A Long War in the East: Doctrine,Diplomacy, and the Prospects for a Protracted Sino-American Conflict

Increasing diplomatic tension between China and the United States has led to concerns about military conflict, possibly including rapid nuclear escalation. Scholars have spent less time considering the opposite scenario: protracted conventional war. This analysis explains why a combination of politics, geography, and technology may conspire to produce such a war, despite the fact that both sides are planning for a short, high-intensity fight. It shows how the Peloponnesian War, an ancient conflict fought with ancient weapons, nonetheless provides a warning of what might happen in the present. It also describes a grim trade off that American policy-makers will face in the event of war. Washington can take steps to reduce the chance of nuclear escalation, but in so doing will make a long war more likely. The conclusion describes the diplomatic challenge of war termination in a protracted conflict where neither side can compel the other to back down.     

国际环境对东南亚威权政治的影响

冷战期间,东南亚国家处在冷战的全球国际大环境之下的“热战”地区国际小环境之中。两种制度之间的争夺、美苏中三大国之间的角逐对东南亚国家推行威权政治起到了一定的推动作用。由于实行威权政治的东南亚各国的国情不同,国际环境对它们的作用方式和影响效果也不尽相同。本文试对新加坡、印度尼西亚和菲律宾三国的情况进行初步的分析。     

Clear and Present Strangers: The Clash of Civilizations and International Conflict

Huntington's (1993a, 1993b, 1996) clash of civilizations thesis suggests that states belonging to different civilizations are more likely to become involved in conflict with one another. To evaluate the empirical accuracy of Huntington's claims, we examined the relationship between civilization membership and interstate war between 1816 and 1992. We find that civilization membership was not significantly associated with the onset of interstate war during the Cold War era (1946–1988), which is consistent with one aspect of Huntington's thesis; however, we also find that for the pre–Cold War period (1816–1945) states of similar civilizations were more likely to fight each other than were those of different civilizations, which contradicts Huntington's thesis. Most importantly, our analysis reveals that during the post–Cold War era (1989–1992), the period in which Huntington contends that the clash of civilizations should be most apparent, civilization membership was not significantly associated with the probability of interstate war. All told, our findings challenge Huntington's claims and seriously undermine the policy recommendations that devolve from his clash of civilizations thesis.     

战争、和平与全球治理

战争与和平是人类社会面临的重大问题。战争的爆发与和平的实现既受国际政治经济因素的影响,也是国内政治力量相互作用的结果。裁军是决定战争与和平的重要因素,然而,当今国际社会在裁军方面的进展十分缓慢。随着全球化步伐的加快,尤其进入21世纪以来,国际安全形势令人担忧。大规模杀伤性武器的有增无减以及恐怖主义的蔓延继续威胁着国际社会,原先的国际治理逻辑已不再适用。为消除战争、增进和平,重塑全球治理机制的呼声愈加高涨。为此,国际社会需要引入新的治理机制,对影响国际安全的因素加以管理。世界各国日益加深的相互依赖意味着以议题关联为核心的治理手段能够发挥更大作用。为提升和改进全球治理的效果,国际社会必须引入具有动机的激励机制,建立起可信和可核查的制度,对违反协议的国家实施惩罚和制裁,这不仅是国际协议和国际行动成功的关键,也是确保全球治理有效性的不二选择。     

Lincoln's Gamble: Fear of Intervention and the Onset of the American Civil War

Few studies consider how civil war onset can be influenced by third parties and by the belligerents’ perceptions of third party actions. I show that the American Civil War, a war largely ignored by civil war scholars, sheds insights into how anticipation of third party intervention influences the decision-making process within the target state and how the possibility of third party intervention can influence the onset and escalation of civil war. The American Civil War is an especially interesting case for exploring the role of third parties in civil war initiation since, unlike most cases considered by the existing civil war literature, the American Civil War is an instance of nonintervention: the third parties (the European powers in this case) mattered despite staying out of the conflict. Specifically, I argue that fear of foreign recognition (particularly by the British) played an underappreciated (if not the decisive) role in the earliest stages of the American Civil War by influencing Lincoln's decision to authorize the first major battle of the war at Manassas Junction, Virginia.     

A Behavioral Model of Dispute Escalation: The Major Powers, 1816–1976

This study combines the empirical evidence drawn from studies of conflict escalation in political science, and the social‐psychological insights concerning human inference and prediction, to develop a dynamic model of dispute escalation. This model makes systematic use of historical data concerning the behavioral unfolding of disputes involving at least one major power to generate probabilistic predictions of the war/no war outcomes of such disputes. Using the Correlates of War Project data on major power disputes in the 1816–1976 period, these predictions are tested against the actual outcomes of the disputes. Overall, the model predicts correctly nearly 94 percent of the cases and compares favorably to several null models against which it is tested. However, while not consistently biased the model's predictions are characterized by considerable instability across various probability ranges. This suggests that the incorporation of more stable factors such as underlying systemic and dyadic attributes may substantially improve the overall performance of the model as well as the stability of its predictions.     

The changing phases of the Niger Delta conflict: implications for conflict escalation and the return of peace

This paper discusses the nature and dynamics of the Niger Delta conflict and traces the structural origin of the conflict to a dysfunctional Nigerian ‘state-nation’ that is a product of colonisation. The paper argues that the conflict is best understood as a process viewed in terms of nests or phases. Building on previous findings on the aetiology of African conflicts and contemporary scholarship on African politics, the paper identifies how different phases of the Niger Delta conflict interact to impel the conflict toward escalation. Consequently, it is argued that both the ‘marginalisation-relative deprivation’ and the ‘political economy of war’ theses have been instrumental in furthering our understanding of the conflict along different lines. However, the tendency for both perspectives to claim superiority over the other has meant that each only offers a partial truth and is therefore unable to explain the increasing intensity and longevity of the Niger Delta conflict. Indeed, it is shown how these theses feed into the discursive struggle between militants, militant entrepreneurs and the Nigerian Government in ways that allow for the commodification of the Niger Delta people. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of the emerging issues for the return of peace in the Niger Delta.     

Eyes wide shut: persistent conflict and liberal peace-building in Nepal and Sri Lanka

The decisive, albeit different, endings of armed conflict in Sri Lanka and Nepal and subsequent post-war developments challenge key assumptions about conflict that have informed post-Cold War international efforts to produce peace in such conflict zones. International intervention—including in Sri Lanka and Nepal—characterises armed conflict as sustained by specific political economies that can only be stably resolved by establishing liberal democracy and market economics. This paper examines liberal peace engagement in Sri Lanka and Nepal to challenge a crucial assumption of the persistent conflict thesis, namely the separation between political contestation and armed conflict. It argues that the divergent post-conflict outcomes of continuing ethnic polarisation in Sri Lanka and constitutional reform in Nepal reveal strong continuities in the dynamics of pre-war, war and post-war politics. This continuity challenges the presumed separation of politics and violence that drove international engagement to produce liberal peace and suggests that such engagement, far from encouraging reform, may have (inadvertently) sustained conflict in both cases.     

Ballotbox Diplomacy: The War Powers Resolutiona and the Use of Force

The strategic problem for the United States during the lead-up to a potential military clash is maintaining the executive's ability to respond internationally while not abrogating legislative oversight of the use of force. In light of this dilemma, congressional leaders have an incentive to engage in "stage management": establishing short-term contracts with the executive that shift political risk during conflict onto the president while maintaining a final check on presidential policy.
The War Powers Resolution is a useful test of the stage management model and an alternative model that derides congressional involvement in the use of force as nothing more than symbolic politics. We find that the War Powers Resolution changed the process by which Congress opposes the presidential use of force, easing congressional collective-action problems and minimizing the electoral repercussions associated with said confrontation. Moreover, presidents have used force differently since the resolution's passage. By changing both process and outcomes, the War Powers Resolution fulfills all the requirements of a stage management contract.     

Nationalist Protests,Government Responses,and the Risk of Escalation in Interstate Disputes

While the existing literature emphasizes that elites often have incentives to pander to nationalist sentiment, much less attention has been paid to elite efforts to subdue popular nationalism, either to avoid domestic instability or international escalation. This article examines how different governments respond to nationalist protests and the resulting effects on the risk that interstate disputes will escalate to armed conflict. We argue that government responses to nationalist protests tend to vary in patterned ways across regime types. Nationalist protests present particular dangers in weakly institutionalized democracies, where demonstrations often pose serious threats of instability but are difficult or costly for the government to subdue, tempting or forcing leaders to escalate to appease domestic critics. We illustrate the theory with four cases representing a range of regime types: Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and the Philippines.     

Political Repression,Democratization and Civil Conflict in Post-Independence Algeria

This article applies the inverted U-shape theory to Algeria's experience with political repression, democratization and civil conflict. It aims to provide insights into Algeria that other theoretical approaches, such as the clash of civilization, do not. The main findings point to the central role of economic dissatisfaction in promoting political change (democratization) as well as political instability (armed conflict).     

On money and memory: Political economy of cross-border engagement on the politically divided Armenia-Turkey frontier

Complicated historical memories and mutual distrust coupled with decades of Cold War separation have prevented the Iron Curtain from lifting on the border between Turkey and Armenia. Indeed the end of the Cold War has seen tension between these two countries escalate further over the conflict between the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh and the republic of Azerbaijan. Turkey, having allied itself with Azerbaijan in this dispute, has made diplomatic engagement with Armenia conditional on the settlement of this conflict. Paradoxically, despite a trade and transport blockade imposed on Armenia by Turkey and Azerbaijan, economic ties in the region have not disappeared. This discrepancy between the political and diplomatic rhetoric and the economic and developmental realities on the ground motivates the present study. Drawing from the Armenian context the study illustrates how the tension between political interests and business interests are manifested and managed in Armenia. Generalising from this study, the work presented here maintains that weak cross-border governance capacities in the developing world can influence abilities to utilise, leverage and manage globalisation and, further, in politically divided regions they can undermine prospects of constructive engagement between the conflicting sides. It argues that the promotion of liberal statehood in developing countries characterised by small governments does little to assist the development of cross-sectoral links between the public and private sectors within a region, such cross-sectoral links being important ingredients in the promotion of cross-border regionalism.     

Rethinking the Relationship between Inclusive Institutions and Political Violence

Abstract

In this paper we empirically reexamine the debate over the conflict reducing properties of inclusive political institutions. We examine the purported violence reducing effects of proportional representation (PR) electoral systems, parliamentarism, and federalism, conditioning their effects on ethnic fractionalization and whether a country is conflict prone. In other words, are these institutions more effective in countries that have already experienced major conflict or are they more effective in preventing conflict in countries that have not experienced major conflict? Using a data set that includes a sample of 81 countries and 2488 observations from 1973 to 2018, we test the conditional effects of proportional representation electoral systems, parliamentarism and federalism conditioning these by ethnicity and whether the country has experienced a major conflict (i.e., civil war). We find that these institutions have little effect on reducing the number of riots or political deaths, but PR electoral systems reduces ethnic violence when ethnic fractionalization is high. On the other hand PR electoral systems and parliamentarism reduce ethnic violence in conflict prone countries, but federalism increases the likelihood of ethnic violence. We discuss the implications of these findings with regard to arguments regarding inclusive power sharing arrangements and violence in post conflict environments.     

Henry Kissinger: Realism,Domestic Politics,and the Struggle Against Exceptionalism in American Foreign Policy

Henry Kissinger was the single most controversial diplomat of the 20th century. This article explores Kissinger's approach to the philosophy of realism in international affairs, his role in Vietnam policy making, and his most recent engagement in the debate over the Iraq War. It argues that Kissinger's realism, although philosophically consistent and having roots within his own life's experience, was always tempered by his desire to exercise influence within the American political system. Once in office under Richard Nixon and then Gerald Ford, Kissinger came to recognise how significantly domestic politics shaped American foreign policy. His involvement in the Vietnam War demonstrates this, and one lesson he took from that conflict was the hope that Americans could be persuaded to move away from their convictions about American exceptionalism and recognise the limits of American power.     

Limiting America's Engagement: Roger Hilsman's Vietnam War, 1961–1963

This article examines the role of Roger Hilsman, an important State Department official in the Kennedy administration, in the formulation of American policy towards the Vietnam War between 1961 and 1963. Hilsman was one of the leading opponents of a conventional military escalation of the war in Vietnam, frequently clashing with the Pentagon and the American military establishment in order to limit United States' engagement. Hilsman was convinced that “victory” in Vietnam was possible if the United States adopted a counterinsurgency approach to the conflict. This perception was forged by his experiences as a guerrilla fighter in World War II. Perceived to be one of the main architects of the coup against President Diem in 1963, and vilified by elements in the United States military, he was removed from office by President Johnson early in 1964.     

A Universal Test of an Expected Utility Theory of War

Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman's version of an expected utility theory of war has become one of the most widely cited theories of international conflict. However, the testing of the theory has lagged behind its theoretical development. In its most sophisticated formulation, the theory has been tested on only 707 dyad-years, all drawn from Europe between 1816 and 1970. We present a test of the expected utility theory of war (as developed in War and Reason ) on the international system from 1816 to 1984. Specifically, we examine the relationship between the main equilibrium variables derived under the "domestic variant" of the international interaction game and behavioral outcomes using multinomial logit. We find that the equilibria correlate with actual behavior in both the set of all dyads and a subset of politically relevant dyads, even after including a set of control variables. The relationship is somewhat less clear among the population of all interstate-directed dyads, however, with key equilibrium variables having smaller effects at increasing the odds of interstate conflict among all dyads. We also present a new software program, EUGene , which generates expected utility data and can serve as an important data management tool for international relations researchers.     

War, Economic Development, and Political Development in the Contemporary International System

The European state-building experience has led many scholars to argue that war forces states to increase their fiscal-administrative capacity, or what we might refer to as political development, in order to compete in the international system. War also requires states to generate wealth to support such competition, which should lead to progressively increased levels of economic development. Yet, in contemporary empirical studies, war is often studied as a dependent variable, with economic and political development modeled as affecting its origination. This reading of theory and empirical work suggests that war, economic development, and political development constitute an endogenous system. In this paper, we develop expectations about how these three processes interact and test them using a three-stage least squares regression model. The results show significant simultaneous relationships between the three processes. We conclude that war, economic development, and political development are mutually constitutive processes in the contemporary international system.     

A social theory of war: Clausewitz and war reconsidered

This article presents a new theory of war that is grounded in the insights of Clausewitz on the social nature of conflict. Clausewitz had argued that war is a political process; he therefore distinguished between ‘war’—understood in political terms—and warfare—understood as fighting. He then created a typology covering a spectrum of war ranging from total to limited, the political stakes of a conflict determining where it would fall on the spectrum. I develop and modify this basic framework by arguing that the social organization of the actors has a determining role in predicting the stakes of war. I then show how this framework helps us understand some key problems in the political science literature on war and conflict. I attempt to show two main things: (1) that there are different types of wars (and that these differences are not necessarily related to the standing of the actors, i.e. the presence or absence of sovereignty); and (2) that how war and warfare are related is more complicated than previously understood and that this has implications for the political science literature on order, conflict and violence.     

Book Review

During George Bush's presidency the Cold War drew to a close and his administration triumphed in the Gulf War. Some viewed these events as a harbinger of a new world order. Basking in the success of the Gulf War, Bush's approval ratings soared, and prominent Democrats reconsidered challenging him in 1992. Foreign policy themes might have seemed a natural emphasis in campaign rhetoric. Yet, on the eve of the election, Bush abandoned efforts to rally the public with such appeals.

This article identifies primary metaphorical themes employed by Bush to define foreign policy reality. Bush's rhetoric was fundamentally ordered by the orientational metaphor of war. Other themes reinforced central premises of the war metaphor and reflected enduring premises of American exceptional ism. However, critical constraints blunted Bush's rhetorical intentions, and perhaps nullified constraints presidents traditionally have harnessed to define rhetorical situations to fit a preferred world view.

A disjuncture between rhetorical expectations and intentions beset the administration as the 1992 election approached. The electorate turned an anxious gaze to domestic politics and the condition of the economy. Furthermore, the war metaphor met a public demonstrably leery of U.S. meddling in the internal politics of other countries. Preference for the war metaphor, finally, represented a significant challenge to the political identity of Bush and the Republican Party.     

The Cold War and Counter-Insurgency

Due to the American-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, theories surrounding counter-insurgency, or COIN, have aroused intense debate in political, military, and academic circles in the United States, Britain, and other Western countries. This article shows that current thinking about how to fight and defeat insurgent movements is based primarily on Cold War-era theories and conflicts. It traces the evolution in COIN thinking both before and during the Cold War—incorporating Western and Eastern bloc experiences of war against insurgents from Malaya to Afghanistan—but also illustrates the conceptual difficulties of applying doctrines based on the historical record of this era. The article concludes by arguing that theories derived from the experiences of states involved in COIN campaigns from 1945 to 1991 still retain utility, but that there are significant differences between Cold War insurgencies and current conflicts associated with the “war on terror”/“long war” which affect the applicability of doctrines based on historical analysis and the works of Thompson, Kitson, Galula, and other “classic” theorists.