Divide and Conquer
Playing to the Home Crowd? Symbolic Use of Economic Sanctions in the United States
Taehee Whang
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why do we observe economic sanctions despite strong doubts regarding their effectiveness? While the symbolic use of sanctions is advanced as an alternative to the instrumental use explanation, no one has assessed this alternative explanation empirically. I investigate the symbolic use of sanctions for domestic political gain in the United States, assessing in particular the effect of sanctions imposition on US presidential approval ratings. Findings suggest that policymakers benefit from imposing sanctions through increased domestic support. This domestic political gain can present policymakers with an incentive to use sanctions as a low-cost way of displaying strong leadership during international conflicts.
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The dangerous myths and dubious promise of COIN
Douglas Porch
Small Wars & Insurgencies, Spring 2011, Pages 239-257
Abstract:
Counterinsurgency (COIN) has again emerged as a topic of both contemporary and historical interest in the age of what has been called a global counterinsurgency. However, little attention is being paid to the historical lineage of a COIN doctrine that is being rediscovered and promoted by an enthusiastic group of military intellectuals and commanders as the basis for US Army and Marine Corps doctrine. This article argues that historical claims for COIN success, based on courting popular gratitude by improving economic conditions, are at best anchored in selective historical memory, when not fantasy fabrications. The first argument of this article is that COIN does not constitute a distinct form of warfare, but merely a sub-set of minor tactics. Second, 'hearts and minds', so-called population-centric warfare, has seldom been a recipe for lasting stability. Rather, historically counterinsurgency succeeded when it has shattered and divided societies by severely disrupting civilian life. In fact, COIN is a nineteenth century legacy of empire whose uniqueness and impact was mythologized in its own day, and that is unlikely to prove a formula for strategic success in the twenty-first century.
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Achieving the Vision of the NPT: Can We Get There Step By Step?
Jacqueline Reich
Nonproliferation Review, Summer 2011, Pages 369-387
Abstract:
This article assesses the prospects for a strategy of incrementalism to lead to achievement of the core bargain of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons: non-nuclear weapon states' nuclear nonproliferation in exchange for nuclear weapon states' nuclear disarmament to the point of "global zero." Game theory, prospect theory, and liberal international theory are used to evaluate the potential of a strategy of incrementalism. While separately each has insights to offer, it is when all three theoretical approaches are used in tandem that meaningful explanatory gains emerge. The article concludes that incrementalism probably cannot lead to complete nonproliferation and global nuclear zero. Instead, signal events (as described by prospect theory) are needed to "punctuate" incremental processes in negotiations (best explained by liberal international theory) in order to move past hindrances such as international structural constraints (exemplified by game theory) and the conservative risk-taking propensities of state elites (described by prospect theory).
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Income, Democracy, and the Cunning of Reason
Daniel Treisman
NBER Working Paper, June 2011
Abstract:
A long-standing debate pits those who think economic development leads to democratization against those who argue that both result from distant historical causes. Using the most comprehensive estimates of national income available, I show that development is associated with more democratic government - but in the medium run (10 to 20 years). The reason is that, for the most part, higher income only prompts a breakthrough to more democratic politics after the incumbent leader falls from power. And in the short run, faster economic growth increases the leader's odds of survival. This logic - for which I provide evidence at the levels of individual countries and the world - helps explain why democracy advances in waves followed by periods of stasis and why dictators, concerned only to entrench themselves in power, end up preparing their countries to leap to a higher level of democracy when they are eventually overthrown.
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Punishment sustains large-scale cooperation in prestate warfare
Sarah Mathew & Robert Boyd
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Understanding cooperation and punishment in small-scale societies is crucial for explaining the origins of human cooperation. We studied warfare among the Turkana, a politically uncentralized, egalitarian, nomadic pastoral society in East Africa. Based on a representative sample of 88 recent raids, we show that the Turkana sustain costly cooperation in combat at a remarkably large scale, at least in part, through punishment of free-riders. Raiding parties comprised several hundred warriors and participants are not kin or day-to-day interactants. Warriors incur substantial risk of death and produce collective benefits. Cowardice and desertions occur, and are punished by community-imposed sanctions, including collective corporal punishment and fines. Furthermore, Turkana norms governing warfare benefit the ethnolinguistic group, a population of a half-million people, at the expense of smaller social groupings. These results challenge current views that punishment is unimportant in small-scale societies and that human cooperation evolved in small groups of kin and familiar individuals. Instead, these results suggest that cooperation at the larger scale of ethnolinguistic units enforced by third-party sanctions could have a deep evolutionary history in the human species.
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Bruce Hoffman
Small Wars & Insurgencies, Spring 2011, Pages 258-272
Abstract:
Does terrorism work? Its targets and victims steadfastly maintain that it does not; its practitioners and apologists that it does. Scholars and analysts are divided. But, if terrorism is as ineffective as many claim, why has it persisted for at least the past two millennia and indeed become an increasingly popular means of violent political expression in the twenty-first century? Using the Jewish terrorist campaign against the British in Palestine during the 1940s, this article attempts to shed light on this question. It concludes that notwithstanding the repeated denials of governments, terrorism can, in the right conditions and with the appropriate strategy and tactics, indeed 'work'. At minimum, even if terrorism's power to dramatically change the course of history (along the lines of the 11 September 2001 attacks) has been mercifully infrequent; terrorism's ability to act as a catalyst or fulminate for either wider conflagration or systemic political change appears historically undeniable.
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The Political Costs of Crisis Bargaining: Presidential Rhetoric and the Role of Party
Robert Trager & Lynn Vavreck
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We analyze the first large-scale, randomized experiment to measure presidential approval levels at all outcomes of a canonical international crisis-bargaining model, thereby avoiding problems of strategic selection in evaluating presidential incentives. We find support for several assumptions made in the crisis-bargaining literature, including that a concession from a foreign state leads to higher approval levels than other outcomes, that the magnitudes of audience costs are under presidential control prior to the initiation of hostilities, and that these costs can be made so large that presidents have incentive to fight wars they will not win. Thus, the credibility of democratic threats can be made extremely high. We also find, however, that partisan cues strongly condition presidential incentives. Party elites have incentives to behave according to type in Congress and contrary to type in the Oval Office, and Democratic presidents sometimes have incentives to fight wars they will not win.
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Consanguineous Marriages in Afghanistan
Khyber Saify & Mostafa Saadat
Journal of Biosocial Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present cross-sectional study was done in order to illustrate the prevalence and types of consanguineous marriages among Afghanistan populations. Data on types of marriages were collected using a simple questionnaire. The total number of couples in the study was 7140 from the following provinces: Badakhshan, Baghlan, Balkh, Bamyan, Kabul, Kunduz, Samangan and Takhar. Consanguineous marriages were classified by the degree of relationship between couples: double first cousins, first cousins, first cousins once removed, second cousins and beyond second cousins. The coefficient of inbreeding (F) was calculated for each couple and the mean coefficient of inbreeding (α) estimated for each population. The proportion of consanguineous marriages in the country was 46.2%, ranging from 38.2% in Kabul province to 51.2% in Bamyan province. The equivalent mean inbreeding coefficient (α) was 0.0277, and ranged from 0.0221 to 0.0293 in these two regions. There were significant differences between provinces for frequencies of different types of marriages (p<0.001). First cousin marriages (27.8%) were the most common type of consanguineous marriages, followed by double first cousin (6.9%), second cousin (5.8%), beyond second cousin (3.9%) and first cousin once removed (1.8%). There were significant differences between ethnic groups for the types of marriages (χ2=177.6, df=25, p<0.001). Tajiks (Soni) and Turkmens (also Pashtuns) showed the lowest (α=0.0250) and highest (α=0.0297) mean inbreeding coefficients, respectively, among the ethnic groups in Afghanistan. The study shows that Afghanistan's populations, like other Islamic populations, have a high level of consanguinity.
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Using Social Media to Measure Conflict Dynamics: An Application to the 2008-2009 Gaza Conflict
Thomas Zeitzoff
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
The lack of temporal disaggregation in conflict data has so far presented a strong obstacle to analyzing the short-term dynamics of military conflict. Using a novel data set of hourly dyadic conflict intensity scores drawn from Twitter and other social media sources during the Gaza Conflict (2008-2009), the author attempts to fill a gap in existing studies. The author employs a vector autoregression (VAR) to measure changes in Israel's and Hamas's military response dynamics immediately following two important junctures in the conflict: the introduction of Israeli ground troops and the UN Security Council vote. The author finds that both Hamas's and Israel's response to provocations by the other side increase (both by about twofold) immediately after the ground invasion, but following the UN Security Council vote, Israel's response is cut in half, while Hamas's slightly increases. In addition, the author provide a template for researchers to harness social media to capture the micro-dynamics of conflict.
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Violent Conflict and Behavior: A Field Experiment in Burundi
M.J. Voors et al.
American Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use a series of field experiments in rural Burundi to examine the impact of exposure to conflict on social-, risk- and time preferences. We find that conflict affects behavior: individuals exposed to violence display more altruistic behavior towards their neighbors, are more risk seeking, and have higher discount rates. Large adverse shocks can thus alter savings and investments decisions, and potentially have long-run consequences - even if the shocks themselves are temporary.
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Bandwagonistas: Rhetorical re-description, strategic choice and the politics of counter-insurgency
Jeffrey Michaels & Matthew Ford
Small Wars & Insurgencies, Spring 2011, Pages 352-384
Abstract:
This paper seeks to explore how a particular narrative focused on population-centric counterinsurgency shaped American strategy during the Autumn 2009 Presidential review on Afghanistan, examine the narrative's genealogy and suggest weaknesses and inconsistencies that exist within it. More precisely our ambition is to show how through a process of 'rhetorical re-description' this narrative has come to dominate contemporary American strategic discourse. We argue that in order to promote and legitimate their case, a contemporary 'COIN Lobby' of influential warrior scholars, academics and commentators utilizes select historical interpretations of counterinsurgency and limits discussion of COIN to what they consider to be failures in implementation. As a result, it has become very difficult for other ways of conceptualizing the counterinsurgency problem to emerge into the policy debate.
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From bombs to banners? The decline of wars and the rise of unarmed uprisings in East Asia
Isak Svensson & Mathilda Lindgren
Security Dialogue, June 2011, Pages 219-237
Abstract:
One of the most important debates in the field of peace and conflict research concerns whether wars and armed conflicts are declining over time. The region where this plays out most markedly is East Asia: having suffered some of the world's most brutal wars in the period prior to 1979, the region has since witnessed an era of relative peacefulness. This article asks whether the decline in the level of war in the region reflects a change in the means used to pursue conflicts: are conflicts that previously were fought with arms increasingly manifested through unarmed uprisings based on strategic nonviolent actions? Examining the empirical patterns of armed conflicts and unarmed uprisings in the region, the article shows that there has been a substantial increase in the number of unarmed uprisings in East Asia that runs parallel with a decrease in the intensity and frequency of warfare. Yet, the article also shows that these nonviolent uprisings do not follow on from previous armed campaigns, and that armed and unarmed campaigns differ in terms of aims, nature and outcome. Thus, the article concludes that there is little support for the hypothesis that those who formerly used violence have shifted to new nonviolent, unarmed tactics, and that we are rather witnessing two parallel, unrelated processes. These insights call for an enlargement of the research agenda of the ‘East Asian peace'.
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A Bright Idea for Measuring Economic Growth
Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard & David Weil
American Economic Review, May 2011, Pages 194-199
Abstract:
The quantity of human-generated light visible from outer space reflects variation in both population density and income per capita. In this paper we explore the usefulness of the change in visible light as a measure of GDP growth. We discuss the data, and then present a statistical framework that uses lights growth to augment existing income growth measures, assuming that measurement errors in the two series are uncorrelated. For some countries with very poor income measurement, we significantly revise estimates of growth. Our technique also produces growth estimates for cities or regions where no other data are available.
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Using luminosity data as a proxy for economic statistics
Xi Chen & William Nordhaus
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 May 2011, Pages 8589-8594
Abstract:
A pervasive issue in social and environmental research has been how to improve the quality of socioeconomic data in developing countries. Given the shortcomings of standard sources, the present study examines luminosity (measures of nighttime lights visible from space) as a proxy for standard measures of output (gross domestic product). We compare output and luminosity at the country level and at the 1° latitude × 1° longitude grid-cell level for the period 1992-2008. We find that luminosity has informational value for countries with low-quality statistical systems, particularly for those countries with no recent population or economic censuses.