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.     

Assessing military reform in Indonesia

This article seeks to assess the magnitude of military reform in Indonesia and its impact in establishing greater levels of professionalism within the armed forces. To this end, the authors will offer some reflections on the studies of civil-military relations and military transformation for inculcating a higher degree of military professionalism; analyse to what extent the process of military reform in Indonesia has reshaped the institutional role of the armed forces; and discern three major strategic gaps in Indonesia's military reform, namely the “legal loopholes and regulation vacuum,” the “shortcomings of democratic civilian control,” and the “defence-economic gap.” This article asserts that military professionalism will grow more substantially depending on the ability of civilian elites to exercise effective control over the military and the capacity of the government to transform the military establishment keeping pace with strategic challenges and operational requirements.     

How Probable is Cyber War? Bringing IR Theory Back In to the Cyber Conflict Debate

Many well-established explanations for war suggest that cyber weapons have a greater chance of being used offensively than other kinds of military technologies. This response article introduces a research agenda for the study of cyber war, and offers an example – principal-agent problems in cyber operations – to demonstrate how rigorous theoretical and empirical work may proceed.     

To avert impending disaster: American military plans to use atomic weapons during the Korean War

Though historians continue to argue about the role of American nuclear threats in producing an armistice in the Korean War, by 1953 the United States was moving closer to actually escalating the war with the employment of atomic bombs. While military studies and unsatisfactory exercises during the first two years of the conflict had relegated such weapons to a role just as a last resort to prevent a catastrophe, frustration with stalemated peace talks and the aggressiveness of General Mark Clark combined to produce a set of contingencies envisioning an expanded war involving nuclear air strikes.     

‘What Kind of War is This?’

This article explores the nature of the American war in Vietnam in an effort to determine whether it was a response to an indigenous uprising or an external effort by the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) to use a wide array of policies and programs to unite North Vietnam and South Vietnam under the party’s leadership. It argues that, although there initially were elements of the South Vietnamese population that rose against the southern leadership, the CPV gained control of their resistance and relegated it to a secondary role in the CPV war effort.