Influence without power? Reframing British concepts of military intervention after 10 years of counterinsurgency

British attitudes towards military intervention following the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have undergone what appears to be considerable change. Parliament has voted against the use of Britain's armed forces in Syria and the public are unenthused by overseas engagement. Conscious of the costs and the challenges posed by the use of British military power the government has been busy revamping the way it approaches crises overseas. The result is a set of policies that apparently heralds a new direction in foreign policy. This new direction is encapsulated in the Building Stability Overseas Strategy (BSOS) and the more recent International Defence Engagement Strategy (IDES). Both BSOS and IDES set out the basis for avoiding major deployments to overseas conflict and instead refocuses effort on defence diplomacy, working with and through overseas governments and partners, early warning, pre-conflict prevention and post-conflict reconstruction. Developing a number of themes that reach from across the Cold War to more contemporary discussions of British strategy, the goal of this special edition is to take into account a number of perspectives that place BSOS and IDES in their historical and strategic context. These papers suggest that using defence diplomacy is and will remain an extremely imprecise lever that needs to be carefully managed if it is to remain a democratically accountable tool of foreign policy.     

‘Faced with death,even a mouse bites’: Social and religious motivations behind terrorism in Chechnya

This article analyzes the motivations behind individuals who chose to adopt terrorist methods in the Chechen conflicts of the late 1990s and early 2000s. While the seemingly obvious motivation in joining in a ‘religious’ war of jihad would be a strong belief in that religion, the reality is more complicated. The motivations behind these individuals were not only religious, but cultural, social, and political. This indicates that while the methods and ideological rhetoric adopted by Chechen terrorists prove similar to methods adopted by terrorists across the world, the fundamental causes and drive behind these terrorists are actually quite distinct and unique from others.     

Aircraft weapon budgeting

This article considers the problem of allocating a fixed budget among alternative air-to-ground weapons. The weapon-budgeting problem is high-dimensional, involving all feasible combinations of aircraft, weapons, and targets. The decision maker's utility function is defined over kills of the various target types, but it is unrealistic to expect him to write down the mathematical formula for this function. The article suggests two procedures for reducing the dimension of the maximization problem and operating without exact knowledge of the utility function. The first procedure uses successive linear approximations to generate the set of “efficient” or undominated weapon allocations. The second procedure applies separability restrictions to the utility function, thereby reducing the overall maximization problem to a sequence of low-dimensional subproblems.     

The Iranian nuclear dilemma: light at the end of the tunnel?

In February 2012, Iran announced its willingness to resume negotiations with the Western powers. This statement followed in the wake of a damning report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors and the imposition of additional sanctions by the international community on an Iranian economy already under pressure. Tehran's announcement also coincided with increased speculation regarding an Israeli military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. At the same time, however, this seemingly positive step appeared to be undermined by Iran's concomitant announcement that “huge” technical progress has been made on Iran's nuclear programme. This article will explore the significance of the recent political, diplomatic and technical developments in the Iranian nuclear affair and situate them in the broader context of Tehran's nuclear strategy. The analysis will assess the potential for this latest phase in the Iranian nuclear crisis to reverse Iran's current trajectory and initiate a rapprochement between Iran and Western powers.     

Turning gangsters into allies: the American way of war in Northern Afghanistan

ABSTRACT

The American way of war in Afghanistan presents a conundrum for proponents of 21st-century state-building projects. How can liberal peace proponents engage in efficient state building without sacrificing their ideals? The US learned that state-building allocates a degree of command and control to powerbrokers operating in the shadows to launder aid money, traffic illicit narcotics, and engage in extrajudicial punishments. These clients failed to represent the liberal values foreign patrons endorsed, because the latter not only offered resources without conditions but also rewarded bad behavior. This issue is examined by looking at the case of post-2001 northern Afghanistan, where powerful warlords should have held greater control over their paramilitary forces, limited predatory behavior, and built stronger relationships with the community. Instead, warlords-turned-statesmen expanded their material and social influence in the north, while holding onto the informal instruments of racketeering and patronage that overwhelmed Western ideals and shaped the predatory state present in Afghanistan today. Moreover, paramilitaries were influenced by material, social, and normative incentives that rewarded violent and predatory behavior and further eroded already weak community control mechanisms at the subdistrict level.