Consociationalism for Weaklings,Autocracy for Muscle Men? Determinants of Constitutional Reform in Divided Societies

Why have some countries adopted consociational constitutions after civil wars, while others have not? This contribution analyses the advent of constitutional provisions and their rationale in the five deeply divided societies that adopted the most ‘radical’ constitutional reforms in 2001–10 (Burundi, Comoros, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nepal and Sudan). In places where norm-diffusing external actors played a major role in ending an intra-state war, constitutional change was particularly profound. It appears that strong outside mediators have followed a blueprint approach to constitutional engineering in post-war societies with power sharing as a guiding principle, more often than not of the consociational type. There is reason to believe that the strong outside involvement in turn depends on a relative weak bargaining position of sitting governments.     

The Illusion of ‘Peace Through Power-Sharing’: Constitutional Choice in the Shadow of Civil War

Conflict managers around the world cling to the hope that power-sharing decreases the risk of civil war in post-conflict societies. Distinguishing between territorial and governmental conflicts, we analyse the origin and effectiveness of power-sharing institutions (PSI) and power-sharing arrangements (PSA). Our examination reveals that power-sharing is largely a consequence of the institutional legacy and of the war outcome. While PSI such as proportional representation or federalism cannot prevent a war from recurring, PSA in the form of grand coalitions reduces this risk marginally. However, granting autonomy to a rebellious region increases the danger that the relationship with the government turns violent again. Our results suggest that constitution makers should advocate power-sharing with caution.     

HUMAN STABILITY AND CONFLICT IN THE HORN OF AFRICA

States in the Horn of Africa have limited control of their economic situation and very little autonomy in security matters. Globalisation, the growing militarisation of conflicts and an ideological vacuum are some of the reasons for this. The idea that a central power (the state) can, or should, bring order to the periphery, should be questioned. When the rule of law is maintained at the expense of diversity, catastrophic conflict may arise. Regional organisations have too few resources to implement conflict prevention, management or resolution strategies. Refugees and displaced populations are the result. Authoritarian statism, fostered by international capitalist interests, has not prevented the tragic conflicts in the Horn. This Western model has not brought democratic rule, equality or human rights and it should be resisted in future peace efforts. A regional, co-operative union with a strong civil society drawing on pre-colonial wisdom offers the Horn a better path to prosperity and stability.     

ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES FOR ARMS CONTROL

The efforts of President Barack Obama and his administration to restore the United States as a driving force of multilateral arms control and nonproliferation negotiations are commendable, yet the lack of progress on such issues over the last eight years has ensured that U.S. policy has not kept pace with changes in the geostrategic environment and the evolving security agenda. Meanwhile, an alternative agenda has been articulated by non-Western countries. This article focuses on the arms control perspectives of Non-Aligned Movement states and others that have begun to embrace the idea of “disarmament as humanitarian action.” It explores this idea in the context of recent initiatives and argues that if the Obama administration wants to make progress on its arms control and nonproliferation priorities, it should consider a multifaceted approach that incorporates this emerging alternative agenda.     

An Opportunity Structure for Terrorism: Moderate Leadership Departures in Nationalist Movements

Why does terrorist violence escalate from some ethnic groups but not others? According to theoretical insights, many groups endure conditions that should spur on terrorist campaigns, but in reality only some carry them out. In contrast to studies emphasising motivations, this article constructs a framework centred on opportunity structures that contributes to our understanding of the rise of terrorism waged along ethnic lines. It argues that beyond grievances or other motivations, terrorist campaigns develop from communities when moderate political leaders depart from their positions in nationalist movements, causing terrorists to fill the subsequent power vacuum, while little terrorism occurs when leaders do not relinquish the nationalist agenda. This argument is evaluated with evidence from the Tamil and Muslim cases in the context of the Sri Lankan Civil War. Tamil United Liberation Front leaders left the Tamil nationalist movement in the early 1980s, enabling the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’s rise to dominate the nationalist agenda for three decades, while the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress did not relinquish the Muslim cause, which in part precluded the normalisation of violence in the community.     

Western drones and African security

While unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become a standard element of modern armed forces, African countries have been reluctant to acquire remotely piloted aircraft for military purposes until recently. This is mainly due to a lack of industrial capabilities and, for military purposes so far, procurement policies that have concentrated on small arms and light weapons, more prestigious armoured vehicles and combat aircraft. Moreover, counter-insurgency strategies in Africa tend to focus on manoeuvre warfare, co-opting rebels or fighting them using armed proxies. As a consequence, international counterterrorism operations against fanatical and reckless groups like al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Boko Haram in sub-Saharan Africa are characterised by a strong dependence on Western forces providing UAV-based reconnaissance and, in some cases for the United States, military strikes by drones. This essay reviews some of the incentives and problems of the use of UAVs in the African context. Given the geographical and military conditions of asymmetric warfare in Africa, and potential problems concerning international law, ethical aspects of the use of arms, and civil–military relations notwithstanding, it is argued that African security forces should develop their own UAV capabilities by intensifying their cooperation with Western armed forces.     

Reward,punishment or inducement? US economic and military aid, 1946–1996

If the US has wielded power as global hegemon, then there should be evidence of a linkage between American resources and the ability to influence behavior. However, there is widespread disagreement on how this power is manifested (see Krause, ). Methodological and epistemological issues have hampered empirical studies of US hegemonic behavior. For example, does the US reward past behavior or does it offer inducements for future behavior? We document and discuss these issues in terms of the aid–foreign policy compliance nexus. The empirical portion of our paper tests whether US military and non‐military aid are correlated with foreign policy similarity. The main merits of our study are that: (1) we test a new measure of foreign policy similarity developed by Signorino and Ritter () and compiled by Gartzke et al. (); (2) we relax the causality issue and test using vector autoregression (VAR) for 76 developing countries; and (3) our time horizon is a minimum of 30 years for each country. Our central finding is that aid is most often used as a reward. More specifically, foreign policy similarity leads to greater economic aid for most African countries, foreign policy similarity leads to greater military aid for a majority of Latin American states, and there are no overarching patterns for Asia and the Middle East. We discuss the implications of our findings in the context of the bargaining and structural approaches to statecraft.     

Burden Sharing in CSDP Military Operations

Abstract

Military burden sharing has been a subject of repeated debates in NATO and the UN. Despite more modest goals, the European Union’s (EU) Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) has experienced no fewer difficulties in garnering men, money, and materiel. While this may not come as a surprise, the fact that some EU member states have carried disproportionate shares of the burden of CSDP operations is a puzzle that remains unaccounted for. We address this gap by analyzing determinants of contribution levels to CSDP operations. In employing an innovative multi-method design that combines insights from collection action theory with those from integrated theories of military burden sharing, our results indicate that EU countries tend to contribute in positive disproportion with their capabilities when they have a strong peacekeeping tradition and elections are distant. In contrast, they undercontribute when small trade volumes with the area of operations combine with a weak peacekeeping tradition.     

International Norms in Ethno-Territorial Disputes: Legitimacy and Efficacy in Outsiders’ Views of Independence and Irredentism

Ethno-national territorial disputes typically involve conflicting homeland claims between states and minority ethnic groups. Where such minority ethnic groups have cross-border ethnic kin who themselves constitute a dominant or influential ethnic group in a neighbouring state, separatist goals may take the form of either irredentism or independence. We conjecture that external sympathy for irredentism and independence may vary significantly, and that this variation may be an important influence in situations where secessionist groups and ethnic kin states have a choice between the two goals. Using a bargaining framework that controls for variation in relative power, status quo conditions and minority-side leadership preferences, we present experimental evidence indicating that external audiences are likely to support more confrontational policies in pursuit of independence than in pursuit of irredentism. Our evidence also indicates that independence attracts greater support largely because outsiders perceive it as a more legitimate goal; and that practical efficacy is not important in stimulating sympathy for either independence or irredentism. These results also support a broader argument in the literature on international norms – that such norms receive support not only because they may justify pre-existing goals or interests, but also because they are perceived as having greater legitimacy per se.     

Ideoscapes in the World Society: Framing Violence in Somalia

The article uses the example of the Somali war to analyse how globally travelling ideas and political concepts are adapted to local settings and translated into frames that promote collective action and feature violence. It outlines how two ideas with universal claim, nationalism and modernisation were combined with an anti-colonial rhetoric and evolved into the meta-narrative of Somali history. This meta-narrative changed little, and keywords such as (pan-Somali) nationalism, anti-colonialism, development, sovereignty structure most of the discursive repertoires of political actors in Somalia. The main difference is that politicized clan affiliations were during the war dragged out of their shadowy existence and placed in the spot-light of political practice. They alone were however not sufficient to justify claims to power, but were complemented by ‘injustice’, ‘modernisation’ and ‘territorial’ narratives that justified violent deeds as ‘liberation’, ‘defence’ or ‘territorial rights’. Islamists employed similar key narratives and revived the pan-Somali anti-colonialist nationalism, but rooted it in a religious rational. Their ability to abandon culturalised frames contributed to their success.     

Too much Western bias? The need for a more culturally adaptable approach to post-conflict security sector reform

The existing guidelines for security sector reform (SSR) tend to draw on theoretical work in the field of civil–military relations, which in turn has been derived from Western, liberal democratic models of governance. Although guidelines strongly advise that local culture and context need to be considered when drawing up objectives for post-conflict SSR programmes, this is not often reflected in practice. This article considers some of the reasons for this, citing both in-country challenges and donor-related issues, and suggests that one of the biggest problems is a lack of alternative, non-orthodox models of civil–military relations to draw upon. It is further suggested that elements of suitable alternative models may be found in states which possess political structures not entirely dissimilar to the Western, liberal democratic ideal, but which can offer different perspectives. Detailed research of these structures should produce a pool of sub-models which could then be employed to create bespoke, culturally appropriate objectives for use in post-conflict SSR programmes.     

Effective attacks in the salvo combat model: Salvo sizes and quantities of targets

This article considers two related questions of tactics in the context of the salvo model for naval missile combat. For a given set of targets, how many missiles should be fired to produce an effective attack? For a given available salvo size, how many enemy targets should be fired at? In the deterministic version of the model I derive a simple optimality relationship between the number of missiles to fire and the number of targets to engage. In the stochastic model I employ the expected loss inflicted and the probability of enemy elimination as the main performance measures and use these to derive salvo sizes that are in some sense “optimal.” I find that the offensive firepower needed for an effective attack depends not only on a target's total strength but also on the relative balance between its active defensive power and passive staying power. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

Economic sanctions and official ethnic discrimination in target countries, 1950–2003

Conventional studies on the consequences of sanctions tend to focus on the target society as a whole without specifying how foreign economic pressures might affect the well-being of vulnerable groups within target countries – the same groups who often disproportionately bear the burden of sanctions. This study explores the extent to which sanctions increase the likelihood of discriminatory government practices against one of the globally most vulnerable groups, ethnic groups. It is argued that sanctions contribute to the rise of official ethnic-based economic and political discrimination through contracting the economy and creating incentives for the target government to employ ethnic-based discriminatory policies. Using data on over 900 ethnic groups from 1950 to 2003, the results lend support for the theoretical claim that sanctions prompt the government to pursue ethnic-based discriminatory economic and political practices in multiethnic countries. The findings also indicate that multilateral sanctions are likely to be more harmful to the well-being of ethnic groups than sanctions levied by individual countries. Further, the negative effect of comprehensive sanctions appears to be greater than that of sanctions with moderate and limited impact on the target economy. The regime type of the target state, on the other hand, appears to have a significant role only in conditioning the hypothesized effect of sanctions on economic discrimination. Overall, this study’s focus on a vulnerable segment of the target society – ethnic groups – offers a greater understanding of the consequences of sanctions. It also provides additional insight as to how, in multiethnic countries, political elites might domestically respond to external pressures to retain power.     

论边防在中国和平崛起中的作用

中国的和平崛起是指中国以和平的方式崛起,但这并不意味着崛起会抛开以国防为依托。而边防是国防的有机组成部分,边防在维护国家领土完整和主权独立中扮演着非常重要的角色。试图根据边防的各种职能,分析边防在中国和平崛起中的具体作用。     

Rebel movements in the DRC

Despite a generally valiant effort on the part of the United Nations (UN) since 1999 to bring peace and stability to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the country continues to be destabilised by rebel forces. These armed movements pose a constant threat to the fragile transition in the DRC, and security in the country is continuously undermined. This article examines rebel forces in the DRC from two perspectives. Firstly, it examines such movements as a manifestation of sub-national terrorism. Secondly, it examines armed movements from the perspective of so-called ‘ungoverned spaces’. The view taken in this article supports the scholarly insight and argument that in countries such as the DRC, armed movements and militias are filling power vacuums that are the result of the inability and lack of military capacity of weak states to fight these movements effectively. Specifically, the eastern and north-eastern parts of the DRC have been major conflict zones where sub-national terrorists employ terror as a strategy. In this context, the DRC is severely affected by terrorism – a phenomenon in the DRC that is intimately linked to the failure to effect sustained development and to consolidate accountable and effective governance.     

Ethnic groups,political exclusion and domestic terrorism

This study examines whether the exclusion of ethnic groups from political power is an important contributing factor to domestic terrorism. To empirically test this question, we employ a negative binomial regression estimation on 130 countries during the period from 1981 to 2005. We find that countries in which certain ethnic populations are excluded from political power are significantly more likely to experience domestic terrorist attacks and to suffer from terrorist casualties; furthermore, ethnic group political exclusion is a more consistent and substantive predictor of domestic terrorist activity than general political repression or economic discrimination.     

Reconsidering publicness in alliance defence expenditures: NATO expansion and burden sharing

Over the past several decades, NATO allies have debated the relative burdens and benefits of NATO membership. Recently, this concern surfaced as members debated the magnitude and distribution of NATO expansion costs. This paper presents an economic model of defence alliances to identify the benefits and burdens of alliance membership. It suggests that defence expenditures provide public benefits if alliance members share common interests and mutual commitment; defence expenditures provide private benefits if countries lack common interests and mutual commitment. The model's results are used to discuss NATO's evolving roles and missions, NATO expansion and burden sharing across NATO members.     

Security sector reform in Africa: Donor approaches versus local needs

Many African states have security sector reform (SSR) programs. These are often internationally funded. But how do such programs account for previously existing security institutions and the security needs of local communities? This article examines SSR all over Africa to assess local ownership and path dependency from a New Institutionalist perspective. It finds that SSR, particularly in post-conflict countries, tends to be driven by ideas and perceptions of international donors promoting generalized blueprints. Often, such programs only account in a very limited way for path-dependent aspects of security institutions or the local context. Hence, the reforms often lack local participation and are thus not accepted by the local community eventually.     

The Unveiled Motivations of Violence in Intra-State Conflicts: The Colombian Guerrillas

This article explores the motivations that push individuals to join and remain in insurgent groups. Though I consider the Colombian guerrillas, these findings are not necessarily case-specific. I argue that socio-psychological motivations at the individual level may be the most significant reason for joining, surpassing in importance grievance-based, ideological and even economic motivations. Moreover, I find that the lack of cohesion inside the Colombian guerrillas may boost economic motivations, further weakening insurgents' commitment to the pursuit of political power, and to the improvement of the socio-political position of those they claim to represent. This type of research contributes to a greater understanding of those in armed groups and it provides insights for developing focused recruitment prevention programs. It also contributes to the growing literature that explores the meaning and character of insurgencies, and possibly terrorist organizations.     

The right place at the right time,or the right person in the right place?

South Africa's military has, since the First World War, been an oft-used and effective tool in the conduct of South African foreign policy, but this role has not always translated into power for Defence Department principals in its formulation. South African Defence Ministers for most of the country's history have played a minor role in the making of foreign policy; despite a change in this dynamic between approximately 1975–1990, the post-apartheid era has once again seen a diminishment of Defence's power in this arena. This article examines why Defence Ministers have generally been such weak players, with an eye toward disaggregating whether this was a product of interpersonal relationships with Cabinet and – most importantly – the Head of State, or whether this influence (or lack thereof) was more a function of South Africa's international standing. While determining who has influence on this process is difficult given the primacy of the national leader in making foreign policy and a lack of insider accounts by participants in the process, this article relies upon several interviews with participants and knowledgeable observers that help illuminate the process and Defence's role in it.