Pick Your Battles
They Think They're Normal: Enduring Questions and New Research on North Korea - A Review Essay
David Kang
International Security, Winter 2011/12, Pages 142-171
Abstract:
A wave of recent scholarship, built on rich empirical research, provides new perspectives on enduring questions about North Korea. Three books, in particular - Patrick McEachern's Inside the Red Box, Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland's Famine in North Korea, and Suk-Young Kim's Illusive Utopia - present a comprehensive and panoramic vision of North Korea today. This essay reviews these books and makes two overarching arguments. First, North Korea is more "normal" than is often thought, and its domestic politics, economy, and society function in ways familiar to other countries around the world. When viewed from the inside out, North Korea's institutions, economic life, and its people act in ways that are not only similar to those of others around the world, but that differ only in their level of intensity. Second, North Korea's continuing nuclear and military challenge is only one aspect of its overall relations with the world, and policies designed to minimize its threatening military behavior may work at cross-purposes with policies designed to improve its economy and the lives of its people. The complexities that arise in dealing with North Korea create a number of contradictory policy choices, and making progress on one issue has often meant overlooking another, or even allowing it to become worse.
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Priming and the Obama Effect on Public Evaluations of the United States
Nicolas Isak Dragojlovic
Political Psychology, December 2011, Pages 989-1006
Abstract:
This article investigates the psychological basis for the dramatic improvement in the Canadian public's evaluations of the United States following President Obama's inauguration. It attributes this change to a media priming effect triggered by Obama's increased visibility in Canadian news coverage of the United States in 2008 and 2009. A survey experiment conducted on a sample of undergraduate students at a Canadian university is used to illustrate this priming effect. Mentioning President Obama in an unrelated question leads participants to evaluate the United States more positively than in a control group. This assimilation effect is particularly strong when compared to a condition in which former President Bush is mentioned instead of President Obama. The results also show that the Obama priming effect is moderated by political awareness such that individuals with intermediate levels of awareness are most sensitive to the Obama prime.
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Scott Kastner & Phillip Saunders
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
China's rising power and increased global activism have attracted increasing attention, with particular focus on whether a stronger China is likely to be a revisionist or status quo state. Power transition theory highlights the potential for a dissatisfied rising power to challenge the existing international order, but it is difficult to evaluate whether a rising power is dissatisfied. Where Chinese leaders choose to travel can offer insights into whether China's behavior is more consistent with that of a revisionist or status quo state and into China's broader diplomatic priorities. We present a series of expectations concerning how the travel patterns of a challenger state are likely to differ from the travel patterns of a status quo state. Using a newly compiled data set, we then analyze the correlates of travel abroad by top Chinese leaders from 1998 to 2008. Our results are more consistent with a status quo conceptualization of China, though there are some important exceptions such as willingness to travel to rogue states. We also use travel data to test other hypotheses about Chinese foreign policy behavior.
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Unrest Assured: Why Unipolarity Is Not Peaceful
Nuno Monteiro
International Security, Winter 2011/12, Pages 9-40
Abstract:
The United States has been at war for thirteen of the twenty-two years since the Cold War ended and the world became unipolar. Still, the consensual view among international relations theorists is that unipolarity is peaceful. They base this view on two assumptions: first, the unipole will guarantee the global status quo and, second, no state will balance against it. Both assumptions are problematic. First, the unipole may disengage from a particular region, thus removing constraints on regional conflicts. Second, if the unipole remains engaged in the world, those minor powers that decide not to accommodate it will be unable to find a great power sponsor. Placed in this situation of extreme self-help, they will try to revise the status quo in their favor, a dynamic that is likely to trigger conflict with the unipole. Therefore, neither the structure of a unipolar world nor U.S. strategic choices clearly benefit the overall prospects for peace. For the world as a whole, unipolarity makes conflict likely. For the unipole, it presents a difficult choice between disengagement and frequent conflict. In neither case will the unipole be able to easily convert its power into favorable outcomes peacefully.
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Ido Oren
Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Winter 2011, Pages 659-684
Abstract:
Why has the United States (US), under both the Bush and Obama administrations, refrained from attacking Iran even though US officials have depicted the Iranian threat in all but apocalyptic terms and even though a loud chorus in Washington has been persistently calling for a preventive strike against Iran? I present an analysis - informed by Graham Allison's famous bureaucratic politics model - of the main political and bureaucratic forces in Washington acting to promote or impede a preventive attack on Iran's nuclear sites. I argue that America's abstention from attacking Iran should be understood not as a coherent national response to Iran's nuclear programme but rather as (in Allison's terms) an 'intra-national political outcome' resulting from the 'pulling' of 'Iran Threat' interests - primarily Vice President Cheney's camp in the Bush White House, members of Congress, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) - and the countervailing 'hauling' of the Pentagon, the military's top brass, the intelligence community and the Department of State. The main reason why neither the Bush nor the Obama administration has opted for a military strike is that the 'haulers', who were led by a formidable bureaucratic-political player, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, have had the upper hand over the hawkish 'pullers'.
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When War Hits Home: The Geography of Military Losses and Support for War in Time and Space
Scott Althaus, Brittany Bramlett & James Gimpel
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
The "proximate casualties" hypothesis holds that popular support for American wars is undermined more by the deaths of American personnel from nearby areas than by the deaths of those from far away. However, no previous research has tested the mechanisms that might produce this effect. This omission contributes to three areas of lingering uncertainty within the war support literature: whether national or local losses have a greater effect on war support, whether the negative effects of war deaths are durable or temporary, and whether the negative effects of war deaths have a greater influence on the most or least attentive citizens. Analysis of Iraq War data shows that local losses have a greater effect on war support than national losses, that these casualty effects decay rapidly, and that citizens who closely follow news at the national and local levels are least affected by new information about war costs. These findings run contrary to the prevailing cost-benefit calculus model of war support.
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Climate Wars? Assessing the Claim That Drought Breeds Conflict
Ole Magnus Theisen, Helge Holtermann & Halvard Buhaug
International Security, Winter 2011/12, Pages 79-106
Abstract:
Dominant climate models suggest that large parts of Africa will experience greater climatic variability and increasing rates of drought in coming decades. This could have severe societal consequences, because the economies and food supplies of most African countries depend on rain-fed agriculture. According to leading environmental security scholars, policymakers, and nongovernmental organizations, an increase in scarcity-driven armed conflicts should also be expected. A conditional theory of environmental conflict predicts that drought increases the risk of civil war primarily when it strikes vulnerable and politically marginalized populations in agrarian societies. However, an empirical evaluation of this general proposition through a unique gridded dataset of postcolonial Africa, which combines high-resolution meteorological data with georeferenced data on civil war onset and the local ethnopolitical context, shows little evidence of a drought-conflict connection. Instead, the local risk of civil war can be explained by sociopolitical and geographic factors: a politically marginalized population, high infant mortality, proximity to international borders, and high local population density.
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Emanuel Gregory Boussios
Journal of Applied Security Research, Winter 2012, Pages 1-10
Abstract:
This article presents the results of an analysis of partisan attitudes towards war for the Korean, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan Wars. In total, 85 surveys conducted by the Gallup Organization starting in August 1950 (near the beginning of the Korean War) and ending May 2011 (recent events from the Afghanistan War) were analyzed. Previous research of public opinion during wartime indicates how powerful the influence of political party affiliation is in the United States on individuals' war attitudes, with several scholars suggesting that most people follow the cues provided by their most salient political reference group - their own party. Therefore, they are inclined to follow their President's lead no matter the Administration's policy on foreign affairs. There has been evidence to suggest that the earlier wars in modern America, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, that this was in fact true. In the later wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, two wars closely linked to the "War on Terror," this did not occur. During times of regime change, the shift in power from a Republican Bush regime to a Democratic Obama regime has indicated that citizens are no longer following their party cue and in fact are more likely to reject the policies of their own party leaders. The evidence in this research points out that partisans can no longer be thought of as followers, which may suggest that leaders can no longer rely on their own party base for support on war policies.
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Jerry Cullum, Bradley Okdie & Helen Harton
Social Influence, Winter 2011, Pages 231-248
Abstract:
Two studies investigated how issue importance and interpersonal influence contribute to the development of shared attitudes among social network members (i.e., attitude clustering). Study 1 used the start of the 2003 Iraq War as a natural experiment on the role of issue importance in attitude clustering within residential conversation networks. Attitudes toward the U.S. involvement in Iraq grew more clustered after - but not before - the start of the Iraq War, and this post-war growth in attitude clustering was greater for this issue relative to other political issues. Study 2, using structural equation modeling (SEM), found support for a sequential mediation model whereby personal importance of the Iraq War increases war-relevant information seeking, which increases discussion of the issue, which in turn increases attitude clustering within egoistic social networks. Overall, these results illustrate how intrapersonal attitude processes can catalyze interpersonal influence processes.
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Foreign Policy Votes and Presidential Support in Congress
W.R. Mack, Karl DeRouen & David Lanoue
Foreign Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper explores the role of foreign policy votes on presidential support in Congress. We postulate that a selection effect is inherent in this topic. Failing to consider that certain factors will influence whether a president takes a position on an issue in the first place can yield misleading results. For instance, presidents might not take positions during lame duck years or when their popularity is low. They might be more willing to take positions on international votes, votes requiring super majorities, or those that take place during a honeymoon period. In turn, this decision regarding position-taking can bias the outcome. We also capture the relationship between Congress and public opinion in our models as it is important to consider that the Congress is listening to its constituents as well. If the public identifies international problems as the most important to the nation, Congress might be more willing to vote in favor of the president on international votes. Testing key vote data from 1953 to 2003 for each chamber, we show that presidents are more likely to take positions if the vote is international, if the public identifies the "most important problems" as international ones, and if the vote requires a super majority for passage. They are less likely to take positions if they are up for reelection and are lame ducks. In turn, international votes, the percentage of the public identifying international problems as the most important, and the size of the president's majority have positive effects on presidential support. These findings are obscured if selection is not taken into account.
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The struggle for Palestinian hearts and minds: Violence and public opinion in the Second Intifada
David Jaeger et al.
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines how violence influences the political preferences of an aggrieved constituency that is purportedly represented by militant factions. Using longitudinal public opinion poll micro data of the Palestinian population linked to data on fatalities from the Second Intifada, we find that although local Israeli violence discourages Palestinians from supporting moderate political positions, this "radicalization" is fleeting, and vanishes completely within 90 days. We do, however, find evidence suggesting that collateral violence affecting Palestinian civilians has a stronger effect on the populations' political preferences relative to individuals directly targeted by the Israeli military. In addition, we observe that major political events in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have had a longer-term impact on political preferences. Individuals who were teenagers during the period of the Oslo negotiations tend to have relatively moderate preferences, while those who were teenagers during the First Intifada tend to be relatively radical.
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China's Century? Why America's Edge Will Endure
Michael Beckley
International Security, Winter 2011/12, Pages 41-78
Abstract:
Two assumptions dominate current foreign policy debates in the United States and China. First, the United States is in decline relative to China. Second, much of this decline is the result of globalization and the hegemonic burdens the United States bears to sustain globalization. Both of these assumptions are wrong. The United States is not in decline; in fact, it is now wealthier, more innovative, and more militarily powerful compared to China than it was in 1991. Moreover, globalization and hegemony do not erode U.S. power; they reinforce it. The United States derives competitive advantages from its hegemonic position, and globalization allows it to exploit these advantages, attracting economic activity and manipulating the international system to its benefit. The United States should therefore continue to prop up the global economy and maintain a robust diplomatic and military presence abroad.
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Backfire: Behavioral Decision Making and the Strategic Risks of Successful Surprise
Scott Helfstein
Foreign Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
States attempting surprise attacks usually achieve tactical success in catching an opponent unprepared. Many studies of surprise do not look beyond the opening bolt from the blue to examine the impact of surprise based on the broader strategic objectives. A comparative case study of centrally planned surprise attacks from 1950 to 1990 suggests that surprise rarely achieves strategic ends. They did not deter the targets from military action, and more surprisingly, did not contribute to less deadly wars. This runs counter to conventional beliefs about surprise, since attacks are supposed to impair a target's desire or ability to mount a military response. Instead, the most damaging surprises are followed by particularly bloody conflict, a phenomenon referred to here as backfire. The article examines a number of possible strategic explanations for this empirical pattern and ultimately concludes that behavioral decision-making processes characterized by prospect theory offer the best possible explanation. An increased propensity for risk, resulting from the losses suffered during a large surprise, drives target military reaction despite the lower likelihood of success.
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Peacekeeping and the Contagion of Armed Conflict
Kyle Beardsley
Journal of Politics, October 2011, Pages 1051-1064
Abstract:
Existing scholarship has characterized the severity of and mechanisms behind the problem of conflict contagion but not how to address it. Although studies of peacekeeping have demonstrated that it can prevent conflict recurrence, we know little about whether international actors can also help prevent conflict from spreading. Using event history analysis that incorporates information from neighboring observations, the empirical findings indicate that the expected risk of armed conflict increases by over 70% when peacekeepers are not deployed to a recent neighboring conflict but does not significantly rise when neighboring peacekeepers are deployed. One of the key means by which peacekeeping helps contain conflict is through addressing problems related to transnational movement of and support for insurgencies, thereby specifically preventing intrastate conflict from increasing the propensity for new intrastate conflict nearby. Moreover, both lighter and more substantial peacekeeping deployments can prevent conflict diffusion.
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Stephen Saideman & David Auerswald
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is the most robust and deeply institutionalized alliance in the modern world, yet it has faced significant problems in running the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. Specifically, the coalition effort has been plagued by caveats: restrictions on what coalition militaries can and cannot do. Caveats have diminished the alliance's overall effectiveness and created resentment within the coalition. In this article, we explain why ISAF countries have employed a variety of caveats in Afghanistan, focusing on the period from 2003 to 2009. Caveats vary predictably according to the political institutions in each contributor to ISAF. Troops from coalition governments are likely to have caveats. Troops from presidential or majoritarian parliamentary governments tend, on average, to have fewer caveats, but specific caveats depend on the background of key decision makers in those countries. To demonstrate these points, we first review key limitations facing military contingents in Afghanistan. We then compare the experiences of Canada, France, and Germany and find that our institutional model does a better job of explaining the observed behavior than do competing explanations focusing on public opinion, threat, or strategic culture. We conclude with implications for both research and North Atlantic Treaty Organization's future.
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Moral Hazard, Discipline, and the Management of Terrorist Organizations
Jacob Shapiro & David Siegel
World Politics, January 2012, Pages 39-78
Abstract:
Terrorist groups repeatedly include operatives of varying commitment and often rely on a common set of security-reducing bureaucratic tools to manage these individuals. This is puzzling in that covert organizations are commonly thought to screen their operatives very carefully and pay a particularly heavy price for record keeping. The authors use terrorist memoirs and the internal correspondence of one particularly prominent group to highlight the organizational challenges terrorist groups face and use a game-theoretic model of moral hazard in a finitely sized organization to explain why record keeping and bureaucracy emerge in these groups. The model provides two novel results. First, in small heterogeneous organizations longer institutional memory can enhance organizational efficiency. Second, such organizations will use worse agents in equilibrium under certain conditions. The core logic is that in small organizations the punishment strategies that allow leaders to extract greater effort are credible only when operatives can identify and react to deviations from the leaders' equilibrium strategy. This dynamic creates incentives for record keeping and means that small organizations will periodically use problematic agents in equilibrium as part of a strategy that optimally motivates their best operatives.
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Roads and the diffusion of insurgent violence: The logistics of conflict in Russia's North Caucasus
Yuri Zhukov
Political Geography, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does insurgency spread? Existing research on the diffusion of violence at the local level of civil war tends to under-specify the theoretical mechanisms by which conflict can be expanded, relocated or sustained, and overlooks the real-world logistical constraints that combatants face on a daily basis. This paper attempts to address both problems by taking a closer look at the role of road networks in the diffusion of insurgent activity. By explicating the logic of diffusion in a simple epidemic model and exploiting new disaggregated data on violence and road networks in the North Caucasus, this analysis challenges the conventional view that insurgent logistics are either self-sufficient or highly flexible. Roads shape the costs of sustaining and expanding operations, which facilitates the transmission of violence to new locations, but can also intensify competition for limited military resources between nearby battlefronts. At the local level, this dynamic makes the relocation of insurgent activity more likely than its expansion. Methodologically, this paper demonstrates that a failure to account for logistical constraints in the empirical study of civil war can underestimate costs of diffusion and overpredict the transmissibility of violence between neighboring locations. The use of road network distances can yield more conservative inferences and more accurate predictions of how violence spreads.