Foreign aid fungibility and military spending: The case of North Cyprus

The present article examines if the foreign aid to North Cyprus is fungible and if it is in a long-run equilibrium relationship with military spending using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag bounds testing procedure from 1977 to 2007. The results suggest that neither tax revenues nor public expenditures are in a long-run equilibrium relationship with foreign aid. However, strong evidence emerges that defence expenditures are in a long-run equilibrium relationship with foreign aid, and that the latter seem to cause the former.     

QUANTITATIVE RESTRICTIONS ON THE FLOW OF NARCOTICS: SUPPLY AND DEMAND RESTRAINTS IN A NORTH–SOUTH MACRO‐MODEL

This paper constructs a macroeconomic model of North–South interaction where the flow of narcotics from the South to the North is restricted. The economic effects are akin to quantitative restrictions in trade policy. Two alternative policy scenarios will be considered. One involves reducing the supply of drugs at the source, accompanied by aid. Supply‐side restrictions have negative aggregate supply‐side effects in the producing region, because of the monopoly rents generated from that type of control. This makes them a second‐best policy, particularly if the accompanying aid is not used for poverty alleviation and fails to expand domestic aggregate demand. Alternatively, demand side restrictions will be found to be superior.     

An Empirical Analysis of the Arms Race Between South and North Korea

This study analyses an arms race between South and North Korea over the period 1963–2000. Despite the strategic importance of the Korean Peninsula, the arms race between South and North Korea has rarely been studied. In this study, the South–North arms race is empirically estimated using Richardson’s action–reaction model. The pattern of South–North arms race between the Cold War (1963–1989) and the post‐Cold War eras (1990–2000) as well as the existence of an arms race is examined comparing both countries’ defence spending, number of military personnel and tactical aircraft.     

The Republic of Korea and Its Navy: Perceptions of Security and the Utility of Seapower

Abstract

Understanding the development of Republic of Korea (ROK) seapower is central in exploring the evolution and nature of its security consciousness. This article aims to examine how the wider East Asian maritime sphere has influenced ROK perceptions of its own security and how such perceptions have come into conflict with the needs of maintaining its deterrent capabilities within the peninsular context. In doing so it concludes that for the ROK seapower has been an expression of wider engagement and international developing security concerns but that it is curtailed and influenced by the realities of the threat from the North.     

A nuclear-armed North Korea without ICBMs: the best achievable objective

This article analyzes the North Korean nuclear crisis from a balance-of-power perspective. It is in the long-term interests of international peace for a secure and independent North Korea to serve as a buffer between US and Chinese ground forces. However, the conventional military advantage of the South Korean-American alliance over North Korea has grown drastically since the end of the Cold War, threatening North Korea’s survival. Since North Korea lacks any reliable ally, nuclear weapons represent its most cost-effective way to restore a balance of power and thus secure itself. Accepting security guarantees in exchange for its nuclear arsenal is rhetorically appealing but not a viable approach. North Korea’s development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), however, has overcompensated for the post-Cold War imbalance, inviting talk in Washington of waging a preventive war. Persuading North Korea to give up its ICBM capability, not its nuclear arsenal, should therefore be the primary objective of US diplomacy.     

Why provoke? the Sino-US competition in East Asia and North Korea’s strategic choice

This article seeks to make sense of North Korean provocations in light of the Sino-US strategic competition in post-Cold War East Asia, where such variables as China’s rise, US’s pivot to Asia, and growing Sino-ROK economic ties are driving the strategic choices of major states in the region. The article examines the main motivations behind Pyongyang’s provocations since the end of the Cold War, discusses their implications for the Sino-US strategic competition in East Asia, and offers predictions about the future of North Korean provocations. The central thesis of the article is that Pyongyang has exploited the Sino-US strategic competition in East Asia for its regime survival. By raising North Korea’s strategic value to China, the intensifying Sino-US competition allows Pyongyang to continue provocations, regardless of Beijing’s explicit opposition.     

A Reversal of Fortunes? Extended Deterrence and Assurance in Europe and East Asia1

ABSTRACT

The extended deterrence relationships between the United States and its allies in Europe and East Asia have been critical to regional and global security and stability, as well as to nonproliferation efforts, since the late 1950s. These relationships developed in different regional contexts, and reflect differing cultural, political and military realities in the US allies and their relations with the United States. Although extended deterrence and assurance relations have very different histories, and have to some extent been controversial through the years, there has been a rethinking of these relations in recent years. Many Europeans face a diminished threat situation as well as economic and political pressures on the maintenance of extended deterrence, and are looking at the East Asian relationships, which do not involve forward deployed forces as more attractive than NATO’s risk-and-burden-sharing concepts involving the US nuclear forces deployed in Europe. On the other hand, the East Asian allies are looking favorably at NATO nuclear consultations, and in the case of South Korea, renewed US nuclear deployments (which were ended in 1991), to meet increased security concerns posed by a nuclear North Korea and more assertive China. This paper explores the history of current relationships and the changes that have led the allies to view those of others as more suitable for meeting their current needs.     

Making Jihad or Making Money? Understanding the Transformation of Dagestan’s Jamaats into Organised Crime Groups

While terrorist and insurgent groups have often combined anti-state subversion with ‘purely‘ criminal activities in order to obtain the financial means to wage their ideological struggle, little is known about the transformation of such groups into non-ideological organised crime groups (OCG) with close links to authorities. This holds particularly for jihadist groups that have on ideological grounds ruled out collaboration with their archenemies – ‘infidels’ and ‘apostates’. Using unique ethnographic data from Russia’s Dagestan, this article explores the causes and contexts of the gradual transformation of some of Dagestan’s jihadist units – jamaats – into organised crime groups collaborating with local authorities.     

Postmodern warfare and the blurred boundaries between war and peace

Each age has its own wars and its own forms of warfare. In today’s evolving world risk society warfare has entered a new development stage. The states of the “global North” adapt their forms of intervention. They increasingly practice postmodern warfare characterized especially by the role of influencing the information space, networked approaches, the incorporation of indirect and covert actions, and the special quality of new technologies. This practice furthers an increasing grey zone between limiting and de-bounding of warfare. The phenomenon of postmodern warfare raises some tough questions and offers a rich research agenda.