World of warcraft
Talking Peace, Making Weapons: IAEA Technical Cooperation and Nuclear Proliferation
Robert Brown & Jeffrey Kaplow
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
A growing literature suggests that nuclear assistance from other countries is an important determinant of whether states pursue nuclear weapons. Existing work does not consider, however, the most widely available source of assistance — the Technical Cooperation (TC) program administered by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). IAEA assistance is an important piece of the nonproliferation regime’s central bargain: member states enjoy nuclear assistance in exchange for agreeing not to seek nuclear weapons. Using a data set of TC projects since 1972, we examine whether international nuclear assistance is associated with the pursuit of nuclear weapons. We hypothesize that some TC assistance reduces the cost of pursuing nuclear weapons, making weapons programs more likely. We find that receiving TC related to the nuclear fuel cycle is a statistically and substantively significant factor in state decisions since 1972 to seek nuclear weapons, with important implications for existing theories of nuclear proliferation.
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Deterrence in the Gulf War: Evaluating New Evidence
Avner Golov
Nonproliferation Review, Fall 2013, Pages 453-472
Abstract:
A recently published collection of captured Iraqi records offers an opportunity to better understand Saddam Hussein's perception of US and Israeli deterrence signals, affording innovative insights into the reasons behind Iraq's restraint from using weapons of mass destruction against Israeli targets during the 1991 Gulf War. This article tests a wide range of suggested hypotheses, and suggests that US and Israeli deterrence played only a minimal role in dissuading Iraqi use of WMD. The article concludes with some thoughts on the practical implications, particularly on the effectiveness of a “no-first-use” nuclear policy.
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The CIA's TPBEDAMN Operation and the 1953 Coup in Iran
Mark Gasiorowski
Journal of Cold War Studies, Fall 2013, Pages 4-24
Abstract:
This article gives an overview of TPBEDAMN, a large covert operation the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) carried out in Iran for several years in the early 1950s. TPBEDAMN was a psychological warfare operation intended to undermine the influence of the Soviet Union and its Iranian ally, the Communist Tudeh Party, through covert propaganda and political action activities. When U.S. officials decided in early 1953 to overthrow Iran's prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, they relied heavily on TPBEDAMN's large network of Iranian agents and subagents to plan and implement a coup d'état. The overview of TPBEDAMN presented here helps to clarify both the nature of the organizational apparatus the CIA used against Mosaddeq and the broader context within which the coup occurred, especially the intense Cold War climate that prevailed and the prevalence of psychological warfare in this era.
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Early warning signals for war in the news
Thomas Chadefaux
Journal of Peace Research, January 2014, Pages 5-18
Abstract:
There have been more than 200 wars since the start of the 20th century, leading to about 35 million battle deaths. However, efforts at forecasting conflicts have so far performed poorly for lack of fine-grained and comprehensive measures of geopolitical tensions. In this article, a weekly risk index is derived by analyzing a comprehensive dataset of historical newspaper articles over the past century. News reports have the advantage of conveying information about contemporaries’ interpretation of events and not having to rely on meaning inferred a posteriori with the benefit of hindsight. I applied this new index to a dataset of all wars within and between countries recorded since 1900, and found that the number of conflict-related news items increases dramatically prior to the onset of conflict. Using only information available at the time, the onset of a war within the next few months could be predicted with up to 85% confidence and predictions significantly improved upon existing methods both in terms of binary predictions (as measured by the area under the curve) and calibration (measured by the Brier score). Predictions also extend well before the onset of war – more than one year prior to interstate wars, and six months prior to civil wars – giving policymakers significant additional warning time.
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Known Unknowns: Power Shifts, Uncertainty, and War
Alexandre Debs & Nuno Monteiro
International Organization, January 2014, Pages 1-31
Abstract:
Large and rapid power shifts resulting from exogenous economic growth are considered sufficient to cause preventive wars. Yet most large and rapid shifts result from endogenous military investments. We show that when the investment decision is perfectly transparent, peace prevails. Large and rapid power shifts are deterred through the threat of a preventive war. When investments remain undetected, however, states may be tempted to introduce power shifts as a fait accompli. Knowing this, their adversaries may strike preventively even without conclusive evidence of militarization. In fact, the more effective preventive wars are, the more likely they will be launched against states that are not militarizing. Our argument emphasizes the role of imperfect information as a cause of war. It also explains why powerful states may attack weaker targets even with ambiguous evidence of their militarization. We illustrate our theory through an account of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.
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Social Network Analysis: A case study of the Islamist terrorist network
Richard Medina
Security Journal, February 2014, Pages 97–121
Abstract:
Social Network Analysis is a compilation of methods used to identify and analyze patterns in social network systems. This article serves as a primer on foundational social network concepts and analyses and builds a case study on the global Islamist terrorist network to illustrate the use and usefulness of these methods. The Islamist terrorist network is a system composed of multiple terrorist organizations that are socially connected and work toward the same goals. This research utilizes traditional social network, as well as small-world, and scale-free analyses to characterize this system on individual, network and systemic levels. Leaders in the network are identified based on their positions in the social network and the network structure is categorized. Finally, two vital nodes in the network are removed and this version of the network is compared with the previous version to make implications of strengths, weaknesses and vulnerabilities. The Islamist terrorist network structure is found to be a resilient and efficient structure, even with important social nodes removed. Implications for counterterrorism are given from the results of each analysis.
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Voting Rules in International Organizations
Eric Posner & Alan Sykes
University of Chicago Working Paper, January 2014
Abstract:
International organizations use a bewildering variety of voting rules — with different thresholds, weighting systems, veto points, and other rules that distribute influence unequally among participants. We provide a brief survey of the major voting systems, and show that all are controversial and unsatisfactory in various ways. While it is tempting to blame great powers or the weakness of international law for these problems, we argue that the root source is intellectual rather than political — the difficulty of designing a voting system that both allows efficient collective decisions and protects the legitimate interests of members. We show how a new type of voting system — quadratic voting — could in theory resolve these problems, and while it may be too new or unusual to implement any time soon, it provides insights into the defects of the existing systems.
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Delegating Death: Military Intervention and Government Killing
Jacqueline DeMeritt
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Does military intervention affect civilian death tolls? Existing research has focused on international actors’ ability to limit ongoing slaughter but has not examined their ability to prevent the emergence or escalation of such killing. I develop a theory of government killing that accounts not only for the government’s decision to kill civilians but also for the transference of the killing order from leader to perpetrator, and for the perpetrator’s implementation of that order. Focusing on the principal–agent relationship produces new expectations about the effects of military intervention on government killing. I find that international actors are well equipped to limit civilian slaughter: intervention supporting the government decreases the likelihood that a government orders civilians killed. Intervention against the government leads to a decrease in death tolls when killing occurs. Ultimately, supportive intervention is a useful means of preventing government killing, while oppositional intervention limits its escalation once it begins.
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Why Target the “Good Guys”? The Determinants of Terrorism against NGOs
Amanda Murdie & Craig Stapley
International Interactions, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why would a terrorist group target non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? We theorize that certain types of NGOs, namely those using mainly non-violent pressure to advocate for changes in government human rights practices, influence the behaviors of potential terrorist group supporters in ways not liked by terrorist organizations. These advocacy-based human rights NGOs make terrorism attacks against the whole NGO sector more likely by changing the dynamics of terrorist-domestic audience relations in ways that threaten to limit audience support of terrorist groups. Other types of NGOs, especially those that do not have an advocacy focus, are less likely to directly challenge the terrorist organization or the state and can provide resources utilized by terrorist groups and potential sympathizers, making their presence not increase the likelihood of any NGO-targeted terrorist attacks. A global test of these dynamics supports our basic hypotheses.
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Opium for the Masses? Conflict-Induced Narcotics Production in Afghanistan
Jo Thori Lind, Karl Ove Moene & Fredrik Willumsen
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
To explain the rise in Afghan opium production we explore how rising conflicts change the incentives of farmers. Conflicts make illegal opportunities more profitable as they increase the perceived lawlessness and destroy infrastructure crucial to alternative crops. Exploiting a unique data set, we show that Western hostile casualties, our proxy for conflict, have a strong impact on subsequent local opium production. Using the period after the planting season as a placebo test, we show that conflict has a strong effects before and no effect after planting, indicating causality.
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Drugs and Violence in Afghanistan: A Panel VAR With Unobserved Common Factor Analysis
Vincenzo Bove & Leandro Elia
Defence and Peace Economics, November/December 2013, Pages 535-554
Abstract:
This paper addresses the relationship between the level of violence and the opium market in Afghanistan’s provinces. We first provide an overview of the nature and extent of the Afghan drug trafficking. This is followed by a vector autoregressive analysis of the nexus opium-insurgency activities using monthly time-series data on opium prices and the number of security incidents for 15 Afghan provinces over the period 2004–2009. We use a multifactor error structure, the common correlated effect, to include unobservable common factors; Impulse Response functions to describe the time path of the dependent variables in response to shocks; and the mean group estimator to summarize our results across the provinces. Results suggest a conflict-induced reduction in opium prices, while the reverse opium-violence mechanism is mostly negligible. Moreover, unobservable common factors are the main drivers of opium prices and violence.
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Steven Wagner
Intelligence and National Security, forthcoming
Abstract:
At the end of the Second World War, British intelligence struggled to enforce strict limits imposed on Jewish immigration to Palestine. Holocaust survivors and Jews wishing to escape communism in Eastern Europe flooded the western Zones of occupation in Germany and Austria, while the Zionist movement worked to bring them to Palestine. Illegal immigration to Palestine was the key policy dispute between Britain and the Zionist movement, and a focus for British intelligence. Britain sought both overt and covert means to prevent the boarding of ships at European ports which were destined for Palestine, and even to prevent the entry of Jewish refugees into the American zones. This article highlights Britain's secret intelligence-gathering efforts as well as its covert action aimed to prevent this movement. It highlights a peculiar episode in the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States, during which cooperation and partnership was lacking. British intelligence promoted a rumour that Soviet agents were using Jewish escape lines to penetrate Western Europe and the Middle East in order to persuade American authorities to prevent the movement of Jewish refugees. Instead, this article argues, American intelligence secretly cooperated with the Zionist organizers of the escape routes so to expose Soviet agents. Britain's attempt at deception backfired, and provided effective cover for the movement of hundreds of thousands of Jews during a critical period. Meanwhile its intelligence had dramatically improved, but policymakers failed to reassess Britain's ability to sustain immigration restrictions and the indefinite detention of tens of thousands of illegal migrants.
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Mass Casualty Potential of Qassam Rockets
Lian Zucker & Edward Kaplan
Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, forthcoming
Abstract:
In spite of the bombardment of southern Israel by thousands of Qassam rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, comparatively few people have been injured or killed. This has led some observers to dismiss Qassams as more of a symbolic than lethal threat. However, southern Israeli towns feature robust civil defense systems that include safe rooms, bomb shelters, early detection alarms, and missile defense. How many casualties would occur were such systems not in place? This paper applies shrapnel-casualty and spatial allocation models to the population of the southern Israeli town of Sderot to estimate casualties per randomly-aimed rocket fired into the unprepared town, that is, in the absence of civil defense (technical details appear in the Appendix). Assuming an injury radius of only 5 meters from impact, the modeled expected casualties per rocket are between three (best-case) and nine (worst-case) times higher than Sderot's observed casualties-to-rocket ratio, suggesting that Qassam-like terror attacks on unprotected urban locations could prove much more serious than what one would expect based solely upon the observed number of casualties in Sderot.
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Unresolved World War II Animosity Dampens Empathy Toward 2011 Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami
Ying Yang et al.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, February 2014, Pages 171-191
Abstract:
The 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami evoked widespread empathy and sympathy. We examine how historical representations of WWII among Chinese and Americans affect their empathy toward the Japanese disaster. In three online surveys conducted 8 days, 4 weeks, and 10 months after the Japanese earthquake, we recruited over 900 participants from diverse age groups and geographic locations in China and the United States. We consistently found that the Chinese participants showed less empathy toward the Japanese disaster (but not toward the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami) than did Americans, and these cross-national differences were partially mediated by Chinese participants’ tendency to attribute the disaster to retribution or associate Japan as an aggressor in WWII. We also manipulated participants’ identity (national vs. global identity) and found it had an interaction effect with patriotism on empathy toward the Japanese. We discuss how these findings shed light on identity, patriotism, shared historical representations, and lingering international conflicts.
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Security Guarantees and Allied Nuclear Proliferation
Philipp Bleek & Eric Lorber
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
As Iran continues its apparent pursuit of a nuclear weapons breakout capability and North Korea resists efforts to roll back its proliferation, policy makers in Washington eager to prevent further proliferation in both regions regard security guarantees to allies as crucial tools. But recent scholarship calls into question whether security guarantees ameliorate proliferation risks. Relying on a combination of large-N quantitative analysis and a case study of South Korea from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, this article argues that, consistent with policy makers’ conventional wisdom, security guarantees significantly reduce proliferation proclivity among their recipients.
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Olga Chyzh
Conflict Management and Peace Science, February 2014, Pages 3-27
Abstract:
Building on recent studies that focus on institutional variation among authoritarian regimes, this paper asks whether this variation leads to meaningful differences in the tendencies to reach and comply with international agreements. The results suggest that previous evidence regarding the democratic credibility advantage over autocracies may have been driven by a lack of a more refined authoritarian regime typology. Employing such a typology, I find that the institutional constraints that generate credibility and compliance may not be unique to democracies. In fact, the only authoritarian regime that seems to lack such features is bossism, a personalist party-based regime. Bosses are more likely than democracies to enter into international agreements, but are less likely than democracies to comply with the agreements they sign. This result is remarkably robust. Results associated with other types of autocracies suggest minor or no differences between autocracies and democracies, relating to reaching and complying with international treaties. Finally, I find evidence of strategic behavior, as all regime types are more likely to sign agreements and less likely to comply when the other negotiating party is a boss, compared with a democracy.
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The Greek Civil War (1944–1949) and the International Communist System
Nikos Marantzidis
Journal of Cold War Studies, Fall 2013, Pages 25-54
Abstract:
The involvement of the Soviet bloc in the Greek Civil War, especially the weapons and other aid provided by the Communist states to the Greek Communist Party (KKE), could not be studied in any serious way until very recently. Only a small number of historians addressed this question prior to the collapse of the Communist regimes in Europe and the opening of East European archives. The newly available documentary evidence shows that throughout the conflict the KKE acted in close cooperation with the Soviet bloc, particularly through permanent representatives who were responsible for coordinating the aid supplied to the KKE and ensuring maximal use of it. The Democratic Army of Greece (DAG) was completely dependent on weaponry, equipment, and training from the Soviet bloc. The insurgency in Greece would have been impossible without the external support of the Communist states.
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The Impact of Human Rights INGO Shaming on Humanitarian Interventions
Amanda Murdie & Dursun Peksen
Journal of Politics, January 2014, Pages 215-228
Abstract:
Do transnational human rights organizations (HROs) influence foreign military intervention onset? We argue that the greater international exposure of human suffering through HRO “naming and shaming” activities starts a process of mobilization and opinion change in the international community that ultimately increases the likelihood of humanitarian military intervention. This is a special corollary to the supposed “CNN Effect” in foreign policy; we argue that information from HROs can influence foreign policy decisions. We test the empirical implication of the argument on a sample of all non-Western countries from 1990 to 2005. The results suggest that HRO shaming makes humanitarian intervention more likely even after controlling for several other covariates of intervention decisions. HRO activities appear to have a significant impact on the likelihood of military missions by IGOs as well as interventions led by third-party states.
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Nationalism, Patriotism and Foreign Policy Attitudes among Chinese University Students
Elina Sinkkonen
China Quarterly, December 2013, Pages 1045-1063
Abstract:
Does empirical evidence support treating “nationalism” and “patriotism” as separate concepts in China and is there a relationship between strong nationalist/patriotic attitudes and foreign policy preferences? To analyse the construction of Chinese national identity, Chinese university students (N = 1346) took part in a survey in Beijing in spring 2007. The data supported the assumption of a conceptual separation between nationalism and patriotism. CCP members and students from rural backgrounds were more nationalistic than non-members and students with urban upbringings. Moreover, nationalism had a stronger link to foreign policy preferences than patriotism, and respondents with a greater degree of nationalism were less likely to favour international cooperation and more likely to prefer protectionist policies. The associations of nationalism and patriotism with foreign policy attitudes, and the contribution of other potential explanatory factors to the relationship between nationalism, patriotism and policy attitudes were explored with linear regression models.
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The determinants of election to the United Nations Security Council
Axel Dreher et al.
Public Choice, January 2014, Pages 51-83
Abstract:
The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is the foremost international body responsible for the maintenance of international peace and security. Members vote on issues of global importance and consequently receive perks — election to the UNSC predicts, for instance, World Bank and IMF loans. But who gets elected to the UNSC? Addressing this question empirically is not straightforward as it requires a model that allows for discrete choices at the regional and international levels; the former nominates candidates while the latter ratifies them. Using an original multiple discrete choice model to analyze a dataset of 180 elections from 1970 to 2005, we find that UNSC election appears to derive from a compromise between the demands of populous countries to win election more frequently and a norm of giving each country its turn. We also find evidence that richer countries from the developing world win election more often, while involvement in warfare lowers election probability. By contrast, development aid does not predict election.