The politics of foreign debt in Latin America a study of the debtors’ cartel

This analysis of the foreign debt problem in Latin America shows that this economic burden is onerous and will not be reduced in the short run. The region's political leaders perceived that collective bargaining could increase their bargaining leverage with foreign lenders and could produce more advantageous repayment schedules for most nations. However, despite verbal backing and the economic promise of collective bargaining, a debtors’ cartel failed to materialize. Evaluations of the political dynamics in key nations anticipated creditors. This analysis also shows that the debtors’ cartel failed because collective bargaining did not gain domestic political support. Foreign influence was tangential to the outcome. Given this political climate, the chances for a revival of collective bargaining are very slim.     

To Repress or Not to Repress—Regime Survival Strategies in the Arab Spring

Authoritarian regimes use repression as an essential strategy to attain regime stability and survival. During the Arab Spring, different forms of repression have been employed. We argue that to explain this variation, three bundles of characteristics have to be taken into account: the setup of the regime, the state, and the challenge. As we assume that elites have a wider repertoire of strategies besides repression at their disposal, the analysis of repression has to be embedded in a broader framework of strategies of rule. Including specific forms and target groups of repression, we develop an explanatory model addressing the question of which repressive measures rulers utilize under which circumstances. The postulated relationship between repression and characteristics of the state, regime, and challenge are then tested in a comparative analysis of the reactions to the challenges arising with the 2011 uprisings in two very different Arab countries, Bahrain and Egypt. On the basis of these empirical findings, we propose a readjusted model explaining repression.     

A new turn to authoritarian Rule in Russia?

Many observers have pointed to the increasingly authoritarian nature of President Putin's regime in Russia. This apparent turn away from democracy has generally been attributed either to Russian political culture or to the security background of Putin himself and many of those he has brought to office. However, analysis of the democratization literature suggests that the sources of Russia's authoritarianism may lie in the nature of the initial transition from Soviet rule, and in particular the way in which elites were able to act with significant independence from civil society forces because of the weakness of such forces. This weakness enabled successive elites led by Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin to construct a political system in which popularly based involvement and participation were severely restricted. In this sense, Putin is merely building on what went before, not changing the regime's basic trajectory.     

Constraining consolidation: military politics and democracy in Pakistan (2007–2013)

Why do some militaries retain high authoritarian prerogatives during transitions from militarized authoritarian rule? The Pakistan military's 2007 extrication shows that an important part of the answer lies in the level of structural differentiation between the “military government” and the “military institution”. Despite sustained contentious opposition to military rule, the high level of separation between these two military dimensions of the state allowed the institutional military to delink itself from the discredited dictatorship and exit on its own terms. In the post-authoritarian context, the military has preserved its expansive prerogatives by using a variety of adaptive contestation mechanisms – including the mobilization of the media and the judiciary – that act as a continuing source of political instability and uncertainty.     

Living and Teaching Across Cultures

As long as one lives within the confines of a single culture it is difficult to achieve cross-cultural awareness. Multiculturalism is often simply the tolerance of a dominant culture for minority cultures. Cross-cultural awareness is a state of mind in which one is alert to alternity , the existence of others possessing different and equally valid world views and ways of life. This can be acquired living within or alongside other cultures, when one's own and others' strangeness become readily apparent. Culture shock involves just such a realization. The challenge for the teacher of international relations is to convey the possibility of alternity to students in the classroom. After all, international relations is above all about the interaction between communities possessing separate identities and autonomous wills. The article discusses ways of cultivating cross-cultural awareness, comparing the difficulties of doing so in a society under siege—Israel—with the greater scope available in the cosmopolitan setting of an elite American university.     

Beyond the Target State: Foreign Military Intervention and Neighboring State Stability

Despite the abundance of research on the consequences of foreign military intervention for target countries, scant research has been devoted to the possible regional externalities of intervention. This article examines whether large-scale armed operations affect the likelihood of civil conflict onset in countries neighboring the target of intervention. We posit that interventions against the target regime reduce the government's ability to maintain full control over the entire national territory by diminishing its coercive and administrative capacity. This might, in turn, result in safe haven possibilities for neighboring rival groups in the target and facilitate the transnational spread of arms and other illicit activities that increase the risk of civil conflict onset in the contiguous countries. Armed interventions supportive or neutral toward the target state, on the other hand, bolster the government's coercive capacity and mitigate ongoing crises in the target. Such armed intrusions might therefore undermine the likelihood of internal armed conflict in neighboring countries triggered by the factors associated with “bad neighborhoods”: safe haven possibilities, transnational spread of arms, and refugee flows. To substantiate these claims, we use time-series, cross-national data for the 1951–2004 period. Results indicate that hostile interventions increase the probability of civil conflict onset in connected countries while supportive interventions have a regional pacifying effect, reducing the likelihood of domestic unrest in countries neighboring the target state. Neutral interventions, on the other hand, are unlikely to have any discernible effect on regional stability. Further, the primary motive of intervention, whether for humanitarian or other purposes, has no statistically significant impact on the stability of neighboring countries.     

Civilian supremacy in democracies with ‘fault lines’: The role of the parliamentary standing committee on defence in Bangladesh

This article sets out to identify the conditions that promote civilian supremacy over the military in the post-military democracies. The article addresses the case of Bangladesh, where a decade-old post-military democratic political process is riddled with problems, such as the absence of opposition parties in the parliament, chronic political instability and violence and inefficient governance. However, the powerful military has not yet shown any inclination towards intervention in domestic politics. Rather, various civilian institutions, such as the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence (PSCD), have been successful in raising the level of the military's accountability to the civilian government and society. The article seeks to explain the role of PSCD during 1998–2001 in promoting civilian supremacy in Bangladesh. It argues that three sets of factors can explain the PSCD's role. First, there is intense competition for political power between the two major parties, which resists the military's involvement in politics in favour of any one political party. Second, there is the important role of civil society in favour of civilian supremacy. Third, there are external factors such as the donor countries' and international agencies' stance in favour of democracy and the Bangladesh military's participation in United Nations peacekeeping missions, which are discouraging military intervention in politics at home.     

Negotiating peace in Kosovo

We systematically analyze and forecast key developments before and during the Kosovo Crisis. Prior to the air campaign, we anticipated the breakdown of negotiations at Rambouillet and the subsequent initiation of hostilities. Without Russia as a mediator, we predicted that Milosevic would engage in military activity and strengthen his domestic control. As the war was being waged, we took a second look at settlement opportunities. Russia was identified as the key mediator needed to reach a settlement We show that a European‐led settlement offered promising prospects for peace. Finally, we demonstrate that the settlement achieved after the air war was not much different than the settlement that could have been achieved at Rambouillet The settlement on Kosovo offers only short‐term stability. To gain long‐term stability, the Serbians must either agree to the existing ethnic makeup in Kosovo or allow it to be partitioned. Otherwise, conflict in this region will likely revive.     

Religion and Conflict: Explaining the Puzzling Case of “Islamic Violence”

Despite considerable interest in the relationship between Islam and political violence, there is little systematic empirical research that explores the intrastate conflict proneness of Muslim countries, and existing studies provide mixed results. This article examines the causal factors that explain the prevalence of intrastate conflict in Muslim-plurality states and the conditions under which Islam may influence civil war onset. Further, following Ward, Greenhill, and Bakke’s (2010) suggestion, the effects of Islam and other socioeconomic and political factors in actually predicting civil wars are examined by utilizing ROC curves and cross-validation exercises. Utilizing the Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s data for the 1981–2009 period, the findings indicate that Muslim-plurality countries are indeed disproportionately involved in intrastate conflicts, but these countries are also characterized by lower GDP per capita, oil dependency, state repression, autocracy, and youth bulges, all of which correlate strongly with intrastate conflict onset. The significance of Islam disappears when controls for such factors are included in the statistical model. The variable of Islam does not make any significant contribution to either the in-sample or out-of-sample predictive power of models. Among the factors that increase the risk of intrastate conflict, the presence of a youth bulge has the greatest impact in Muslim-plurality countries.     

An assessment of democratic vulnerability: regime type,economic development,and coups d’état

Prior research has not established a clear relationship between democracy and insulation from coups d’état, with very few studies illustrating robust findings on the subject. I contend that the lack of attention paid to the conditional influences of democracy on coups has resulted in these mixed findings. I posit that insulation from coups occurs at higher levels of economic development in both autocracies and democracies. However, the vulnerability present at low levels of economic development is significantly greater in democracies. Poor democracies lack the coercive capacity associated with authoritarian states, suffer from relatively weaker patronage networks, and have smaller pots for public goods provision, all making them less capable of maintaining elite loyalty. An assessment of 165 states for the years 1950–2011 offers strong support for the argument. Democracies are indeed an important part of the coup story, but only when simultaneously addressing their level of economic development.     

Civil War Diffusion and the Emergence of Militant Groups, 1960–2001

In this research note, I argue that scholars of the international diffusion of civil conflict would benefit from directly measuring rebel mobilization prior to the onset of civil war. To better understand the way in which international processes facilitate dissidents overcoming the collective action problem inherent in rebellion, I focus on militant organizations and model the timing of their emergence. I use several data sets on militant groups and violent nonstate actors and rely on Buhaug and Gleditsch’s (2008) causal framework to examine how international conditions predict militant group emergence. While Buhaug and Gleditsch conclude that civil war diffusion is primarily a function of internal conflict in neighboring states, once militant group emergence is substituted in the dependent variable, I observe that global conditions affect rebel collective action. A final selection model links militant groups with civil conflict onset and demonstrates the variable performance of diffusion effects. The results indicate that many rebels mobilize in response to more global events and then escalate their behavior in response to local conditions.