War and Peace
Securitization, Social Identity, and Democratic Security: Nixon, India, and the Ties That Bind
Jarrod Hayes
International Organization, January 2012, Pages 63-93
Abstract:
The Democratic Peace stands as one of the most coherent and recognizable programs of study in international relations. Yet despite the pages of research devoted to the subject and claims about its law-like nature, the democratic peace remains a highly contested finding. In large part, this contestation arises out of an enduring question: What exactly keeps democracies from fighting? Drawing on the securitization theory of the Copenhagen School as well as social psychology, this article claims that a critical mechanism of the democratic peace lies at the political junction between policymakers and the public. I argue that the democratic identity of the public, grounded in basic democratic norms essential for the function of any democracy at any time, plays an independent role in the construction of security and foreign policy in the United States. To test the argument, I examine the difficult case of the 1971 Bangladesh War, when President Richard Nixon sent the USS Enterprise carrier group to the Bay of Bengal. Analysis of public statements as well as administration documentation reveals that, while Nixon and national security advisor Henry Kissinger actively saw India as a threat to U.S. interests, they were constrained by their belief that the public would not accept a security argument with respect to a fellow democracy.
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Aiding Conflict: The Impact of U.S. Food Aid on Civil War
Nathan Nunn & Nancy Qian
NBER Working Paper, January 2012
Abstract:
This paper examines the effect of U.S. food aid on conflict in recipient countries. To establish a causal relationship, we exploit time variation in food aid caused by fluctuations in U.S. wheat production together with cross-sectional variation in a country's tendency to receive any food aid from the United States. Our estimates show that an increase in U.S. food aid increases the incidence, onset and duration of civil conflicts in recipient countries. Our results suggest that the effects are larger for smaller scale civil conflicts. No effect is found on interstate warfare.
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Conventional Wisdom? The Effect of Nuclear Proliferation on Armed Conflict, 1945-2001
David Sobek, Dennis Foster & Samuel Robison
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
The possession of nuclear weapons confers many benefits on a state. The path to proliferation, however, is often violent. When a state initiates a nuclear weapons program, it signals its intent to fundamentally alter its bargaining environment. States that once had an advantage will now be disadvantaged. This change in the environment is not instantaneous, but evolves slowly over time. This gives states both opportunities and incentives to resolve underlying grievances, by force if necessary, before a nuclear weapons program is completed. Our cross-national analyses of nuclear weapons program and the onset of militarized conflict confirm this expectation. In particular, the closer a state gets to acquiring nuclear weapons, the greater the risk it will be attacked (especially over territorial issues). Once nuclear weapons are acquired, however, the risk of being attacked dramatically drops, though not below the risk of attack for non-proliferators.
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The Political Effectiveness of Terrorism Revisited
Max Abrahms
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Terrorists attack civilians to coerce their governments into making political concessions. Does this strategy work? To empirically assess the effectiveness of terrorism, the author exploits variation in the target selection of 125 violent substate campaigns. The results show that terrorist campaigns against civilian targets are significantly less effective than guerrilla campaigns against military targets at inducing government concessions. The negative political effect of terrorism is evident across logit model specifications after carefully controlling for tactical confounds. Drawing on political psychology, the author concludes with a theory to account for why governments resist compliance when their civilians are targeted.
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Wade Cole
American Journal of Sociology, January 2012, Pages 1131-1171
Abstract:
Much research has shown human rights treaties to be ineffective or even counterproductive, often contributing to greater levels of abuse among countries that ratify them. This article reevaluates the effect of four core human rights treaties on a variety of human rights outcomes. Unlike previous studies, it disaggregates treaty membership to examine the effect of relatively "stronger" and "weaker" commitments. Two-stage regression analyses that control for the endogeneity of treaty membership show that stronger commitments in the form of optional provisions that allow states and individuals to complain about human rights abuses are often associated with improved practices. The article discusses the scholarly and practical implications of these findings.
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A Blessing or a Curse? State Support for Terrorist Groups
David Carter
International Organization, January 2012, Pages 129-151
Abstract:
Little existing work has systematically examined the factors that help terrorist groups survive or contribute to their failure. State support for terrorist groups is commonly thought to be a factor that helps groups to survive. I demonstrate with newly collected data that state sponsorship is not always helpful to terrorist groups. The resources provided by sponsors increase a group's ability to maintain itself internally. However, when a group has a sponsor that provides it with safe haven, the risk of the group being forcefully eliminated by the target increases. I argue that sponsors that provide safe haven can have incentives to provide information to the target about the groups to avoid potential costs from target military operations within their territory. The key empirical findings suggest that state sponsorship is a less serious problem for target states than many previously thought.
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This Time It's Real: The End of Unipolarity and the Pax Americana
Christopher Layne
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Before the Great Recession's foreshocks in fall 2007, most American security studies scholars believed that unipolarity - and perforce American hegemony - would be enduring features of international politics far into the future. However, in the Great Recession's aftermath, it is apparent that much has changed since 2007. Predictions of continuing unipolarity have been superseded by premonitions of American decline and geopolitical transformation. The Great Recession has had a two-fold impact. First, it highlighted the shift of global wealth - and power - from West to East, a trend illustrated by China's breathtakingly rapid rise to great power status. Second, it has raised doubts about the robustness of US primacy's economic and financial underpinnings. This article argues that the unipolar moment is over, and the Pax Americana - the era of American ascendancy in international politics that began in 1945 - is fast winding down. This article challenges the conventional wisdom among International Relations/Security Studies scholars on three counts. First, it shows that contrary to the claims of unipolar stability theorists, the distribution of power in the international system no longer is unipolar. Second, this article revisits the 1980s' debate about American decline and demonstrates that the Great Recession has vindicated the so-called declinists of that decade. Finally, this article takes on the institutional lock-in argument, which holds that by strengthening the Pax Americana's legacy institutions, the United States can perpetuate the essential elements of the international order it constructed following World War II even as the material foundations of American primacy erode.
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Jomana Amara
Journal of Development Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The United States used a combination of economic, political, and military means to effect change in Iraq. Most notably, the United States used a buildup of security forces, the "surge", as an intervention to stabilize Iraq. This article uses structural change tests to determine the effect of the intervention on security and economic metrics of success. There appears to be compelling evidence that several events may have had a direct influence on security variables with the surge being one of the events. There is little to suggest that the surge was the primary intervention that enhanced economic development and political order.
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Economic Conditions and the Quality of Suicide Terrorism
Efraim Benmelech, Claude Berrebi & Esteban Klor
Journal of Politics, January 2012, Pages 113-128
Abstract:
This article analyzes the link between economic conditions and the quality of suicide terrorism. While the existing empirical literature shows that poverty and economic conditions are not correlated with the quantity of terror, theory predicts that poverty and poor economic conditions may affect the quality of terror. Poor economic conditions may lead more able and better-educated individuals to participate in terror attacks, allowing terror organizations to send better-qualified terrorists to more complex, higher-impact terror missions. Using the universe of Palestinian suicide terrorists who acted against Israeli targets in 2000-06, we provide evidence of the correlation between economic conditions, the characteristics of suicide terrorists, and the targets they attack. High levels of unemployment enable terror organizations to recruit better educated, more mature, and more experienced suicide terrorists, who in turn attack more important Israeli targets.
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Reputation for Resolve, Interests, and Conflict
Joe Clare & Vesna Danilovic
Conflict Management and Peace Science, February 2012, Pages 3-27
Abstract:
Schelling's work laid the foundation for a reputational theory of conflict behavior, claiming that a state's reputation for resolve, as established through its past behavior, should provide it with bargaining leverage in future conflicts. This argument is scrutinized both theoretically and empirically in this study and also juxtaposed to an alternative framework that modifies the impact of "face-saving" stakes with those of a more inherent nature, such as the interests in a dispute. We advance an argument about the interplay between a state's reputation from past behavior and its current interests in order to predict its crisis behavior. Our empirical expectations are subsequently tested in a quantitative analysis of deterrence crises for the period 1895-1985. The findings indicate that, while reputation matters, its impact is indirect at best and contingent on a state's interests. Given the strong empirical support, we expect the interaction between reputation and interests as specified in our analysis to further contribute to a better understanding of conflict behavior.
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Total Decontamination Cost of the Anthrax Letter Attacks
Ketra Schmitt & Nicholas Zacchia
Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, forthcoming
Abstract:
All of the costs associated with decontamination following the 2001 anthrax letter attacks were summarized, estimated, and aggregated based on existing literature and news media reports. A comprehensive list of all affected structures was compiled. Costs were analyzed by building class and decontamination type. Sampling costs and costs of worker relocation were also included. Our analysis indicates that the total cost associated with decontamination was about $320 million.
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Cultures of Violence and Acts of Terror: Applying a Legitimation-Habituation Model to Terrorism
Christopher Mullins & Joseph Young
Crime & Delinquency, January 2012, Pages 28-56
Abstract:
Although uniquely positioned to provide insight into the nature and dynamics of terrorism, overall the field of criminology has seen few empirically focused analyses of this form of political violence. This article seeks to add to the understanding of terror through an exploration of how general levels of violence within a given society influence the probability of political dissidents within that society resorting to terror as a form of political action. Drawing on the legitimation-habituation thesis, the authors explore whether general levels of legitimate and illegitimate violence within a society predict terrorist violence (both internal and external in direction) within that society. To do so, the authors use zero-inflated negative binomial regression models to perform time series cross-sectional analysis on predictors of terrorist events from the Global Terrorism Database. The authors find support for their core hypothesis and provide a discussion of the implications for the findings within their data and for future criminological research on terrorism.
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Explaining the Development-Civil War Relationship
Helge Holtermann
Conflict Management and Peace Science, February 2012, Pages 56-78
Abstract:
The vast majority of civil wars occur in economically less developed countries, as measured by GDP per capita. Two suggested explanations for this are prominent: one emphasizing that poverty facilitates rebel recruitment due to lowered economic opportunity cost of rebelling, and the other highlighting that low state reach and capacity give political and military opportunity for organizing insurgency. I argue that the latter account is more powerful. Low state reach is vital not only to rebel survival; it also enables rebels to obtain control over remote settlements, which facilitates the effective use of persuasion, coercion, organization, and economic rewards for mobilizing recruits and other resources. Although low economic opportunity costs can ease recruitment, it may not be essential if such tools are available. The argument is supported by a quantitative analysis covering 133 countries from 1989 to 2006. Countries experiencing civil war were distinguished more by low state reach (measured by road density, telephone density, and % urban of the population) than by depth of poverty (measured by the mean income of the poorest decile). Moreover, the negative association between GDP per capita and civil war risk disappeared when controlling for state reach, but remained strong controlling for poverty.
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A Dynamic Theory of Resource Wars
Daron Acemoglu et al.
Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2012, Pages 283-331
Abstract:
We develop a dynamic theory of resource wars and study the conditions under which such wars can be prevented. Our focus is on the interaction between the scarcity of resources and the incentives for war in the presence of limited commitment. We show that a key parameter determining the incentives for war is the elasticity of demand. Our first result identifies a novel externality that can precipitate war: price-taking firms fail to internalize the impact of their extraction on military action. In the case of inelastic resource demand, war incentives increase over time and war may become inevitable. Our second result shows that in some situations, regulation of prices and quantities by the resource-rich country can prevent war, and when this is the case, there will also be slower resource extraction than the Hotelling benchmark (with inelastic demand). Our third result is that because of limited commitment and its implications for armament incentives, regulation of prices and quantities might actually precipitate war even in some circumstances where wars would not have arisen under competitive markets.
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Why the U.S. Military Budget is Foolish and Sustainable
Benjamin Friedman & Justin Logan
Orbis, forthcoming
Abstract:
What defense budget the United States should have and what defense budget it can afford are separate questions. The debate raging in Washington about Pentagon spending ignores the distinction. Doves insist that we need a more modest military strategy because the current one is wasteful and economically unsustainable. Hawks say that the current approach is sensible and affordable. This article takes a third path, arguing that U.S. military policy is likely to remain extravagant because it is sustainable. We adopted our current strategy - which amounts to trying to run the world with the American military - because we could, not because it was wisest. Wealth and safety make the consequences of bad defense policy abstract for most U.S. taxpayers. So we buy defenses like rich people shop, ignoring the balance of costs and benefits. We conflate ideological ambition with what is required for our safety. Unfortunately, the current political demand for austerity and fewer wars will only temporarily restrain our military spending and the ambitions it underwrites.
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Convoys to combat Somali piracy
Benjamin Hughes & Simon Jones
Small Wars & Insurgencies, Winter 2012, Pages 74-92
Abstract:
As the world becomes increasingly globalized, interruptions to international trade cannot be permitted. Piracy off the coast of Somalia has hampered international trade in the region and poses significant risks to the sailors required to navigate those waters. Over the past three years the global community has attempted, through a number of different naval tactics, to stop these acts of piracy; however, these tactics have proven ineffective. This article looks at historical precedence and military theory to support the concept of using convoys to protect the thousands of cargo vessels traveling round the Horn of Africa every year. This tactic will greatly decrease the number of successful pirate attacks and save countless lives in the process.
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Industry-Level Supply-Side Market Concentration and the Price of Military Conflict
Jaya Wen
Conflict Management and Peace Science, February 2012, Pages 79-92
Abstract:
In economics, supply-side market concentration profoundly impacts firm behavior. This dimension of economic interaction can be used to predict the conflict initiation of countries in the context of international relations. The following investigation uses industry-level trade data to define four new market concentration variables, which are incorporated into the traditional model of military conflict. The article finds that high dyadic market concentration significantly decreases the likelihood that a state initiated military conflict in the period 1962-2001, and argues that market concentration is an important factor in the trade-conflict relationship.
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Paul Staniland
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Ethnic insurgents sometimes defect to join forces with the state during civil wars. Ethnic defection can have important effects on conflict outcomes, but its causes have been understudied. Using Sunni defection in Iraq as a theory-developing case, this article offers a theory of "fratricidal flipping" that identifies lethal competition between insurgent factions as an important cause of defection. It examines the power of the fratricidal-flipping mechanism against competing theories in the cases of Kashmir and Sri Lanka. These wars involve within-conflict variation in defection across groups and over time. A detailed study of the empirical record, including significant fieldwork, suggests that fratricide was the dominant trigger for defection, while government policy played a secondary role in facilitating pro-state paramilitarism. Deep ideological disagreements were surprisingly unimportant in driving defection. The argument is probed in other wars in Asia. The complex internal politics of insurgent movements deserve careful attention.