Arming China: Major powers’ arms transfers to the People’s Republic of China

The rise of China has been fuelled by a massive military modernisation programme relying, in large part, on the acquisition of foreign military equipment. The question of how the world’s major powers define their arms transfer policies towards China is therefore crucially important. This article makes two original contributions. First, drawing on neoclassical realism, it proposes an explanatory framework integrating international and domestic factors to explain variations in major powers’ arms transfers. Second, based on a large body of elite interviews and diplomatic cables, it offers the first comprehensive comparison of American, British, French and Russian arms transfer policies towards China since the end of the Cold War.     

Sweden and the issue of NATO membership: exploring a public opinion paradox

The past decade has seen substantial shifts in Swedish security policy and major change in the domestic debate about NATO. For the first time, all of the right-of-centre “alliance parties” are calling for a full NATO membership, and popular support for NATO has increased. Yet public opinion contains ambiguities and paradoxes that complicate the picture. At the same time as support for NATO has increased, the public is overwhelmingly for continued military non-alignment. Drawing on previous research, longitudinal data from national surveys, and other sources on defence and security issues, this article aims to increase our understanding of the development and change in Swedish public opinion on NATO. A key argument is that Erving Goffman’s theatre metaphor, combined with neo-institutional decoupling theory, to a large degree can help understand the public opinion paradox.     

论科学社会主义理论与实践的新发展

科学社会主义理论是一个开放的体系,具有与时俱进的理论品质。中国改革开放的伟大实践有力推动了科学社会主义理论的发展,社会主义事业将不断发展,科学社会主义理论也将得到不断发展。     

The French Army ‘Centre for Training and Preparation in Counter-Guerrilla Warfare’ (CIPCG) at Arzew

Psychological warfare had been used by the French army in the Indochina War (1946–54), and had spawned a sub-caste of French officers who moulded it and counter-insurgent propaganda into a doctrine known as guerre révolutionnaire (revolutionary war). In Algeria, in 1956, the army established a specialist training centre, the CIPCG, at Arzew on the Algerian coast, to provide courses for all officers arriving ‘in country’. By this, the French command sought to ensure that field officers possessed an approach to pacification and the political dimension to their missions well suited to the terrain and socio-political make-up of Algeria. The real ‘revolutionary war’ zealots were kept away from the directing staff, although some delivered guest lectures. Despite complaints from commanders of field units at losing experienced officers to the CIPCG instructing staff, Arzew students testified that the courses aided them in their missions. Some 10,000 French officers undertook courses at the CIPCG before it was downgraded and then disbanded after Pierre Messmer, a Gaullist, became Minister for the Armed Forces in 1960.     

Models for production planning under power interruptions

We present a robust optimization model for production planning under the assumption that electricity supply is subject to uncertain interruptions caused by participation in interruptible load contracts (ILCs). The objective is to minimize the cost of electricity used for production while providing a robust production plan which ensures demand satisfaction under all possible interruption scenarios. The combinatorial size of the set of interruption scenarios makes this a challenging problem. Furthermore, we assume that no probabilistic information is known about the supply uncertainty: we only use the information given in the ILC to identify an uncertainty set that captures the possible scenarios. We construct a general robust framework to handle this uncertainty and present a heuristic to compute a good feasible solution of the robust model. We provide computational experiments on a real‐world example and compare the performance of an exact solver applied to the robust model with that of the heuristic procedure. Finally, we include the operational impact of interruptions such as “recovery modes” in the definition of the uncertainty set. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2013     

The Economic Consequences of the Libyan Spring: A Synthetic Control Analysis

Abstract

In 2011 a wave of revolutionary movements, the so-called Arab Spring, spread in the Middle East and North Africa. Libya was one of the most affected countries, ending Gaddafi’s dictatorship after an international intervention and a civil war. This paper assesses the effects that this revolution had on Libyan economy. The analysis is made by means of the synthetic control method. Our estimates for the 2011–2014 period show (i) a cumulative loss in the growth rate of per capita real GDP of 64.15%; (ii) a cumulative loss in per capita real GDP of 56,548 dollars; and (iii) a cumulative loss in the aggregate real GDP of 350.5 billion dollars.     

A Territorial Conflict: Trade-offs and Strategies

We study a war scenario in which the winner occupies the loser’s territory. Attacking a territory increases the chance of winning, but also causes harm, which in turn decreases the territory’s value (i.e. the reward of winning). This paper highlights the effects of this trade-off on the equilibrium strategies of the warring states in a contest game with endogenous rewards. Providing both static and dynamic models, our analysis captures insights regarding strategic behavior in asymmetric contests with such conflict.     

Cinematic representations of the Mexican Narco War

This essay provides an overview of the eras of Mexican cinema followed by an analysis of 10 Spanish-language narco cinematic representations, an overview of the eras of American cinema followed by an analysis of 10 English language narco cinematic representations, and a conclusion that compares and contrasts the Mexican and US narco war cinematic experience. Due to divergent national trajectories – Mexico is engulfed in narco violence and corruption while the United States is not – more differences than similarities exist between these national cinematic genres. Dark spirituality themes are also increasingly evident in more recent narco war films.     

Factors influencing the modernization of military-investment economic appraisal systems

Budgetary restrictions resulting from the present international economic crisis have tightened the need to improve efficiency in defense spending, leading to the armed forces having to undertake their duties with fewer resources. Previous reports on the subject have looked into the determining factors and effects of military spending but very few studies have analyzed the determinants for the modernization of the methodology for assessing efficiency. Thus, using a multiple regression statistical model, we have analyzed the appraisal systems in place in 28 countries to identify factors that influence the development of economic assessment of military expenditure. Our findings have revealed three factors that may favor the improvement of appraisal systems with regard to military expenditure: the quality of governance, size of the armed forces, and unemployment levels.