taliban, but Taliban-inflicted harm does not translate into greater ISAF support. We combine a multistage sampling design with hierarchical modeling to estimate ISAF and Taliban support at the individual, village, and district levels, permitting a more fine-grained analysis of wartime attitudes than previously possible.
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The Demise of Peace Treaties in Interstate War
Tanisha Fazal
International Organization, October 2013, Pages 695-724
Abstract:
The conclusion of peace treaties following war was a norm of international politics for millennia. Since approximately 1950, however, the rate at which interstate wars have ended with a formal peace treaty has declined dramatically. I argue that the costs of concluding peace treaties have risen with the development of the modern canon of the law of war. Using an original data set, I find that states today prefer to avoid admitting to a state of war and risk placing their leaders and soldiers at risk of punishment for any violations of the law of war.
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The “Special Means of Collection”: The Missing Link in the Surprise of the Yom Kippur War
Uri Bar-Joseph
Middle East Journal, Autumn 2013, Pages 531-546
Abstract:
Israeli narratives of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War highlight the army’s lack of preparedness in the wake of a successful surprise attack by Egypt and Syria on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, despite assumptions of Israel’s intelligence gathering capabilities. Using recently declassified government documents, this article reveals a communication breakdown among Israel’s leadership over the operational status of a top secret means of surveillance. This intelligence failure provides the missing link between Israel’s wealth of information and the decision to avoid mobilizing the country’s reserve army until it was too late.
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Insights from a Database of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen Militants
Christine Fair
Journal of Strategic Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article uses a novel database of 1,625 posthumously published biographies of members of two Islamist militant organizations (Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM)), all of whom were killed in the course of carrying out militant attacks. In general, each biography provides data on the militant’s birthplace, education, recruitment, and training. The number of observations in this database is a full order of magnitude larger than those of previous databases assembled from militant biographies. While the sample of militants in this database is the product of multiple selection effects, analysis of the database undermines many common myths about Pakistani militants and casts doubt on current policy approaches to mitigating Islamist militancy in Pakistan.
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Signaling Alliance Commitments: Hand-Tying and Sunk Costs in Extended Nuclear Deterrence
Matthew Fuhrmann & Todd Sechser
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
How can states signal their alliance commitments? Although scholars have developed sophisticated theoretical models of costly signaling in international relations, we know little about which specific policies leaders can implement to signal their commitments. This article addresses this question with respect to the extended deterrent effects of nuclear weapons. Can nuclear states deter attacks against their friends by simply announcing their defense commitments? Or must they deploy nuclear weapons on a protégé’s territory before an alliance is seen as credible? Using a new dataset on foreign nuclear deployments from 1950 to 2000, our analysis reveals two main findings. First, formal alliances with nuclear states appear to carry significant deterrence benefits. Second, however, stationing nuclear weapons on a protégé’s territory does not bolster these effects. The analysis yields new insights about the dynamics of “hand-tying” and “sunk cost” signals in international politics.
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Adam Smith et al.
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Violent conflict destroys resources. It generates “destruction costs.” These costs have an important effect on individuals’ decisions to cooperate or conflict. We develop two models of conflict: one in which conflict's destruction costs are independent of individuals’ investments in “arms” — the tools of conflict — and another in which conflict's destruction costs depend on those investments. Our models demonstrate that when conflict's destruction costs are arms-dependent, conflict is more costly, making cooperation more likely. We test this prediction with a laboratory experiment in which subjects first choose how heavily to invest in arms and then choose whether to cooperate or conflict in an environment where interaction is repeated. In one set of treatments conflict's destruction costs are arms-independent. In another they are arms-dependent. Our experimental results support our models’ predictions. Compared to when conflict's destruction costs are arms-independent, when those costs are arms-dependent, cooperation increases by nearly a third.
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Wheeled Warriors: Explaining Variations in the Use of Violence by Private Security Companies in Iraq
Scott Fitzsimmons
Security Studies, Fall 2013, Pages 707-739
Abstract:
This article engages one of the most widely discussed but poorly understood aspects of the Iraq War: the use of violence by private security companies. It explains why, despite sharing several important characteristics — coming from the same general population of military and police veterans, working for the same client during the same time period, performing the same tasks under the same client-imposed rules of engagement, and facing the same kinds of threats in the same general operating environment — the personnel who worked for Blackwater, the chief protector of US State Department employees in Iraq, killed and seriously injured far more people than their counterparts in DynCorp. The article argues that Blackwater's personnel killed and seriously injured far more people in Iraq than their DynCorp counterparts because Blackwater maintained a relatively bellicose military culture that placed strong emphasis on norms encouraging its security teams to exercise personal initiative, proactive use of force, and an exclusive approach to security, which together motivated its personnel to use violence quite freely against anyone suspected of posing a threat. If the trends established during the Iraq and Afghan Wars continue, then private security companies will see extensive employment in future conflicts. These findings, consequently, have implications that extend beyond the Iraq War and the particular firms under study. Indeed, they indicate that governments and other future clients should analyze the military cultures of the firms vying for their business and use the results as a basis for deciding which firms to hire and, to a great extent, represent them in unstable conflict zones.
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Does Higher Education Decrease Support for Terrorism?
Jitka Malečková & Dragana Stanišić
Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
The paper examines the educational level of the part of the public in 16 Middle Eastern, Asian and African countries who justify suicide bombing and dislike regional/world powers, and its relationship with the occurrence of terrorism originating from the former countries and directed against the powers. We find that the share of highly educated people in this critical support group (regardless of gender and age) in a country is significantly correlated with the number of international terrorist acts carried out by individuals or groups from that country. The paper confirms that public opinion has an impact on terrorism and suggests that increasing education is not by itself a sufficient means of counter-terrorist policy.
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Public Opinion and the Democratic Peace
Michael Tomz & Jessica Weeks
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
One of the most striking findings in political science is the democratic peace: the absence of war between democracies. Some authors attempt to explain this phenomenon by highlighting the role of public opinion. They observe that democratic leaders are beholden to voters and argue that voters oppose war because of its human and financial costs. This logic predicts that democracies should behave peacefully in general, but history shows that democracies avoid war primarily in their relations with other democracies. In this article we investigate not whether democratic publics are averse to war in general, but whether they are especially reluctant to fight other democracies. We embedded experiments in public opinion polls in the United States and the United Kingdom and found that individuals are substantially less supportive of military strikes against democracies than against otherwise identical autocracies. Moreover, our experiments suggest that shared democracy pacifies the public primarily by changing perceptions of threat and morality, not by raising expectations of costs or failure. These findings shed light on a debate of enduring importance to scholars and policy makers.
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Send in the Corps! The Peace Corps and the Popular Perception of the United States in Latin America
Thomas Nisley
Politics & Policy, August 2013, Pages 536–562
Abstract:
This article examines the role of the Peace Corps in U.S. foreign policy and specifically explores the role of the Peace Corps in improving the popular image of the United States. I empirically test the hypothesis that the presence of a Peace Corps program enhances a positive of view of the United States held by the people of that country. Using logistic regression analysis, I show that the presence of Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) in a country positively influences individuals' views toward the United States. I analyze survey research from the region of Latin America using datasets from the Latinobarometer public opinion survey. Furthermore, I present a theoretical explanation to understand how the presence of PCVs can lead to an improved perception of the United States. This explanation draws from the contact hypothesis originally proposed by Gordon Allport.
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Questioning the Secular-Religious Cleavage in Palestinian Politics: Comparing Fatah and Hamas
Frode Løvlie
Politics and Religion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Following the 2007 war between Fatah and Hamas, Palestinian politics appears to have followed the regional trend where the competition between secularism and Islamism is developing into a major political cleavage. Through comparisons of the two movements' ideologies, however, the article questions the relevance of this religious-secular cleavage to explaining Palestinian factional politics. Fatah — the traditional hegemon in Palestinian politics and previously staunchly secularist — has turned increasingly religious in response to the spread of Islamism. Hamas for its part has shed its overly religious rhetoric, absolutist territorial claims, and insistence on a violent solution to the Palestinian problem, in tandem with the deradicalization of the Palestinian population. In finding that both movements have moved toward the center of the political spectrum to maximize support, the article concludes that their rivalry is best understood as a competition for the median voter rather than as an indication of political polarization.
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Territorial disputes and the politics of individual well-being
Steven Miller
Journal of Peace Research, November 2013, Pages 677-690
Abstract:
Multiple studies argue that the division of territory between states is a root cause of war in the international system. This is often understood as a function of the unique importance of territory at the level of the individual citizen, because the territory itself directly affects an individual’s well-being on multiple dimensions. As such, disputes over territory should also have consequences for an individual’s overall subjective appraisal of their well-being. This article argues that disputes over the allocation of territory between states do affect an individual’s subjective well-being, but not uniformly. Citizens in states routinely targeted by a territorial threat from a revisionist neighbor are generally unhappy. However, citizens in states that initiate territorial disputes are happier as a result of the aggressive foreign policy of the state leader to secure the coveted territorial good. This is first demonstrated using mixed effects modeling on data drawn from the World Values Survey and Correlates of War Militarized Interstate Dispute dataset. In addition, this article provides an illustration of variations in territorial threat and subjective well-being using the case of Nigeria, finding that Nigerians were happier when their state was initiating territorial threat against its neighbors and less happy during a period when Nigeria itself was the target of territorial threat. The analyses provided advance the territorial conflict research program by measuring the individual-level effects of territorial disputes. In addition, the findings add to a growing scholarship on the political determinants of an individual quality of life, sometimes considered the ‘ultimate dependent variable’ in social science.
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Contemporary American Military Technology and North Korea's Hard and Deeply Buried Targets (HDBTs)
Soon Ho Lee
Comparative Strategy, Fall 2013, Pages 387-401
Abstract:
Protected by networks of hard and deeply buried facilities, North Korea's asymmetric warfare assets have emerged as a real threat to the U.S.–Republic of Korea (ROK) alliance. As a solution, the U.S.–ROK alliance has developed military technologies to defeat North Korea's hard and deeply buried targets (HDBTs). However, questions remain regarding the efficiency of those technologies. By examining the contemporary status of North Korea's HDBTs and U.S. military technologies, this article proves that these newly developed military technologies are not very effective and that heavy reliance on technology is not a viable solution to North Korea's HDBTs.
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Diversionary Incentives, Rally Effects, and Crisis Bargaining
Philip Arena & Daehee Bak
Foreign Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
We do not yet have strong evidence that the rally effect motivates domestically vulnerable leaders to become engaged in international conflict. We draw upon mechanism design to argue that, if anything, diversionary incentives should be associated with a greater likelihood of being the target of disputes, though the conditions under which the result obtains are restrictive. Our analysis of all dyad-months involving the United States and its rivals for the period from 1956–1996 yields suggestive evidence of the unconventional behavior anticipated by our model, while failing to find evidence of patterns anticipated by either traditional diversionary accounts or strategic conflict avoidance. These results suggest that if we are to better understand international conflict by focusing on diversionary incentives, which may not be very useful, we should focus on the behavior described by our formal model rather than that anticipated by either traditional diversionary accounts or strategic conflict avoidance.
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Americans and Iraq, twelve years apart: Comparing support for the US wars in Iraq
Dana Williams & Suzanne Slusser
Social Science Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Significant differences exist in Americans’ support for force between the 1991 Persian Gulf War and 2003 Iraq War, even when holding all demographic variables constant. Nearly every group decreased their support from 1991 to 2003, including men and women, Whites and racial minorities, people with high school degrees or higher, nearly all age categories, and Democrat and Independent affiliated individuals. When examining potential causes for decreased support in the 2003 Iraq War, the “nature of the conflict” presents the strongest argument and evidence. The Persian Gulf War aimed to force the Iraqi army from Kuwait, while the Iraq War was aimed at changing the governmental regime of Iraq. The latter conflict was less socially acceptable than the former to Americans. These differences between the conflicts are the best explanation for the change in support, while other explanations, including the changing composition of the population and a less pro-military populace, are insufficient.
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Amy Hagopian et al.
PLoS Medicine, October 2013
Background: Previous estimates of mortality in Iraq attributable to the 2003 invasion have been heterogeneous and controversial, and none were produced after 2006. The purpose of this research was to estimate direct and indirect deaths attributable to the war in Iraq between 2003 and 2011.
Methods and Findings: We conducted a survey of 2,000 randomly selected households throughout Iraq, using a two-stage cluster sampling method to ensure the sample of households was nationally representative. We asked every household head about births and deaths since 2001, and all household adults about mortality among their siblings. We used secondary data sources to correct for out-migration. From March 1, 2003, to June 30, 2011, the crude death rate in Iraq was 4.55 per 1,000 person-years (95% uncertainty interval 3.74–5.27), more than 0.5 times higher than the death rate during the 26-mo period preceding the war, resulting in approximately 405,000 (95% uncertainty interval 48,000–751,000) excess deaths attributable to the conflict. Among adults, the risk of death rose 0.7 times higher for women and 2.9 times higher for men between the pre-war period (January 1, 2001, to February 28, 2003) and the peak of the war (2005–2006). We estimate that more than 60% of excess deaths were directly attributable to violence, with the rest associated with the collapse of infrastructure and other indirect, but war-related, causes. We used secondary sources to estimate rates of death among emigrants. Those estimates suggest we missed at least 55,000 deaths that would have been reported by households had the households remained behind in Iraq, but which instead had migrated away. Only 24 households refused to participate in the study. An additional five households were not interviewed because of hostile or threatening behavior, for a 98.55% response rate. The reliance on outdated census data and the long recall period required of participants are limitations of our study.
Conclusions: Beyond expected rates, most mortality increases in Iraq can be attributed to direct violence, but about a third are attributable to indirect causes (such as from failures of health, sanitation, transportation, communication, and other systems). Approximately a half million deaths in Iraq could be attributable to the war.
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Revisiting the “Problem From Hell”: Suicide Terror in Afghanistan
Henry Rome
Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, October 2013, Pages 819-838
Abstract:
A hallmark of the resurgence of antigovernment forces in Afghanistan was the mass introduction of suicide terrorist attacks. Between 2005 and 2006, the incidence of suicide bombings increased more than fivefold, marking a sea change in the Afghan conflict. Despite the initial jump in the volume of suicide attacks and the fear of more violence, the number of attacks actually flat-lined while the level of other attacks increased. This study will argue that it is the competency of the attackers employed in Afghanistan, not the politics, technology, or targeting, that best explains the static level of suicide attacks.
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The Credibility Paradox: Violence as a Double-Edged Sword in International Politics
Max Abrahms
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Implicit in the rationalist literature on bargaining over the last half-century is the political utility of violence. Given our anarchical international system populated with egoistic actors, violence is thought to promote concessions by lending credibility to their threats. From the vantage of bargaining theory, then, empirical research on terrorism poses a puzzle. For nonstate actors, terrorism signals a credible threat in comparison with less extreme tactical alternatives. In recent years, however, a spate of studies across disciplines and methodologies has nonetheless found that neither escalating to terrorism nor with terrorism encourages government concessions. In fact, perpetrating terrorist acts reportedly lowers the likelihood of government compliance, particularly as the civilian casualties rise. The apparent tendency for this extreme form of violence to impede concessions challenges the external validity of bargaining theory, as traditionally understood. In this study, I propose and test an important psychological refinement to the standard rationalist narrative. Via an experiment on a national sample of adults, I find evidence of a newfound cognitive heuristic undermining the coercive logic of escalation enshrined in bargaining theory. Due to this oversight, mainstream bargaining theory overestimates the political utility of violence, particularly as an instrument of coercion.
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Remittances and terrorism: A global analysis
Raechelle Mascarenhas & Todd Sandler
Defence and Peace Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper is the first global investigation of the relationship between remittances and terrorism. To discern this relationship, we draw terrorism event data from the Global Terrorism Database and International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorism Events. When a host of standard terrorism controls is employed, lagged remittances as a share of gross domestic product have a positive and significant impact on both domestic and transnational terrorist attacks. For the venue country’s viewpoint, lagged remittances have a greater marginal impact on domestic than on transnational terrorism. However, when we investigate remittances to the home country of the perpetrator, lagged remittances have the greatest marginal impact on transnational terrorism. Throughout our investigation, standard terrorism controls perform according to our priors and those of the literature, lending credence to the isolation of the impact of remittances. We also account for endogeneity concerns.
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The Economic Dimension of Cold War Intelligence-Gathering: The West's Spies in the GDR's Economy
Paul Maddrell
Journal of Cold War Studies, Summer 2013, Pages 76-107
Abstract:
This article uses new evidence from the former archive of the Ministry of State Security (Stasi) of the German Democratic Republic to show that important intelligence was gathered by Western intelligence agencies, above all those of the United States, from well-placed human sources in the GDR's economy during the first twenty years of the Cold War. This intelligence influenced policymakers' understanding of the GDR's economy and informed debates about weapons procurement and the best trade, credit, information, and aid policies to pursue vis-à-vis the GDR and the Soviet bloc. The intelligence obtained from spies in the GDR's economic bureaucracy and industrial enterprises declined in quality from the 1960s on because of effective counterintelligence measures adopted by the Stasi. The loss of this information contributed to Western policymakers' failure in the 1980s to grasp the full extent of the economic crisis in the GDR that helped to precipitate the Communist regime's collapse.
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Domestic Revolutionary Leaders and International Conflict
Jeff Colgan
World Politics, October 2013, Pages 656-690
Abstract:
There is a strong scholarly consensus that domestic revolutions create conditions ripe for international conflict. Traditionally scholars have treated revolutions as events, after which there is a period of time during which international conflict is more likely. Yet some states experience significant international conflict only during and in the immediate aftermath of a revolution, whereas other states continue to engage in conflict for many years and even decades afterward. This article seeks to explain the persistence of conflict for some but not all revolutionary states by differentiating the concept of revolutionary leaders from that of revolutions as events, both theoretically and empirically. The author shows that existing theories linking revolution to international conflict underemphasize an important mechanism through which revolution leads to conflict: by selecting conflict-prone leaders through the dynamics of revolutionary politics. He argues that revolutionary politics allow leaders with certain characteristics, including high risk tolerance and strong political ambition to alter the status quo, to obtain executive office because individuals without these characteristics generally do not succeed in leading revolutions. Having obtained power, revolutionary leaders have aggressive preferences that make their states more likely than nonrevolutionary states to instigate international conflict.
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Passenger or Driver? A Cross-National Examination of Media Coverage and Civil War Interventions
Sam Bell, Richard Frank & Paul Macharia
International Interactions, Fall 2013, Pages 646-671
Abstract:
Existing research on civil war interventions provides contradicting evidence about the role that the media plays in affecting the likelihood of intervention. To date, studies often focus on specific cases (frequently by the United States) leaving it unclear whether the media's influence extends more broadly. In this article we examine this question cross-nationally and argue that we need to account for the possibility that interventions also lead to increases in media coverage. We test our hypotheses using cross-national data on civil war interventions and media coverage. These data include a new measure of media coverage of 73 countries experiencing civil wars between 1982 and 1999. These data allow us to determine whether media coverage is more likely to drive leaders’ decisions or follow them. Toward this end we employ a two-stage conditional maximum likelihood model to control for potential endogeneity between media attention and interventions. The results suggest a reciprocal positive relationship between media attention and civil conflict interventions. Specifically, an increase of one standard deviation in media coverage raises the probability of intervention 68%.
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Rhapsody in red: Shostakovich and American wartime perceptions of the Soviet Union
Lawrence MacCurtain
Patterns of Prejudice, Fall 2013, Pages 359-378
Abstract:
MacCurtain addresses the role of Russian classical music in brokering popular American perceptions of the Soviet Union during the Second World War. With the launch of Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, the United States entered into an unprecedented wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, a state that had long conjured up domestic American anxieties, and was only recognized by the FDR administration in 1933. Specifically, MacCurtain examines how the composition and transport of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 to the United States in 1942 bolstered domestic commitment towards the wartime alliance with Stalin. By examining and comparing the critical and popular reception of Shostakovich's work in the United States, he found that the music possessed a populist appeal to the domestic audience that was seemingly capable of transcending the rhetoric and fear that previously defined the American image of the Soviet Union.
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The British State and the Irish Rebellion of 1916: An Intelligence Failure or a Failure of Response?
Geoff Sloan
Intelligence and National Security, July/August 2013, Pages 453-494
Abstract:
The teleological narrative that has dominated the handling of intelligence by the British state in the events that led up to the 1916 Irish Rebellion in Dublin has been characterised as a cocktail of incompetence and mendacity. Using new and existing archive material this article argues that both the cabinet in London and key members of the Irish Executive in Dublin were supplied with accurate and timely intelligence by the Admiralty's signals intelligence unit, the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan Police with respect to this event. Far from being a failure of intelligence here is evidence to show that there occurred a failure of response on behalf of key decision-makers. The warnings that were given by intelligence organisations were filtered through the existing policy preferences and assumptions. As a result of these factors accurate evaluations and sound judgement were not exercised by key officials, such as Sir Matthew Nathan, in Dublin Castle.