Thousands of miles away
What Makes Foreign Policy Teams Tick: Explaining Variation in Group Performance at Geopolitical Forecasting
Michael Horowitz et al.
Journal of Politics, October 2019, Pages 1388-1404
Abstract:
When do groups — be they countries, administrations, or other organizations — more or less accurately understand the world around them and assess political choices? Some argue that group decision-making processes often fail due to biases induced by groupthink. Others argue that groups, by aggregating knowledge, are better at analyzing the foreign policy world. To advance knowledge about the intersection of politics and group decision making, this paper draws on evidence from a multiyear geopolitical forecasting tournament with thousands of participants sponsored by the US government. We find that teams outperformed individuals in making accurate geopolitical predictions, with regression discontinuity analysis demonstrating specific teamwork effects. Moreover, structural topic models show that more cooperative teams outperformed less cooperative teams. These results demonstrate that information sharing through groups, cultivating reasoning to hedge against cognitive biases, and ensuring all perspectives are heard can lead to greater success for groups at forecasting and understanding politics.
Human Rights and Public Support for War
Michael Tomz & Jessica Weeks
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
One of the most important themes in international relations is the relationship between domestic politics and interstate conflict. In this article, we use experiments to study how the human rights practices of foreign adversaries affect domestic public support for war. Our experiments, embedded in surveys in the United States and the United Kingdom, reveal several important findings. First, citizens are much less willing to attack a country that respects human rights than a country that violates them, even when the dispute concerns military security rather than humanitarian intervention. Second, human rights affect support for war primarily by changing perceptions about threat and morality. Citizens are more likely to view human rights violators as threatening, and have fewer moral qualms about fighting such countries. Our findings shed new light on the politics of war in democracies, and may provide behavioral foundations for peace among human-rights-respecting states.
Russian Orthodox Church and Nuclear Command and Control: A Hypothesis
Dmitry (Dima) Adamsky
Security Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
The Russian Orthodox Church plays an immense role in current Russian national security policy. The intertwining of the church and the strategic community is nowhere more visible than in the nuclear-weapons complex, where the priesthood has penetrated all levels of command, been involved in operational activities, and positioned itself as a provider of meanings for, and guardian of, the state’s nuclear potential. The first work to highlight the phenomenon of the Russian church-nuclear nexus, this article focuses on the ecclesiastical impact on Russian nuclear command and control. The findings suggest that it is not inconceivable that the Russian military clergy — like the Soviet political officers and contrary to chaplains worldwide — might become future participants in decision making on matters of national security, and that de facto there might be two parallel chains of command authority emerging in Russia, with potential tensions between them. The article outlines the causes of this overlooked singularity and its implications for the theory and practice of international security.
Rapidly expanding nuclear arsenals in Pakistan and India portend regional and global catastrophe
Owen Toon et al.
Science Advances, October 2019
Abstract:
Pakistan and India may have 400 to 500 nuclear weapons by 2025 with yields from tested 12- to 45-kt values to a few hundred kilotons. If India uses 100 strategic weapons to attack urban centers and Pakistan uses 150, fatalities could reach 50 to 125 million people, and nuclear-ignited fires could release 16 to 36 Tg of black carbon in smoke, depending on yield. The smoke will rise into the upper troposphere, be self-lofted into the stratosphere, and spread globally within weeks. Surface sunlight will decline by 20 to 35%, cooling the global surface by 2° to 5°C and reducing precipitation by 15 to 30%, with larger regional impacts. Recovery takes more than 10 years. Net primary productivity declines 15 to 30% on land and 5 to 15% in oceans threatening mass starvation and additional worldwide collateral fatalities.
Gender and Foreign Policy: Are Female Members of Congress More Dovish than Their Male Colleagues?
William Bendix & Gyung-Ho Jeong
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research shows that female legislators tend to support liberal, pacifistic approaches to foreign policy. But it remains unclear whether they are dovish because they seek to represent the dovish values of women generally or because they tend to represent mostly liberal voters. To answer this question, we examine all foreign policy votes cast in Congress over the last five decades to estimate the ideological locations of House and Senate members on a hawk-dove dimension. Once we control for partisan and constituency effects, we find only limited evidence that female legislators are more dovish than their male counterparts are.
Quantifying the future lethality of terror organizations
Yang Yang, Adam Pah & Brian Uzzi
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
As terror groups proliferate and grow in sophistication, a major international concern is the development of scientific methods that explain and predict insurgent violence. Approaches to estimating a group’s future lethality often require data on the group’s capabilities and resources, but by the nature of the phenomenon, these data are intentionally concealed by the organizations themselves via encryption, the dark web, back-channel financing, and misinformation. Here, we present a statistical model for estimating a terror group’s future lethality using latent-variable modeling techniques to infer a group’s intrinsic capabilities and resources for inflicting harm. The analysis introduces 2 explanatory variables that are strong predictors of lethality and raise the overall explained variance when added to existing models. The explanatory variables generate a unique early-warning signal of an individual group’s future lethality based on just a few of its first attacks. Relying on the first 10 to 20 attacks or the first 10 to 20% of a group’s lifetime behavior, our model explains about 60% of the variance in a group’s future lethality as would be explained by a group’s complete lifetime data. The model’s robustness is evaluated with out-of-sample testing and simulations. The findings’ theoretical and pragmatic implications for the science of human conflict are discussed.
What Explains Taxation by Resource-Rich Rebels? Evidence from the Islamic State in Syria
Mara Revkin
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Greed-based theories of civil war predict that rebel groups will only engage in taxation and other state- building activities in areas where they lack exploitable resources. However, this prediction is contradicted by the Islamic State’s pattern of taxation across time and space. A new dataset mapping seven types of revenue-extracting policies imposed by the Islamic State, a jihadist rebel group, in the 19 Syrian districts that it governed between 2013 and 2017 indicates that these policies were just as prevalent in resource-rich as in resource-poor districts. I propose a new theory that better explains this pattern — a rebel group’s pattern of taxation is codetermined by (1) ideology and (2) the costs of warfare — and establish the plausibility of this theory through a case study of al-Mayadin, the most oil-rich district governed by the Islamic State and therefore an ideal site in which to investigate the puzzle of taxation by resource-rich rebels.
Local alliances and rivalries shape near-repeat terror activity of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and insurgents
Yao-Li Chuang, Noam Ben-Asher & Maria D’Orsogna
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 15 October 2019, Pages 20898-20903
Abstract:
We study the spatiotemporal correlation of terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and local insurgents, in six geographical areas identified via k-means clustering applied to the Global Terrorism Database. All surveyed organizations exhibit near-repeat activity whereby a prior attack increases the likelihood of a subsequent one by the same group within 20 km and on average 4 (al-Qaeda) to 10 (ISIS) weeks. Near-response activity, whereby an attack by a given organization elicits further attacks from a different one, is found to depend on the adversarial, neutral, or collaborative relationship between the two. When in conflict, local insurgents respond quickly to attacks by global terror groups while global terror groups delay their responses to local insurgents, leading to an asymmetric dynamic. When neutral or allied, attacks by one group enhance the response likelihood of the other, regardless of hierarchy. These trends arise consistently in all clusters for which data are available. Government intervention and spillover effects are also discussed; we find no evidence of outbidding. Understanding the regional dynamics of terrorism may be greatly beneficial in policy making and intervention design.
Historical Ownership and Territorial Disputes
Songying Fang & Xiaojun Li
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Some of the most enduring and dangerous territorial disputes often involve claims of historical ownership by at least one side of a dispute. Why does historical ownership lead to more hardened bargaining stances than in other territorial disputes? Do such uncompromising positions lead to more military conflict? We investigate these questions in this study. After developing a theoretical argument for how historical ownership may lead to a perception of territorial indivisibility, we test the hypotheses derived from the theory with a survey experiment implemented in China. We find that a historical ownership treatment increases the number of respondents who view the indivisible outcome of a hypothetical dispute as the only acceptable outcome. Furthermore, those who perceive a territory to be indivisible are more likely to favor economic sanctions and military solutions to the dispute, and much less likely to support bilateral negotiation or arbitration by an international organization.
Authoritarian Audiences, Rhetoric, and Propaganda in International Crises: Evidence from China
Jessica Chen Weiss & Allan Dafoe
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
How do government rhetoric and propaganda affect mass reactions in international crises? Using two scenario-based survey experiments in China, one hypothetical and one that selectively reminds respondents of recent events, we assess how government statements and propaganda impact Chinese citizens’ approval of their government's performance in its territorial and maritime disputes. We find evidence that citizens disapprove more of inaction after explicit threats to use force, suggesting that leaders can face public opinion costs akin to audience costs in an authoritarian setting. However, we also find evidence that citizens approve of bluster — vague and ultimately empty threats — suggesting that talking tough can provide benefits, even in the absence of tough action. In addition, narratives that invoke future success to justify present restraint increase approval, along with frames that emphasize a shared history of injustice at the hands of foreign powers.
Military Coalitions and Crisis Duration
Daina Chiba & Jesse Johnson
Journal of Politics, October 2019, Pages 1466-1479
Abstract:
Forming a military coalition during an international crisis can improve a state’s chances of achieving its political goals. We argue that the involvement of a coalition, however, can have unintended adverse effects on crisis outcomes by complicating the bargaining process and extending the duration of crises. This argument suggests that crises involving coalitions should be significantly longer than crises without coalitions. However, other factors that affect crisis duration are also likely to influence coalition formation. Therefore, taking into account the endogeneity of the presence of a coalition is essential to testing our hypothesis. To deal with this inferential challenge, we develop a new statistical model that is an extension of instrumental variable estimation in survival analysis. Our analysis of 255 post–World War II interstate crises demonstrates that, even after accounting for the endogeneity of coalition formation, military coalitions tend to extend the duration of crises by approximately 284 days.
A physically cryptographic warhead verification system using neutron induced nuclear resonances
Ezra Engel & Areg Danagoulian
Nature Communications, September 2019
Abstract:
Arms control treaties are necessary to reduce the large stockpiles of the nuclear weapons that constitute one of the biggest dangers to the world. However, an impactful treaty hinges on effective inspection exercises to verify the participants’ compliance to the treaty terms. Such procedures would require verification of the authenticity of a warhead undergoing dismantlement. Previously proposed solutions lacked the combination of isotopic sensitivity and information security. Here we present the experimental feasibility proof of a technique that uses neutron induced nuclear resonances and is sensitive to the combination of isotopics and geometry. The information is physically encrypted to prevent the leakage of sensitive information. Our approach can significantly increase the trustworthiness of future arms control treaties while expanding their scope to include the verified dismantlement of nuclear warheads themselves.