Force Majeure
Failing to Provide Public Goods: Why the Afghan Army Did Not Fight
Rohan Dutta, David Levine & Salvatore Modica
Federal Reserve Working Paper, March 2022
Abstract:
The theory of public goods is mainly about the difficulty in paying for them. Our question here is this: Why might public goods not be provided, even if funding is available? We use the Afghan Army as our case study. We explore this issue using a simple model of a public good that can be provided through collective action and peer pressure, by modeling the self-organization of a group (the Afghan Army) as a mechanism design problem. We consider two kinds of transfer subsidies from an external entity such as the U.S. government. One is a Pigouvian subsidy that simply pays the salaries, rewarding individuals who provide effort. The second is an output/resource multiplier (the provision of military equipment, tactical skill training, and so forth) that amplifies the effort provided through collective action. We show that the introduction of a Pigouvian subsidy can result in less effort being provided than in the absence of a subsidy. By contrast, an output/resource multiplier subsidy, which is useful only if collective action is taken, necessarily increases output via an increase in effort. Our conclusion is that the United States provided the wrong kind of subsidy, which may have been among the reasons why the Afghan Army did not fight.
US Sanctions Reinforce the Dollar's Dominance
Michael Dooley, David Folkerts-Landau & Peter Garber
NBER Working Paper, April 2022
Abstract:
Recent sanctions on the use of Russia's international reserve assets seem likely to reduce the appeal of US dollar reserves as a "shock absorber" for international payments. But international reserves are also a means to reassure foreign investors that problematic countries will not confiscate their investments. The "collateral" motive for holding dollar reserves has been enhanced by the demonstration that the United States is willing and able to sanction misbehavior. Geopolitically risky countries now more than ever need to reassure foreign investors that their investments are safe from expropriation. We conclude that recent events will strengthen the role of the dollar as the key international reserve currency.
Triumphalism and the Inconvenient Truth: Correcting Inflated National Self-Images in a Rising Power
Haifeng Huang
University of California Working Paper, January 2022
Abstract:
Do people in a rising authoritarian power with pervasive propaganda and information control overestimate their country's reputation, power, and influence in the world? Previous research on national overconfidence and grand self-imagery generally examines perceptions of hard power rather than soft power, and it focuses on the state or leadership level rather than the mass level. I show, with a survey conducted in 2020 and a pre-registered two-wave survey experiment in 2021, that the Chinese public overwhelmingly overestimates China's global reputation and soft power relative to benchmark public opinion polls on China conducted around the world, even during a crisis. Importantly, informing Chinese citizens of China's actual international image lowers their evaluations of the country and its governing system and moderates their expectations for its external success. These effects from simple information interventions are not fleeting, and they indicate that triumphalism and self-aggrandizement can be meaningfully mitigated.
The Economic Cost of A Nuclear Weapon: A Synthetic Control Approach
Anthony Mayberry
Defence and Peace Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study estimates the economic effects of nuclear weapons development efforts in Pakistan using synthetic control group methods. Pakistan started its nuclear weapons program in 1972 and conducted its first test in 1998. This paper focuses on the growth impacts during the 1973 to 1997 period, before Pakistan established itself as a nuclear power. I create a synthetic control group for Pakistan using Per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from the 1950 to 1972. The impact of the nuclear weapons development program is measured as a treatment dummy for the years 1973-1997 in a Difference-in-Difference model. I find that Pakistan's per capita GDP would have been an average of about $718 per year higher had the country not undertaken the effort to produce a nuclear weapon. This equates to per capita GDP being 27.8% lower on average over the 25-year weapons-development period. Results are robust to several alternative specifications, including country exclusion, sparse synthetic controls, non-outcome characteristics as predictors of GDP, and in-space placebo experiments of differing specifications.
Rethinking China's Soft Power: "Pragmatic Enticement" of Confucius Institutes in Ethiopia
Maria Repnikova
China Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article examines China's most controversial soft power export - the Confucius Institute initiative - through the case study of its promotion and implementation in Ethiopia. As one of China's closest partners in Africa, Ethiopia presents a path-breaking case for examining the potential and the limitations of Confucius Institutes. In contrast to the existing literature that depicts Confucius Institutes largely as contested and limited initiatives, this article shows that Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms have thus far been relatively successful in Ethiopia. Specifically, China's fusion of practical or tangible benefits with language and cultural promotion - what I describe as "pragmatic enticement" - invokes support from key participants in this project, including university administrators, students and Chinese teachers. In the long term, however, even in the highly favourable context of Ethiopia, the sustainability of Confucius Institutes is questionable, as there are apparent gaps between the rising expectations of Ethiopian administrators and students, and the limited resources on the ground.
Third-Party Intervention and Strategic Militarization
Adam Meirowitz et al.
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Winter 2022, Pages 31-59
Abstract:
Codified at the 2005 United Nations World Summit, the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect articulates an ideal of international interventions motivated by compassion for victims and a desire to bring stability to hot-spots around the world. Despite this consensus, practitioners and scholars have debated the importance of unintended consequences stemming from the expectation of third-party intervention. We analyze how third-party intervention shapes the incentives to arm, negotiate settlements, and fight wars in a parsimonious game theoretic model. Among the unintended consequences we find: interventions that indiscriminately lower the destructiveness of war increase the probability of conflict and increasing the cost of arming makes destructive wars more likely. Other interventions, however, can have much more beneficial effects and our analysis highlights peace-enhancing forms of third-party intervention. From a welfare perspective, most interventions do not change the ex-ante loss from war, but do have distributional effects on the terms of peace. As a result R2P principles are hard to implement because natural forms of intervention create incentives that make them largely self-defeating.
Strongmen cry too: The effect of aerial bombing on voting for the incumbent in competitive autocracies
Milos Popovic
Journal of Peace Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does exposure to aerial bombing influence voting for the target country's leadership? Do voters tend to punish incumbents for policy failure? These questions are relevant for understanding the target country's postwar politics because aerial bombing remains one of the deadliest and most widely used military options for coercive bargaining. Despite the historical and contemporary relevance of these questions, there are only a few studies in the air-power literature arguing that strategic bombing produces a temporary rally effect but no subsequent political consequences other than political apathy. Most studies ignore important variation within states even though leadership responsibility can vary tremendously on the substate level. This article analyzes the effect of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia on Serbian local elections using difference-in-differences identification strategy and identifies the effect of airstrikes on the vote-share of Slobodan Milosevic's regime. The results show that the regime's vote-share is 2.6% lower in municipalities exposed to the bombing. Challenging prior studies, this finding demonstrates that retrospective voting applies to aerial bombing even in competitive authoritarian regimes.
Leadership Targeting and Militant Alliance Breakdown
Christopher Blair, Michael Horowitz & Philip Potter
Journal of Politics, April 2022, Pages 923-943
Abstract:
Existing research finds that cooperation among militant groups is common and contributes to both capabilities and lethality. Comparatively little is known, however, about how militant alliances are maintained and how they break apart. We argue that leaders are critical to sustaining alliances among militant groups. As a consequence, organizational disruption in the form of leadership targeting can lead to the breakdown of militant alliances. To test this argument, we pair original data on militant alliances with data on leadership targeting to reveal that decapitating an organization's leader, and particularly its founder, increases the probability that an organization's alliances terminate. We find that leadership decapitation spurs alliance termination by incapacitating targeted groups, stoking fear among allies, and inducing preference divergence between targeted groups and allies over strategy.
Thinking about the distant future promotes the prospects of peace: A construal-level perspective on intergroup conflict resolution
Nir Halevy & Yair Berson
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current research reveals that the pursuit of peace entails an inherent paradox. The urgent need to save lives and alleviate human suffering necessitates swift solutions to the problem of intergroup conflict. However, because the human mind associates peace with longer time horizons, people anticipate peace more when considering the distant rather than the near future. Six experiments demonstrate a robust and large effect whereby thinking about the distant future promotes the prospects of peace compared to thinking about the near future. These experiments also provide evidence for the role that construal fit, that is, the tendency to match high temporal distance with abstractness, plays in this effect. We discuss implications for shorter-term and longer-term peace interventions.
Autonomous weapons and ethical judgments: Experimental evidence on attitudes toward the military use of "killer robots"
Ondrej Rosendorf, Michal Smetana & Marek Vranka
Journal of Peace Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The advent of autonomous weapons brings intriguing opportunities and significant ethical dilemmas. This article examines how increasing weapon autonomy affects approval of military strikes resulting in collateral damage, perception of their ethicality, and blame attribution for civilian fatalities. In our experimental survey of U.S. citizens, we presented participants with scenarios describing a military strike with the employment of weapon systems with different degrees of autonomy. The results show that as weapon autonomy increases, the approval and perception of the ethicality of a military strike decreases. However, the level of blame toward commanders and operators involved in the strike remains constant regardless of the degree of autonomy. Our findings suggest that public attitudes to military strikes are, to an extent, dependent on the level of weapon autonomy. Yet, in the eyes of ordinary citizens, this does not take away the moral responsibility for collateral damage from human entities as the ultimate "moral agents."
Ian Fleming's Soviet rival: Roman Kim and Soviet spy fiction during the early cold war
Filip Kovacevic
Intelligence and National Security, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article focuses on the life of Roman Kim (1899-1967), an ethnic Korean Soviet counterintelligence officer, and highlights his contribution to the Soviet spy fiction genre during the Cold War. Kim was born in Vladivostok and educated in Japan. He was recruited by the VChK in the early 1920s and was involved in a variety of Soviet counterintelligence operations directed against Japan. Arrested and tortured during the Great Purge, he was the only Soviet Japanese intelligence expert to survive. Kim was released after the end of WWII and reinvented himself as a writer of spy fiction, arguing that the Soviet Union must score victories against the West on the literary front. The article examines Kim's impact on the literary Cold War by analyzing his most significant spy fiction works, none of which have been translated into English, and chronicles his influence on the later generation of Soviet spy fiction writers, such as Yulian Semyonov and Vasily Ardamatsky, much better known in Russia and in the West.
Food resilience in a dark catastrophe: A new way of looking at tropical wild edible plants
Daniel Winstead & Michael Jacobson
Ambio, forthcoming
Abstract:
A global sun-blocking catastrophe is more plausible than anyone would like to think. Models have consistently shown the devastating effects these events could have to the world's agricultural systems for upwards of 15 years. New shade-, drought-, and cool-tolerant crops and more food stockpile sources must be found if there would be any hope of feeding the global population in such a scenario. Wild edible plants (WEPs) are important buffers of food security to indigenous peoples, impoverished peoples, and those in areas with erratic growing seasons across the globe. Here, we suggest WEP species that have the potential to be scaled up through cultivation in post-catastrophe conditions, and the use of foraged food stockpiles to function as stop-gap foods until conventional agriculture returns. We also propose policy initiatives for habitat protection, education programs, and general preparedness.