Power-Sharing in Civil War: Puzzles of Peacemaking and Peacebuilding

Syria's slide into sectarian civil war in 2011 raises a new fundamental knowledge question about the conditions under which power-sharing pacts can be clinched as an approach to war termination. When intrastate conflicts escalate into violent sectarian struggles, power-sharing is a likely basis of an eventual political settlement in situations where partition is off the table. This article contends that there remain two puzzling knowledge gaps about power-sharing as the basis for peace agreements to end civil wars: first, the specific conditions under which elites find it in their own interest to share power with bitter adversaries rather than fight on the battlefield, and second, how war-ending elite-negotiated pacts may evolve into more enduring social contracts. These puzzles, critical for policymakers and still unresolved in the scholarly literature, suggest the need to develop more contingent- and context-specific knowledge if research findings are to more capably contribute to peacemaking efforts.     

Does Spoiling Work? Assessing the Impact of Spoilers on Civil War Peace Agreements

Scholars and policymakers argue that violent actors – termed ‘spoilers’ – pose a significant threat to civil war peace agreements. Yet existing research, which is overly reliant on single-case studies, has not effectively determined how prevalent spoiling is, or thoroughly examined what its ultimate effects are on peace agreements. This article draws on a newly constructed cross-national dataset of spoiling following 241 civil war peace agreements in the post-Cold War era to analyze spoiling. It finds that spoiling intended to terminate an agreement is not as common as typically assumed, but still plagues a sizeable number of peace agreements. Moreover, most actors who resort to this strategy typically fail in their goals and the agreement is not at risk, despite the high publicity and attention given to these threats. Yet particular types of actors, most notably paramilitaries and state security forces excluded from the agreement, can pose a significant threat to peace.     

Mediation,Peacekeeping And Civil War Peace Agreements

The post-civil war agreement phase is vulnerable to credible commitment problems, a lack of government capacity to implement, and/or mutual vulnerability to retribution from violating the agreement. This study’s main contribution is to demonstrate the combined utility of mediation and UN peacekeeping. Mediation builds trust and confidence and works with the parties to design an efficacious agreement conducive to, among other features, tamping down post-agreement violence. Peacekeeping stems violence and facilitates the implementation of the agreement. Agreements that are mediated and followed by UN peacekeeping are expected to be more robust in terms of staving off violence. We report the effects of the mediation–peacekeeping interaction using a method correcting for a common misinterpretation of interaction terms. We test logit and hazard models using a sample of full and partial civil war peace agreements signed between 1975 and 2011. Controlling for agreement design, democracy, and income per capita, the results indicate mediation and its interaction with peacekeeping reduce the probability of renewed/continuing violence and have a positive impact on agreement duration. We also report brief case study evidence from the 1990s peace process in Guatemala.     

战场目标声音识别关键技术研究

战场目标声音探测技术在现代战争中发挥着越来越重要的作用。针对战场目标声音识别的一些关键技术进行了研究。首先分析了目标声音探测技术的军事应用特点,然后对战场典型目标发出的噪声的物理特性进行了分析。最后论述了战场目标声音识别技术中的几种关键技术,重点分析了特征提取中的LPCC、MFCC技术以及分类器中的隐马尔可夫模型,为战场目标声音识别系统的开发奠定了基础。     

Autocracies and Economic Sanctions: The Divergent Impact of Authoritarian Regime Type on Sanctions Success

There is some consensus in the literature that economic sanctions targeting authoritarian regimes are less effective than those against democratic regimes. This line of research, however, assumes that autocratic regimes are monolithic and that they have similar capacities to resist foreign pressure. This study argues that the success rate of sanctions against dictatorships is contingent on institutional differences across different types of autocracies. I develop a theoretical model indicating that single-party and military regimes are less likely to concede to foreign pressure compared to democracies. This is because they effectively use various repressive tactics and positive inducements to endure the costs of the coercion. Sanctions against personalist regimes, on the other hand, are likely to be as effective as sanctions directed at democracies. Personalist regimes might be inclined to acquiesce to foreign pressure due to their lack of strong institutional capacity to weather the costs of the sanctions. Results from the selection-corrected models show that sanctions against military or single-party regimes are less likely to induce concessions relative to democratic target regimes. The findings also indicate that there is no significant difference in the success rate of sanctions against personalist regimes and democratic governments.     

Buying Peace? Civil War Peace Duration and Private Military & Security Companies

Do Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) impact peace duration after civil war? I argue that the role these organisations play in a conflict can impact post-conflict stability. Specifically, I suggest that variance in services provided by PMSCs can influence rebels’ calculations about relative capabilities. These calculations then contribute to the probability for civil war recurrence. Building on the bargaining framework, with a focus on information and commitment problems, this article demonstrates that PMSCs participating in armed combat operations can jeopardise the stability of peace following civil war. Three case narratives (Angola, Sierra Leone and Croatia) are used to probe the theoretical argument and results are illustrative – PMSCs serving as force multipliers contribute to an increase in the probability for conflict recurrence.     

The political command and control of nuclear forces

“Even more than in 1914, governments in our own day are likely to be ignorant of the technical detail of war and the tactical measures that can or cannot (or, more important, must or must not) be taken in various specialized situations. In peacetime the study and preparation of these measures will be relegated to military staffs as being narrow and technical. Today, .... it is almost impossible to get people interested in the tactics and strategy of thermonuclear war. It is now believed that only the prewar moves are of interest, and even those are not too important because deterrence is supposed to be so close to 'automatic'.” Herman Kahn (1960).     

The impotence of conventional arms control: why do international regimes fail when they are most needed?

Amid tensions with the West over Ukraine, Russia pulled out of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe in March 2015. The Russian case is another example of a country disengaging from conventional arms control when relations with other member states deteriorate. This raises an important question: can arms control regimes aimed at preventing conflict survive periods of tension and preserve peace? This article argues no. It demonstrates that the prospect and stability of conventional arms control regimes depend on healthy international relations. In times of tension, governments rely on military institutions for advice and absorb military biases incompatible with arms control. Therefore, these regimes fail when most needed and are impotent as instruments of peace. Beyond conventional arms control, the article hints at the fragility of nuclear agreements such as the 2015 Iran deal and the 2010 New START between the United States and Russia.     

Can Governments Negotiate With Insurgents? The Latin American Experience

In June 2016, the Colombian Government and the FARC insurgent movement signed a ceasefire agreement, which brings the two sides one step closer to putting an end to over five decades of war. Unfortunately, Latin America has a rich history of insurgent movements, particularly during the cold war era, some of which continue to operate today. Most of these movements disappeared due to military operations, though some did so via peace negotiations. This essay aims to discuss the various ends of Latin American insurgencies to answer whether, indeed, insurgents can be negotiated with.     

Pursuing sustainable peace through post-conflict peacebuilding: The case of Sierra Leone

Many of the world's poorest states have experienced violent conflict in the past decades and it is today widely accepted that armed conflicts require sustained efforts that address not only the military, but also the political, humanitarian, economic and social dimensions of conflicts. For some years there has been a growing international concern with and emphasis on peacebuilding programming in the area of conflict resolution and peacekeeping. In Sierra Leone, a country that was engulfed in a brutal civil war for more than ten years, peace was hard won—a peace that would not have been possible without the presence and active post-conflict assistance of the United Nations (UN). However, Sierra Leone remains in a precarious state, being one of the poorest countries in the world, and needs the commitment of the international community in ongoing post-conflict peacebuilding to sustain its delicate peace. This article examines the challenges, extent and achievements of peacebuilding programming in Sierra Leone, and assesses the prospects for sustainable peace in this once war-torn West African state.     

Iraq's role in the 1973 Arab‐Israeli War

The events of the 1973 Arab‐Israeli War serve as an early indicator of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's willingness to use military power to address foreign policy concerns. In that war, Iraq intervened on the Syrian front with an armored division, other supporting units, and over 100 aircraft. This intervention, which occurred despite severe political and military difficulties, was larger than any previous Iraqi contribution to the anti‐Israeli struggle. Baghdad later asserted that Iraqi forces had saved Damascus from possible Israeli occupation, and these claims have been widely repeated by a variety of authors of different nationalities with various degrees of agreement or skepticism. Nevertheless, Iraqi claims to have saved Damascus from Israeli capture are false since the Israelis did not view the seizure of the city as important to their strategy for victory. Rather, the Iraqi presence on the Golan Heights was useful to the Arab war effort as one of many factors helping to delay the Israeli advance and prevent some important Syrian targets from being placed within artillery range of the Israeli force. Iraqi military shortcomings were well highlighted in this conflict, and many were repeated in the early stages of the war with Iran.     

India and Pakistan: Bargaining in the Shadow of Nuclear War

Based on the experience of the Cold War, some scholars hoped that the introduction of nuclear weapons into South Asia would promote peace between India and Pakistan. Instead, nuclear weapons made Pakistan less fearful of India's conventional military forces, and therefore help explain recent conflicts between them. Moreover, US expressions of concern about the possibility of inadvertent nuclear war in South Asia may have provided an incentive to both sides to be intransigent in order to elicit US intervention.     

Operational aspects of a future war between Egypt and Israel

The peace treaty between Israel and Egypt has survived since 1979. Even so, following the events in Egypt, there is a growing tension between the two states, particularly surrounding the Sinai, which could cause a crisis and even a war. In such a case, the main battlefield would be in Sinai, and there would be several dominant aspects. Some of them would appear for the first time, compared with previous wars, such as a collision between Israeli and Egyptian units of around corps size. Other aspects would be more familiar, such as the ratio between the size of the forces to that of the battlefield, the “fog of war,” night fighting, “friendly fire” and deception.     

影响指挥员军事决策的因素分析

现代高技术条件下的局部战争,军事活动的节奏明显加快,作战空间跨域扩展,战场态势复杂多变,尤其是当重大危机发生时,对军事决策的时效性提出了更高要求,指挥员必须能够及时、果断、有效、准确地定下作战决心。指挥员军事决策的有效性不仅受主观因素的影响,还受客观因素的影响。通过对影响因素的分析,提出提高指挥员军事决策能力的有效途径,为军队指挥人才培养提供合理建议。     

What Goes Up Must Come Down: Military Expenditure and Civil Wars

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of civil war on military expenditure. We employ two measures of military expenditure: the share of military expenditure in general government expenditure and the logarithm of military expenditures. We would reasonably expect a priori that military expenditure as a share of general government expenditure increases during a civil war and that such increases would taper off over the duration of a civil war. We also explore whether the termination of a civil war induces a decline in the share of military expenditure as a share of the general government expenditure in the short-run. We find evidence the of share of military expenditure increases during a civil war and falls in the year succeeding the end of a civil war, and, in particular, if a war ends in a peace treaty. The level of military expenditures, however, rises during civil wars and does not appear to decline in the short-term after the end of a civil war.     

基于人工势场的军事态势分析模型

在基于Agent建模仿真方法的战争复杂性研究过程中,为了解决高层指挥控制Agent对军事态势自主分析判断能力的问题,引入了高等物理学中电势场的基本原理来对战场军事态势分析进行建模--并取名为人工势场.介绍了人工势场模型构建的基本原理,结合工程实践详细讨论了该模型在理论和工程实现上的一些基本问题,最后给出了基于该模型的几个简单的分析测试实例.仿真实验证明该模型用于高层指挥控制Agent的实时军事态势分析是可行的.     

Women and the military

Debates about the relationship between women and the military have become common within Western societies. These debates primarily centre on the issue of the place, fitness and desirability of a female presence within institutions designed for national war making. There are those who claim that equality betwen the sexes demands the full integration of women into national militaries, including in combat roles, others however argue that women are ill‐equipped for the traditional tasks required of ‘warriors’. This article argues that these debates are increasingly irrelevant. Future wars are increasingly less likely to be fought only by clearly defined national combat forces and more likely to be ‘virtual’ wars involving the deployment of Western technologies against militarily inferior opponents. This too is an age in which Western states will be engaged not just in virtual wars but in ‘humanitarian intervention’, peacekeeping, enforcement and postwar reconstruction. This allows, even encourages, a rethinking of traditional notions and debates over the place of women within the military sphere.     

Democracy for the rescue—of dictators? The role of regime type in civil war interventions

Intrastate conflicts, long eclipsing interstate conflicts, are often internationalized. This paper examines internationalized intrastate conflicts through the types of both the intervening and the embattled regimes. Do democracies, more or less than autocracies, support autocratic governments in their fights against rebels? This paper tests three hypotheses: (1) democracies support autocrats fighting rebels less than autocracies do. (2) Democracies support democratic governments fighting against rebels more than autocracies do. (3) The more democratic two states are, the higher the probability one would support the other’s fight against rebels. Covering all documented external support in intrastate wars (1975–2000), our findings support hypothesis one and two only partly and confirm hypothesis three. However, comparing the two major accounts of the Democratic Peace theory (DPT)—the normative and the structural—our findings corroborate only the former robustly. The paper thus helps enriching the insights of the DPT beyond interstate conflicts.     

THE STRUCTURAL CRISIS IN GUINEA-BISSAU'S POLITICAL SYSTEM

Guinea-Bissau's transition toward democracy has been violent and disruptive. Despite holding elections and attempts to promote economic and social development, the latest government, under President Yala, is not equipped to bring stability or even a more democratic state. A politicised military, inexperienced opposition and corrupt government officials have contributed to the current poverty and instability. Although unlikely to be deposed by the fragmented opposition, Yala is not secure within his own party and is likely to use his position to weaken his opponents. As a Catholic, Yala has been careful to avoid religious conflict by reassuring Muslim citizens that they will not be marginalised. The economy is precarious and poverty has not been addressed. Guinea-Bissau is dependent on foreign donors for its financial needs. Guinea-Bissau has begun military operations against rebels opposing the Senegalese government and the battles seem likely to continue to cause regional instability. Without external intervention political and economic development looks remote.