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.     

SAVING THE NPT

For more than forty years, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) has provided major security benefits to the international community; however, the treaty is suffering from internal and external pressures, and benign neglect on the part of its members is undermining its authority. To ensure the treaty's continued viability, it is time for member states to start showing the NPT the respect it deserves and to renew their commitments to its fundamental purposes. Achieving this requires remedial action in at least four areas of vulnerability: reinvigorating nuclear disarmament; strengthening nonproliferation; overcoming the NPT's institutional deficit; and fostering a rapprochement between NPT and non-NPT states that does not abandon the goal of treaty universalization. There is still time before the 2010 NPT Review Conference for concerted action to restore the NPT's vitality and for the United States to resume its leadership role on behalf of the treaty and its membership.     

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 demand for military expenditure in authoritarian regimes

This paper examines whether there are systematic differences in military spending between different types of autocratic regimes. We view military expenditure as an instrument a dictator can exploit in order to stay in power. How he utilises this instrument depends on the institutional set-up of his regime. We distinguish between military regimes, single party states and personalist regimes, and predict that military regimes should have the highest, whereas personalist dictatorships should have the lowest level of military spending. Using panel data on 64 dictatorships from 1960 to 2000, we find empirical evidence that our hypotheses are not rejected.     

It Takes Two to Tango: Autocratic underbalancing,regime legitimacy and China’s responses to India’s rise

What factors do autocracies evaluate when responding to perceived threats and why might they fail to balance appropriately? I posit that autocratic leaders may choose greater exposure to an external threat if, by doing so, it preserves regime legitimacy. Specifically, the desire to promote a positive image to one’s domestic public creates incentives to publicly downplay a rival’s military progress, which then affects the state’s ability to mobilize resources to respond to the growing threat. I test this theory in the case of China’s response to India’s military rise. This research contributes to balancing theory and empirical work on East Asian security.     

Military Expenditures,Income Inequality,Welfare and Political Regimes: A Dynamic Panel Data Analysis

The goal of this paper is to investigate the relationship between type of welfare regimes and military expenditures. There is a sizeable empirical literature on the development of the welfare state and on the typology of the welfare regimes. There appear to be, however, no empirical studies that examine welfare regimes with special attention to military spending. This study aims at providing a comprehensive analysis on the topic by considering several different welfare regime typologies. To do so, we use dynamic panel data analysis for 37 countries for the period of 1988–2003 by considering a wide range of control variables such as inequality measures, number of terrorist events, and size of the armed forces. We also replicate the same analyses for the political regimes. Our findings, in line with the literature, show that there is a positive relationship between income inequality and share of military expenditures in the central government budget, and that the number of terrorist events is a significant factor that affects both the level of military expenditure and inequality. Also, the paper reveals a significant negative relationship between social democratic welfare regimes and military expenditures.     

The politics of international chemical weapon justice: The case of Syria, 2011–2017

There has been near-universal condemnation of the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian conflict. The international community has nevertheless struggled to make progress on holding the perpetrators to account. This article reviews developments at the international level in terms of Syrian chemical weapon justice between 2011 and 2017. It argues that there have been substantive disagreements between states on the rationale and means of justice in the Syrian case. It also argues that international initiatives have been tightly intertwined with developments in chemical disarmament and conflict resolution processes as well as the broader war. The article describes progress and challenges to chemical weapon justice in a number of distinct formal international mechanisms during the period studied. The analysis concludes by contextualizing international responses—including the U.S. tomahawk strikes against a Syrian airbase—to the Khan Shaykhun chemical attacks of April 2017.     

From Westphalian Failure to Heterarchic Governance in MENA: The Case of Syria

Abstract

The problematic export of the Westphalian system to MENA is examined, taking Syria as exemplar. The export model is juxtaposed to actual non-lineal trajectories, semi-sovereignty and hybrid or failing states. This is manifested in post-uprising Syria in failing statehood, fragmented and overlapping governance, permeable and collapsing borders, the loss of sovereignty to trans-state movements, “competitive regime-building” between the Asad regime and jihadist warlords, and “competitive interventionism” by external powers filling the governance vacuum with their own proxies. The result is heterarchic zones of limited statehood in which state sovereignty is contested by both international (supra-state) penetration and sub-state fragmentation.