War
Development and US Troop Deployments
Tim Kane
Foreign Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
For over six decades, the US military has shaped international economic development, notably by way of nearly 31 million US troop-year deployments since 1950. Worldwide, life expectancy increased by 10 years between 1970 and the present. The mortality rate of children dropped from 132 per 1,000 live births to 55. The number of telephone lines per capita quadrupled from 48 to 196 per thousand. In each case, the improvement was faster in countries with a heavy US troop presence and slower in countries with zero US troop presence. These relationships stem from a data set on US deployments across all countries and years from 1950 to the present matched with World Bank data on indicators of social well-being since 1970 across 148 countries. The positive relationship between American forces and social development holds in econometric regressions even when controlling for initial income levels and initial social indicator levels.
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Elites and Death in Vietnam and Other U.S. Wars: A Research Note
Alec Campbell
Armed Forces & Society, October 2011, Pages 743-752
Abstract:
Research on class bias in military service has focused on service and death among the economically disadvantaged during the Vietnam War. This study uses the war records of elite colleges to examine elite participation in five major wars. Significant differences in elite participation across wars are found, with lower rates during the Civil, Korean, and Vietnam Wars and higher rates during the World Wars. The similarities between Korea and Vietnam indicate that political unrest related to the Vietnam War was not the sole cause of low levels of elite participation. Changes in the size and structure of the post-World War II military are hypothesized as alternative causal factors.
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Can Hearts and Minds Be Bought? The Economics of Counterinsurgency in Iraq
Eli Berman, Jacob Shapiro & Joseph Felter
Journal of Political Economy, August 2011, Pages 766-819
Abstract:
We develop and test an economic theory of insurgency motivated by the informal literature and by recent military doctrine. We model a three-way contest between violent rebels, a government seeking to minimize violence by mixing service provision and coercion, and civilians deciding whether to share information about insurgents. We test the model using panel data from Iraq on violence against Coalition and Iraqi forces, reconstruction spending, and community characteristics (sectarian status, socioeconomic grievances, and natural resource endowments). Our results support the theory's predictions: improved service provision reduces insurgent violence, particularly for smaller projects and since the "surge" began in 2007.
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Who Takes the Blame? The Strategic Effects of Collateral Damage
Luke Condra & Jacob Shapiro
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Can civilians caught in civil wars reward and punish armed actors for their behavior? If so, do armed actors reap strategic benefits from treating civilians well and pay for treating them poorly? Using precise geo-coded data on violence in Iraq from 2004 through 2009, we show that both sides are punished for the collateral damage they inflict. Coalition killings of civilians predict higher levels of insurgent violence and insurgent killings predict less violence in subsequent periods. This symmetric reaction is tempered by preexisting political preferences; the anti-insurgent reaction is not present in Sunni areas, where the insurgency was most popular, and the anti-Coalition reaction is not present in mixed areas. Our findings have strong policy implications, provide support for the argument that information civilians share with government forces and their allies is a key constraint on insurgent violence, and suggest theories of intrastate violence must account for civilian agency.
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State-directed political assassination in Israel: A political hypothesis
Nir Gazit & Robert Brym
International Sociology, November 2011, Pages 862-877
Abstract:
Extant theories explain reasonably well why the Israeli state exercises a given level of violence against substate actors. Based on economic or sociological models of human action, these theories attribute the level of state violence, respectively, to the narrow cost-benefit calculations of state officials or the institutionally embedded norms that govern their deliberations. The strength of such theories notwithstanding, this article argues that they fail to account for the willingness of Israeli officials to order the assassination of high-ranking political opponents during the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising against Israel. This article's analysis of published sources concerning the assassination of Hamas leaders Ahmed Yassin and Ismail Abu Shanab and of interviews with 74 Israeli counterterrorist experts suggests that the decision to engage in state-directed political assassination in the period 2000-5 was based less on narrow calculations and institutionally specific norms than on identifiable political contingencies. Specifically, the second intifada appears to have led many Israeli decision-makers to favour creating chaos in the Palestinian political system, a goal that was well served by the policy of political assassination. The policy's effect was to forestall the founding of a viable, independent Palestinian state.
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Can peace be purchased? A sectoral-level analysis of aid's influence on transnational terrorism
Joseph Young & Michael Findley
Public Choice, December 2011, Pages 365-381
Abstract:
Does foreign aid reduce terrorism? We examine whether foreign aid decreases terrorism by analyzing whether aid targeted toward certain sectors is more effective than others. We use the most comprehensive databases on foreign aid and transnational terrorism - AidData and ITERATE - to provide a series of statistical tests. Our results show that foreign aid decreases terrorism especially when targeted toward sectors, such as education, health, civil society, and conflict prevention. These sector-level results indicate that foreign aid can be an effective instrument in fighting terrorism if allocated in appropriate ways.
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Alliances and Trade with Sanctioned States: A Study of U.S. Economic Sanctions, 1950-2000
Bryan Early
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
What determines how US economic sanctions affect the international trade conducted with their targets? This article develops a liberal-based explanation for why economic sanctions increase their targets' trade with some third parties and decrease it with others. It is theorized that the effects of defense pact alliances between sender and third-party states are conditional upon the strength of the third parties' commercial dependence upon the target states. Third parties will cooperate with senders when the costs are low, but use their alliance relationships as cover to sanctions bust when the commercial benefits are high. This suggests that the United States can best gain the support of allies whose cooperation matters the least, while the allies whose support is most important tend to sanctions bust. It is also theorized that a target state's allies trade more with it than its nonallies. An empirical analysis of ninety-six episodes of US-imposed sanctions supports these hypotheses.
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Testing Clausewitz: Nationalism, Mass Mobilization, and the Severity of War
Lars-Erik Cederman, Camber Warren & Didier Sornette
International Organization, October 2011, Pages 605-638
Abstract:
Drawing on Clausewitz's classical theory, we argue that the emergence of mass nationalism following the French Revolution profoundly altered the nature of the units constituting the interstate system, thereby transforming the conduct of interstate warfare. To validate these assertions - and thus to test Clausewitz - we rely on quantitative evidence at the macro level, with a particular focus on the global distribution of interstate war sizes, measured in terms of battle deaths, over the past five centuries. Drawing on extreme value theory, we demonstrate that temporal discontinuities in the shapes of the tails of such distributions can be used to draw inferences about the nature of the mechanisms underlying the bloodiest events in world history. This approach allows us to show that the interstate system experienced a fundamental shift in the mechanisms underlying the production of war sizes: a shift that can be dated to the years 1770-1810, and that resulted in a systematic increase in war severity. These same tools also allow us to rule out a number of alternative explanations for this shift (including changes in population sizes and changes in weapons technology), while providing evidence for a specific account of war severity rooted in the mobilizational capacities of states.
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Systematic blade production at late Lower Paleolithic (400-200 kyr) Qesem Cave, Israel
Ron Shimelmitz, Ran Barkai & Avi Gopher
Journal of Human Evolution, October 2011, Pages 458-479
Abstract:
Qesem Cave is assigned to the Acheulo-Yabrudian cultural complex of the late Lower Paleolithic period. The 7.5 m deep stratigraphic sequence is dated to 400-200 ka (thousands of years ago). It is mostly attributed to the Amudian blade-dominated industry, one of the earliest blade production technologies in the world. In this paper, we present the results of a detailed study of five Amudian assemblages from Qesem Cave and suggest two trajectories for the production of blades at the site. We argue that the reduction sequences of blades at Qesem Cave represent an innovative and straightforward technology aimed at the systemic and serial production of predetermined blanks. We suggest that this predetermined blank technology shows planning and intensity that is not significantly different from Middle Paleolithic Mousterian technological systems. Furthermore, this well-organized serial manufacture of cutting implements mainly for butchering might indicates that a significant change in human behavior had taken place by the late Lower Paleolithic period.
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Pirates and fishermen: Is less patrolling always bad?
Brishti Guha
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, January 2012, Pages 29-38
Abstract:
Motivated by the Somali fishermen-pirates, I explore the time allocation decision of potential pirates between piracy and an alternative non-violent occupation, fishing, when the returns of both piracy and fishing are sensitive to patrolling intensity. For a range of parameters, the static model yields multiple equilibria, an "efficient" one with no patrolling and low piracy, a less efficient equilibrium with intermediate levels of both piracy and patrolling and a highly inefficient high-patrolling high-piracy equilibrium. Analyzing the dynamic analogue, I obtain the surprising result that sufficiently low patrolling can be a good strategy.
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Unfit for service: The implications of rising obesity for US military recruitment
John Cawley & Johanna Catherine Maclean
Health Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper contributes to the literature on the labor market consequences of unhealthy behaviors and poor health by examining a previously underappreciated consequence of the rise in obesity in the USA: challenges for military recruitment. Specifically, this paper estimates the percentage of the US military-age population that exceeds the US Army's current active duty enlistment standards for weight-for-height and percent body fat, using data from the series of National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys that spans 1959-2008. We calculate that the percentage of military-age adults ineligible for enlistment because they are overweight and overfat more than doubled for men and tripled for women during that time. As of 2007-2008, 5.7 million men and 16.5 million women exceeded the Army's enlistment standards for weight and body fat. We document disparities across race and education in exceeding the standards and estimate that a further rise of just 1% in weight and body fat would further reduce eligibility for military service by over 850 000 men and 1.3 million women. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for military recruitment and defense policy.
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Deconstructing the "energy weapon": Russia's threat to Europe as case study
Karen Smith Stegen
Energy Policy, October 2011, Pages 6505-6513
Abstract:
As the likelihood increases that Russia will dominate the European Union's (EU) energy supply, questions have emerged as to whether Russia would use the energy weapon to influence EU member policies and extract political concessions. Countervailing voices argue that Russia would be restricted by interdependence and market forces. As of yet, no one has analyzed the assumptions underlying the energy weapon thesis. Moreover, many scholars examining EU-Russian energy relations rely on non-Russian data. This article seeks to fill several informational and theoretical gaps by including Russian sources and first-hand data and by systematically analyzing the conditions that must obtain before an energy supplier can successfully convert its energy resources into political power. The resulting model can be utilized to analyze the capacity of a supplier to use the energy weapon - whether it be Russia, Iran, Venezuela or any other energy heavyweight - and to assess whether the deployment was successful. Five purported cases of Russian manipulation are analyzed in this article and the findings indicate that, more often than not, Russia failed to achieve political concessions. Looking to the future, the plausibility of Russia using the energy weapon to exploit Europe's dependence, particularly on gas, is also examined.
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Piotr Lis
International Studies Quarterly, September 2011, Pages 771-785
Abstract:
The study applies time series analysis to establish whether income-based transference of international terrorism took place in reaction to the rise of the fundamentalist-based terrorism, the end of the Cold War, 9/11, and the 2003 Iraq invasion. It introduces several extensions to an article by Enders and Sandler (2006); for instance, it uses two independent data sets and presents an alternative approach to the events in Iraq. The differences in results between this paper and Enders and Sandler (2006) are caused by the lack of consistency in employing the World Bank's income classification by the two authors. This study finds that the rise of fundamentalist terrorism brought increases across all countries, while the post-Cold War era resulted in a reduction in attacks only in high- and medium-income countries. 9/11 appeared to have had no long-lasting impact on the distribution of terrorism, while the Iraq invasion seemed to have reduced international terrorism in rich states.
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Coup-Proofing and Military Effectiveness in Interstate Wars, 1967-99
Ulrich Pilster & Tobias Böhmelt
Conflict Management and Peace Science, September 2011, Pages 331-350
Abstract:
This study examines the influence of civil-military relations on military effectiveness. More specifically, we investigate how coup-proofing, that is, the strategies and tactics employed to prevent the military from seizing power, affects battlefield performance. The main argument claims that coup-proofing has a negative impact on soldiers' leadership qualities, initiative, and the ability to coordinate different military units. Ultimately, the higher a country's coup-proofing efforts relative to its opponent, the worse its effectiveness on the battlefield. We test this hypothesis using data on battlefield outcomes and coup-proofing between 1967 and 1999.
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Why is there no revolution in North Korea? The political economy of revolution revisited
Thomas Apolte
Public Choice, forthcoming
Abstract:
The paper critically assesses the Acemoglu-Robinson approach to revolutions, as it is focused on inequality of wealth or income rather than on collective-action problems. We show that income inequality is not a sufficient and not even a necessary condition for a revolution to occur. Rather, a necessary condition for a revolution is that any subpopulation can expect net benefits from it, for which inequality is not a precondition. As a result, a certain structure of commitment devices or their absence rather than inequality is crucial for explaining why revolutions sometimes occur and sometimes not.
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Who Pays for National Defense? Financing Defense Programs in the United States, 1947-2007
Uk Heo & John Bohte
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Past studies on military expenditures in the United States have primarily focused on the extent to which guns versus butter trade-offs are prevalent without examining this relationship in the context of how other fiscal policy tools are used to pay for defense. Using annual data from 1947-2007, this study examines the relative importance of defense financing policy measures, such as guns versus butter trade-offs, tax increases, and deficit spending in paying for defense. The results show evidence of guns versus butter trade-off during the Reagan Era, but not during other periods. Both federal tax policy and deficit spending have played influential roles in funding defense spending during peacetime. This modeling strategy points to the importance of analyzing the effects of multiple fiscal policy tools when studying the forces that drive military spending in the United States since World War II.
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Guns for Hire: Motivations and Attitudes of Private Security Contractors
Volker Franke & Marc von Boemcken
Armed Forces & Society, October 2011, Pages 725-742
Abstract:
Whereas the values, attitudes, and motivations of soldiers serving in their countries' armed forces have been widely studied, to date we know very little about the motivations and occupational self-perceptions of individuals working for the private security industry. Using data obtained through an online survey, this article explores the values and attitudes of more than 200 private contractors with law enforcement backgrounds and operational experience providing armed security services in conflict regions. Contrary to media-dominating images of ruthless, money-grabbing mercenaries, respondents in our sample displayed attitudes comparable to those of military professionals, adhering to high levels of professionalism and ethical conduct and motivated largely by altruistic factors.
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Counterterrorism strategies in the lab
Daniel Arce et al.
Public Choice, December 2011, Pages 465-478
Abstract:
We conduct experiments to test the collective action dilemmas associated with defensive and proactive counterterror strategies. Defensive policies are associated with creating public ‘bads' (e.g., a commons) whereas proactive policies are akin to the voluntary provision of public goods. When combined, the inefficiency of collective action is exacerbated, resulting in a situation known as a Prisoner's Dilemma squared (PD2). Deterministic versus probabilistic equivalent versions of the associated externalities are compared within a laboratory setting. Experimental results reveal that the collective action problem associated with counterterror strategies is deepened in uncertain environments, and is indeed a robust regularity that is not easily overcome; as individuals gain more experience, they become even more self-interested.
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Regulating Conflict: Historical Legacies and State Commitment to the Laws of War
Geoffrey Wallace
Foreign Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
The ongoing War on Terror and the rise of nonstate actors in armed conflicts around the world have led both critics and proponents of international law to argue the Geneva Conventions currently governing warfare are no longer relevant. Yet what are the prospects for a new Geneva Convention to take hold in the international community? In order to begin to address this issue, I examine the factors influencing the decision of states to commit to the existing laws of war. Using an event history analysis of the ratification of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and 1977 Additional Protocols I and II, I find formative events involving past experience with war, as well as several other domestic and external factors, shape the incentives to commit to international law. In particular, far from pushing war-torn states to join international agreements in the hopes of mitigating the costs of armed conflict, the legacy of war makes states less willing to be constrained by international humanitarian law. The findings have implications for the role of formative events on incentives for international cooperation and foreshadow that the path toward widespread acceptance of any new Geneva Convention, should one ever be negotiated, would likely be formidable.
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Megumi Kano et al.
Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, 2011
Abstract:
The government and people of the United States were profoundly affected by the terrorist events of September 11, 2001. Despite the rapid succession of surveys and polls focused on people's reactions to 9/11 that were conducted shortly after the event, much remains unknown about the details of how it affected people's behavior and readiness for future events on a national scale. This study is based on a survey of a nationally representative sample of 3,300 households. It describes specific actions that people took to prepare for terrorism or to reduce exposure to terrorism risk during the years following 9/11, either exclusively because of the terrorism risk or for other reasons. The results show that while many individuals became more vigilant and learned more about terrorism, the threat of terrorism alone did not motivate them to take basic preparedness actions. It did, however, motivate a substantial number of people to avoid places and other things that might expose them to terrorism risk. These results elucidate the impact that 9/11 had on individual behavior and national preparedness, helping to inform future efforts to strengthen the nation's resilience to terrorism and other extreme events.