Using the Feder-Ram and Military Keynesian Models to Examine the Link Between Defence Spending and Economic Growth in Sri Lanka

This study uses the Feder-Ram model in conjunction with the military Keynesian model to examine the nexus between defence spending and economic growth in Sri Lanka. We find that the Keynesian aggregate demand model is better suited to analyse the link than the Feder-Ram model for the case of Sri Lanka. Based upon our results we expect a higher economic growth rate in Sri Lanka if more public resources are diverted from the defence to civilian sectors of the economy, now that the war between the government and separatist guerrillas has come to an end. However, recent post war events cast doubt upon whether a diversion of sources from military to non-military spending will actually occur. We conclude that the sanguine predictions of our economic analysis are entirely dependent upon the political decisions of the Sri Lankan government for their realization.     

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.     

Evaluating the Spillover Effects of the Colombian Conflict in Ecuador

The Colombian civil war lasted for nearly six decades with approximately 10 percent of its population being displaced over the same period. The implications of this conflict have transgressed international boundaries. Countries such as Ecuador experienced an exodus of victims as well as an increase in the presence of armed groups, along with the proliferation of illegal businesses. Even though the internal social and economic consequences of the Colombian conflict have been documented in the literature, there is yet to be a study addressing these issues from the perspective of impacted neighboring countries. In this work, we contribute to the literature by evaluating whether the influx of asylum seekers and the increasing presence of armed groups in the bordering provinces of Ecuador have lead to an increase in violence among these provinces. We do not find any link between the arrival of asylum seekers and the incidence of violent crimes in the Ecuadorean bordering provinces. Similarly, our results indicate that despite an increase in the presence of armed groups, these regions did not experience an increase in the homicide rates significantly different from the other provinces. The results are robust to various specifications and econometric techniques.     

THE HUMAN CAPITAL PEACE: DEVELOPMENT AND INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT

This paper explores the relationship between human capital and international conflict. In theory, human capital may increase the opportunity cost of military service and the economic cost of injury and loss of life in combat; it may decrease the benefits of conflict as human capital cannot be easily appropriated or transferred; it may affect societal norms toward peace and war; and it may alter military productivity through new technology and complementarities between military technology and personnel. Using a panel of politically relevant dyads, I find robust empirical evidence that human capital may significantly decrease the likelihood of militarized conflict between nations. In short, the findings suggest that promoting human capital‐oriented development may help to increase peace in the world.     

The Zimbabwe people’s revolutionary army military operations in Makonde district and the attack on Salisbury’s fuel storage tanks, 1965-1979

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army operations in Mashonaland West province with particular reference to Makonde District during the country’s war of liberation. Despite the growing literature on ZAPU and ZPRA in Zimbabwe’s war of liberation there is little that has been written concerning the operations of ZPRA guerrillas in Mashonaland provinces. Guided by evidence drawn from secondary and primary sources the article further asserts that ZPRA adopted a four pronged strategy in Makonde District. This strategy in part was hinged on the politicization of the population on the one hand and annihilation of the enemy forces, attrition and manoeuvre warfare on the other. Again, the article argues that ZPRA guerrillas attempted to capture Salisbury (Harare) in order to conquer the Rhodesian Security Forces’ centre of gravity. It was hoped that the capture of the capital city would Makoni District was of strategic significance to the conduct of ZPRA operations and arguably hastened Ian Smith’s decision to attend the Lancaster House Conference negotiations that led to the independence of Zimbabwe in 1980.     

Colombian Military Support for ‘Democratic Security’

Building upon a far-reaching reform movement carried out during the administration of Andres Pastrana (1998–2002), the Colombian military emerged in the Alvaro Uribe first term (2002–06) as a powerful, flexible organization capable of implementing a national strategy for successful counterinsurgency. Sweeping organizational change was accompanied by advances in operational art and tactics, as well as the promotion of new leadership tested in combat. A growing maturity in civil–military relations enabled national advances in democratic politics, economic progress and state integration, the latter to a degree unprecedented in Colombian history.     

Livelihood systems of enlisted Ugandan Army soldiers: honour and reform of the UPDF

This article explores the livelihood pathways of serving Ugandan Army soldiers and traces their methods and motivations for enlistment. All were from areas of northern Uganda affected by nearly two decades of violent instability. With the Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF) increasing recruitment eligibility requirements and taking other measures to improve professionalism, some soldiers enlisted using false credentials and names, travelled to skirt unofficial ethnic quotas, and joined against their family's wishes. The Army's defence reform process was intended to preclude such problems. The article concludes with reflections on what strategic deception (by both recruits and the Army) may imply for warriors' honour.     

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.     

The Hunt for Martín Caballero

While the success of Colombia's fight against illegal armed groups, led by Fuerzas armadas revolucionarias de Colombia – ejército del pueblo (FARC-EP), is generally lauded as evidence of the effectiveness of both COIN doctrine and security assistance, the configuration of Colombia's counter-insurgency effort remains largely unstudied. This article will explain the success of one of those campaigns carried out principally by the Colombian marines (Colmar) in an area of northern Colombia known as the Montes de María. Contingent factors shaped the success of this campaign, beginning with the fact that the Montes de María forms an area where insurgents, relative late comers to the region, found it difficult to put down deep roots. However, operations to eradicate them were complicated by the inexperience of the Colmar, and by constraints placed by Colombia's Constitutional Court on COIN methods modeled on those successfully applied by the British in Malaya and Kenya. Therefore, Colmar officers initiated their five-year campaign by building up a base of popular support in the towns and targeting insurgent logistical networks. This bought time to strengthen the Colmar's combat and intelligence capabilities, and take the offensive that eventually isolated and killed the leader of the FARC in the Montes de María, Martín Caballero. Unfortunately, the failure of the Colombian government to follow up the Colmar victory by installing a regional and local governments viewed as legitimate by the population, and to resolve long standing land tenure issues, has meant that, so far, the Colmar looks to have delivered a tactical victory in a strategic vacuum.     

Colombia: Changing strategy amidst the struggle

From 1965 to the present, Colombia has been confronted by the insurgency of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The threat reached a new level in 1996 with the advent of mobile warfare, whereby large units sought to neutralize the military in an effort to seize power and institute a Marxist-Leninist regime. Unlike Vietnam, what followed was a regaining of the strategic initiative by the government and a decimation of the insurgent threat. This was accomplished with US assistance but from first to last was driven by Colombian leadership and strategy. The strategy which led to this signal change, ‘Democratic Security’, unfolded under the leadership of President Álvaro Uribe. It was a civil–military partnership, which sought to expand the writ of Colombian democracy to all elements of society. Securing the population provided the shield behind which economic, social, and political life could occur as driven by the will of the people. It was the agreement upon legitimacy as the strategic goal and reform as the route to that goal which allowed the Colombians and the Americans to work so well together.     

The FARC’s militaristic blueprint

This article intends to explain the outstanding sequence of success and failure exhibited by the FARC, the main Colombian guerrilla since the 1980s. It claims that such sequence is unintelligible unless the adoption by the FARC of a militaristic organizational blueprint at its 1982 7^th Conference is taken into account. By building itself like an army, the FARC could boost its combat capacity, maintain its structural integrity, and develop powerful mechanisms that held the whole structure together. At the same time, the militarization of the FARC also entailed significant risks and costs like political isolation and high personnel turnover. After describing the militaristic blueprint, the article compares the FARC with other irregular forces that operated in the Colombian context – a comparison which is important to understand the specificity of the FARC trajectory, as well as the benefits and costs involved in it. The analysis highlights the critical role of organizational dimensions in the explanation of civil war outcomes, and suggests that at least for some problems organizational dynamics should be observed at a low level of granularity.     

The terrorists of today are the heroes of tomorrow: the anti-British and anti-American insurgencies in Iraqi history

The anti-British rebellion of 1920 has become one of the most important foundational myths of Iraqi nationalism. It has been the subject of poetry, theatre, film and folklore and continues to be commemorated and evoked as a symbol of the Iraqi nation state and of Iraqi pride and independence. This popular reading of events ignores the realities of the rebellion: that it was a mid-Euphrates, rather than a national, affair and that the motivations, to begin with at least, were far more personal and economic than national. Nevertheless, the rebellion's memory has acquired a hallowed place in Iraqi nationalist discourse. This article will focus on two points: first, to place the rebellion of 1920 in its correct historical context; second, it will be argued that today's anti-American insurgency will make the same historiographical journey from being a tumultuous and localised event that had no shortage of detractors to becoming a defining symbol of Iraqi nationalism. As will be shown, there is already much evidence to suggest that the process has already begun. The foreign troop presence cannot remain indefinitely and when, sooner or later, Coalition forces withdraw we may well see the development of a narrative that credits the ‘resistance’ for gaining Iraqi independence; in other words, the ‘resistance’ today may well become the foundational nationalist myth of the new Iraq.     

Civilian protection in Africa: How the protection of civilians is being militarized by African policymakers and diplomats

This article explores how the protection of civilians is being militarized by African policymakers and diplomats. I draw on practice approaches to analyze what social groups are doing when they claim to “protect civilians.” I show how innovative protection mechanisms can be seen as a function of officials and diplomats coping with the changing circumstances of increasingly militarized politics in Africa. Specifically, accountability mechanisms for unintended and intended civilian harm by African security operations have originated in connection with this development. I argue that these are results of anchoring practices, which means that everyday informal interactions in one context become linked to another context. I argue that these emerging accountability mechanisms represent a new combination of practices, with the potential of changing the routine activities and mutual learning between policymakers and diplomats.     

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.     

Rebels & Legitimacy; An Introduction

Abstract

This introduction to the double special issue on the theme of rebels and legitimacy aims to set out the parameters for the discussion. It looks at legitimacy as a concept and at legitimation as a process. To date most of the literature on legitimacy has focused on the state. However, rebel groups such as insurgents, terrorists, warlords and guerrillas have all had claims, and continue to claim, legitimacy as well. How and when are these rebels seen as legitimate actors? Existing suggestions of rebel legitimacy focus heavily on state models of social order and the social contract. This first contribution discusses how to conceptualize legitimacy and how to make it operational. A two-pronged approach, borrowing heavily from Max Weber, is proposed. Legitimacy is investigated based on beliefs and belief systems about what is considered legitimate. This is combined with practices whereby legitimacy is enacted, copied and emulated by the population the rebels claim to represent.     

The myth of intrinsic combat motivation

In military studies, the most contentious arguments about human resources are associated with combat motivations. The trouble with the existing literature is that two distrinctions are routinely ignored: the distinction between combat motivation and the motivation to serve; and the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. A review within the terms of these distinctions suggests that the literature, particularly the American literature, exaggerates intrinsic motivations. Motivations to serve, which are intrinsic, are not completely transitive with combat motivations, which are largely extrinsic. An emphasis on intrinsic motivations can even be counter-productive, encourageing, at best, myopia and, at worst, atrocities.     

Mapping Out a Counterinsurgency Campaign Plan: Critical Considerations in Counterinsurgency Campaigning1

This paper argues on the basis of a series of historical examples that include the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaya and Northern Ireland, that there is no perfect counterinsurgency model and that each counterinsurgency campaign is different. Counterinsurgents need to have a series of basic tenets to wage successful war against guerrillas and insurgents. These include: a clear political policy from the government under insurgent attack, a strategy to keep the population safe, successful intelligence gathering, a recognition that successful counterinsurgency is manpower intensive and a high priority on the destruction of the insurgent infrastructure. This paper urges that in period of peacetime it is essential that militaries develop a Standing Counterinsurgency Concepts Unit that can conceptualise past and present insurgent patterns and build this into military and strategic planning.     

Does military expenditure increase external debt? Evidence from Asia

This article empirically explores the effect of military spending on external debt, using a sample of ten Asian countries over the years from 1990 to 2011. The Hausman’s test suggests that the random-effects model is preferable; however, both random-effects and fixed-effects models are used in this research. The empirical results show that the effect of military spending on external debt is positive, while the effects of foreign exchange reserves and of economic growth on external debt are negative. For developing countries caught in security dilemma, military expenditure often requires an increase in external debt, which may affect economic development negatively.     

Externality of Defense Expenditure in the United States: A New Analytical Technique to Overcome Multicollinearity

Abstract

This study estimates a three-sector Feder–Ram model using US annual data for 1965–2014 to confirm the externality of defense expenditure in the United States. Although the model is often used in the literature to scrutinize whether this effect exists, a flaw intrinsic to this model is the appearance of multicollinearity. In this study, I introduced novel techniques, namely: the standardization and estimation of a simple slope, to estimate the model. The results are as follows. First, I prove that the multicollinearity problem can be resolved by standardization. Second, externality, which is judged to conventionally exist, is not found. Third, increases in defense expenditure bring about positive but limited economic growth when the ratio of private to defense expenditure in the previous year ranges from 5.09 to 6.82%. By re-estimating the model, this study contributes to developing the Feder–Ram model within the related literature.     

The impact of political instability on the economic growth of ECOWAS member countries

This study contributes to the literature on political instability and economic growth by specifically investigating the impact of political instability on the economic growth of member countries of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). West Africa is regarded as the riskiest sub-region within the African continent. To achieve this objective, this study employed panel data techniques (fixed effects and generalised method of moments) on a sample of 15 ECOWAS member countries for the period 2005–2012. The findings from the analyses showed that terrorism, poor governance, social unrest, youth unemployment, death rate and natural resource rent have negative relationships with economic growth. The findings and policy implications deduced from this study could not have been any timelier considering the recent escalation of instability in West African countries and their fragile growth prospects.