Shifting power,preventive logic,and the response of the target: Germany,Russia, and the First World War

If a declining state has incentives for preventive war, the rising state should have incentives to delay a confrontation until it is stronger. We develop the theoretical paradox and examine the July 1914 crisis. Why did Russia, rising relative to Germany, not adopt a buying-time strategy? We argue that although most Russian leaders hoped to avoid a confrontation, they feared that the failure to support Serbia would lead to a loss of Russian credibility and a significant setback to Russia’s position in the Balkans, one that could not easily be reversed, even with Russia’s expected increase in relative military power.     

Muslims,Islamists, and the Cold War

A new devil has emerged to challenge Western values and public virtue, and ever so conveniently, the devil masqueraded in religious garb. Terrorism has become synonymous with Islamic fundamentalism if not with Islam itself, and a new iron wall has descended on the world, as Churchill said, separating East from West, Christendom from Islam. This study examines the question why US policy makers feel a persistent urge to draw foreign policy in moralistic terms and religious metaphor, often to their own detriment.     

Acrimony,asymmetry, and the Sino-Indian nuclear relationship

ABSTRACT

While most contemporary analyses of South Asian nuclear dynamics acknowledge the presence of a strategic triangle between the region’s three nuclear players, the primary focus usually remains on the rivalry between India and Pakistan. Discussions of Sino-Indian relations remain limited. This is likely attributed to the stability in the two countries’ relations, yet it is worth asking why this stability exists and whether it is likely to continue in the future. Although China and India have an acrimonious relationship, their asymmetric nuclear capabilities and threat perceptions mitigate the danger of a traditional security dilemma. India may perceive China’s nuclear aggrandizement to be a security threat, but the same is not true of China, which has a vastly superior nuclear force and is largely shaping its nuclear-force structure in response to the threat it perceives from the United States. This dynamic makes a serious conventional or nuclear conflict highly unlikely.     

SDI,NATO, and the Social Composition Function

The strategic defense initiative (SDI) intends to renew the leadership of the USA on the western alliance. The initiative takes place in a period when a summation technology prevails for the aggregation of contributions of NATO allies. We investigate if SDI induces a shift in Hirshleifer’s social composition function. Panel data tests over the period 1970–1990 do not confirm any break toward a best-shot aggregator. SDI does not alter the core of deterrence. It is indeed a public good at the US level but not at the NATO level, where, it is one of the joint products of the alliance. We also investigate the lessons to be drawn for the current debates on ballistic defense.     

Imperial nostalgia,the liberal lie,and the perils of postmodern counterinsurgency

Since 9/11, counterinsurgency is back in fashion; the ‘war on terror’ has even been branded a ‘global counterinsurgency’. However the context within which counterinsurgency originally arose is critical to understanding the prospects for its present success; the radically changed environment in which it is currently being conducted casts into considerable doubt the validity of the doctrine's application by many national militaries currently ‘rediscovering’ this school of military thought today. Above all, classical counterinsurgency was a profoundly imperial, state-centric phenomenon; consequently it only rarely faced the thorny issue of sovereignty and legitimacy which bedevils and may doom these same efforts today.     

Risk,War, and the Dangers of Soldier Identity

The profession of arms is distinct from other professions for many reasons. One reason which is not so obvious is that, unlike members of other professions, soldiers may go their entire careers preparing for a day that never arrives. All things considered, we should think this to be a very good thing. For soldiers, however, this can feel somewhat odd, since there is a natural desire to want to feel useful and to see one’s role and purpose find realization. Accordingly, the common soldier is forced to adopt a rather paradoxical mindset, one of longing for peace, and therefore for uselessness, while at the same time longing to be useful, which would entail that there be a war. This latter desire to be useful and to vindicate one’s identity as a soldier can sometimes take on an unhealthy life of its own. The pull of wanting too strongly to live up to a warrior identity, I argue, can sometimes skew a soldier’s ability to assess risk rationally. This article will therefore investigate how a soldier’s concept of self influences his or her overall capacity to evaluate risk in war and when such influence might become morally problematic.     

Rossellini,Pontecorvo, and the neorealist cinema of insurgency

This article examines the tradition of Italian neorealism and the importance it has for films depicting guerrilla insurgencies. It looks in particular at the two films by Roberto Rossellini Rome Open City and Paisa as well as the later film by Nanni Loy Four Days in Naples. It then proceeds to locate Gillo Pontecorvo's iconic film The Battle of Algiers within this neorealist tradition and examines the degree to which the director succeeded in continuing the basic traditions of neorealism into the context of the Algerian war of Independence. The article concludes that while this film remains of great interest it should be situated in the period when it was produced and is in many ways radically disconnected from many insurgent movements of the present day.     

The Provisional IRA,the Irish border,and Anglo-Irish relations during the Troubles

Using hitherto largely unexplored governmental archives from London and Dublin, this article focuses on the security challenges arising from the existence of the land frontier between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland and the significance of issues of cross-border security cooperation for Anglo-Irish relations from the beginning of the Troubles until the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985. It argues that the relatively safe haven of the Republic was essential to the longevity of the IRA's campaign and that successive Irish governments exploited British security concerns to expand their political influence on Northern Ireland.     

Ethnicity,class, and civil war: the role of hierarchy,segmentation, and cross-cutting cleavages

Why are some countries prone to ethno-nationalist conflict, whereas others are plagued by class conflict? This is a question that has seldom been raised and rarely been examined empirically. This paper presents a social-structural theory to account for the variable incidence of these two forms of political instability. These two types of conflict result from distinct principles of group solidarity – ethnicity and class – and since each individual is simultaneously a member of an ethnic group (or many such groups) and a particular class, these two principles vary in the degree to which they are mutually exclusive or cross-cutting. The degree of economic stratification between groups and economic segmentation within them shapes the relative salience of each principle of group solidarity in any society and is associated with a characteristic form of political mobilization. In places where between-group inequalities are high, and within-group inequalities low, ethnicity should be the dominant principle of group solidarity and serve as the primary basis of group conflict. By contrast, in countries where between-group inequalities are low, and within-group inequalities high, class is more likely to serve as the dominant principle of group solidarity, and conflicts along class lines are more likely. We test these conjectures with data in over 100 countries on cross-cutting cleavages, ethnic war, and class conflict. The results are supportive of the theory, and provide evidence that how groups are stratified and segmented in societies shapes the type of civil war.     

Rebels of the frontier: origins,organization, and recruitment of the Pakistani Taliban

The Pakistani Taliban, factionalized into some 40 groups, form a decentralized insurgent movement, often characterized by infighting, divergent motivations, and a shifting web of alliances. The Pakistani Taliban remain little understood because most scholars have avoided a serious treatment of the insurgent movement and instead focused on analyzing the geopolitics of the region and Pakistan's ‘double game’. This article seeks to fill this gap by dissecting the movement through selected theories of organization and mobilization. First, I explain the various dimensions of the conflict and the origins of the insurgency. Next, I discuss the Pakistani Taliban's political organization, categorizing it as composed of various warlord regimes. I further list the Taliban's component groups and numerical strength and chart the leadership structure. Lastly, I analyze insurgent recruitment strategies, accounting for the role of selective incentives, coercion, and genuine grievances.     

Signaling resolve,democratization, and the first battle of Fallujah

Perceptions and efforts to signal resolve can play an important role in counterinsurgency. The Coalition offensive against Fallujah in April 2004 demonstrates the limitations of relying on military force to signal resolve. The offensive catalyzed insurgent violence in Iraq and generated popular support for the insurgency. The Coalition prematurely halted the offensive because the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) could not maintain support for the Coalition in the face of popular outrage. Given the importance of democratizing Iraq and establishing a sovereign government, the objections of the IGC could not be ignored. Without Iraqi political support, military force ultimately signaled weakness instead of resolve.     

Capacity improvement,penalties, and the fixed charge transportation problem

Capacity improvement and conditional penalties are two computational aides for fathoming subproblems in a branch‐and‐bound procedure. In this paper, we apply these techniques to the fixed charge transportation problem (FCTP) and show how relaxations of the FCTP subproblems can be posed as concave minimization problems (rather than LP relaxations). Using the concave relaxations, we propose a new conditional penalty and three new types of capacity improvement techniques for the FCTP. Based on computational experiments using a standard set of FCTP test problems, the new capacity improvement and penalty techniques are responsible for a three‐fold reduction in the CPU time for the branch‐and‐bound algorithm and nearly a tenfold reduction in the number of subproblems that need to be evaluated in the branch‐and‐bound enumeration tree. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 46: 341–355, 1999     

Community preferences,insurgency, and the success of reconstruction spending

Existing theory on counterinsurgency does not adequately explain persistent insurrection in face of the reconstruction work currently underway in Afghanistan and Iraq. We starkly depart from the literature by developing a simple model of reconstruction allowing misalignment of occupier spending with community preferences. Insurgency arises endogenously as a result of the mix of spending rather than its level. Occupier insistence on its preferred path of reconstruction may lead to fewer projects of any kind being completed. In equilibrium, the occupier may accept an endogenous insurgency to achieve a preferred project mix, or be constrained in its choice even when no insurgency occurs.