Ethnicity,political survival,and the exchange of nationalist foreign policy

How does leadership’s desire for political survival in ethnically heterogeneous democracies affect the probability of states exchanging nationalist foreign policy? I define nationalist foreign policy as foreign policy that aims to fulfill national self-governance using a civic or ethnic frame. I argue that civic-nationalist policy disputing the territoriality of one’s own state is more likely, while ethno-nationalist policy favoring the leadership’s foreign co-ethnics is less likely, when the size of the leadership’s ethnic group is small and the level of democracy is relatively high. This is because the leadership, under such domestic conditions, has to mobilize support from other ethnic groups in order to stay in power. Civic-nationalist policy allows the leadership to increase domestic solidarity across ethnic lines and mobilize support from other ethnic groups, whereas ethno-nationalist policy would risk other ethnic groups criticizing the leadership of being ethno-centrist. These hypotheses are supported by quantitative analysis using an original dataset.     

Playing the Diversity Card: Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Policy under the Salmans

ABSTRACT

Since the 2003 regime change in Iraq and the 2011 Arab uprisings, the political map of the Middle East has been in flux. Regional actors have taken advantage of emerging windows of opportunity, which have affected the outcome of this process. Saudi Arabia’s role as an aspiring regional hegemon in the region is salient: the country’s assertive course in shaping its neighbourhood coincides with a more independent foreign policy that goes beyond the traditional US alliance and seeks to diversify its international partners. This diversification of Saudi foreign policy since the ascension to the throne of King Salman in 2015 is explained by using the IR concept of hedging.     

The effects of the IMF on expropriation of foreign firms

This paper seeks to explain the determinants of foreign expropriation in the developing world. We argue that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) helps to reduce the likelihood of nationalization because of the direct leverage the Fund holds over borrowers, especially as expropriation is a blatant violation of international property rights. Using expropriation data from 1961 to 2006, and several different measures for the Fund, we find that countries under IMF agreements are less likely to nationalize foreign firms. We also show that the Fund’s influence is greatest when the IMF loan represents a larger share of the borrower country’s gross domestic product (GDP) as well as in countries with weaker political institutions. The takeaway is that IMF continues to influence policy choices in the developing world.     

新时期印度尼西亚全方位外交战略解析

面对着不断变动的国际政治格局,为了更好地维护国家安全利益,促进国内经济发展,印度尼西亚的外交战略在坚持"独立、积极"原则的基础上也适应新的形式有所调整。苏西洛在2009年成功连任印尼总统,这使他有机会继续引导印尼的外交政策方向。印尼的外交战略从苏西洛第一任期的"在波涛汹涌的大海中航行"发展到现在的"全方位外交",即以重树在东盟的领导权为基础,积极开展双边和多边关系。     

Coalition politics and the making of Indian foreign policy: a new research program

ABSTRACT

Do Indian regional parties influence foreign policy and under which conditions? Some foreign policy studies have shown that certain coalition-building configurations have facilitated the inclusion of the concerns of small parties in the foreign policy debate. Other works have looked at the role of decentralization and federal power-arrangement in providing more control to political sub-units over the external affairs of a state. Those separate scholarships provide interesting insights to account for the multi-level nature of coalition-building in a federal and pluralistic polity like India. Bridging these two literatures, I argue that the interdependence of regional and national coalition building processes (visible in federal settings) create locked-in alliances between national parties and regional parties which affect foreign policymaking. In these contexts, India’s national parties have to, under certain conditions, take into account the preferences of regional parties when designing foreign policies. This article looks at the hypothesized causal mechanisms and expectations through two illustrative case studies of India’s foreign policy.     

The Effect of IMF Programs on Women’s Economic and Political Rights

Though much research has been devoted to the socioeconomic and political consequences of International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs for recipient countries, little is known about the impacts of these programs on the level of respect for women’s rights. We postulate that IMF-induced policy reforms of privatization and public spending cuts, and the growing political repression and instability following the implementation of IMF programs, undermine the government’s ability and willingness to protect women’s economic and political rights. To substantiate the theoretical claims, we combine data on women’s political and economic rights with data on IMF programs for the years 1981–2004. Our findings suggest that IMF involvement is likely to deteriorate the level of respect for women’s economic rights while having no discernible effect on women’s political rights. The results further indicate that the effect of these programs is not conditioned by political regime type and economic wealth of recipient countries. One major policy implication of our findings is that the IMF should start to recognize that the conditions attached to lending programs might be implemented at the expense of women’s economic rights and that more explicit protections of women’s rights need to be included in program negotiations.     

Tau-b or Not Tau-b: Measuring the Similarity of Foreign Policy Positions

The pattern of alliances among states is commonly assumed to reflect theextent to which states have common or conflicting security interests. For the past twenty years, Kendall's τ b has been used to measure the similarity of nations' "portfolios" of alliance commitments. Widely employed indicators of systemic polarity, state utility, and state risk propensity all rely on τ b . We demonstrate that τ b is inappropriate for measuring the similarity of states' alliance policies. We develop an alternative measure of policy portfolio similarity, S , which avoids many of the problems associated with τ b , and we use data on alliances among European states to compare S to τ b . Finally, we identify several problems with inferring state interests from alliances alone, and we provide a method to overcome those problems using S in combination with data on alliances, trade, UN votes, diplomatic missions, and other types of state interaction. We demonstrate this by comparing the calculated similarity of foreign policy positions based solely on alliance data to that based on alliance data supplemented with UN voting data.     

‘Blocked’ Youth: The Politics of Migration from South and East Mediterranean Countries Before and After the Arab Uprisings

Migration from South and East Mediterranean (SEM) countries has been considered a growing security threat in the EU and Gulf states following the 9/11 attacks and the Arab uprisings. Since 2011, the economic slowdown, regime changes and socio-political instability have spurred growing migration pressure from SEM countries. However, the securitisation of migration of young citizens from these countries in the EU and the Gulf states is manifested in the drastic limitation of migrants’ inflows, and in the selection of prospective migrants on demographic, socio-economic and political grounds. Today’s ‘governmentality’ of youth migration from SEM countries poses ethical and development-related issues.     

The future of the United States as a European power: The case of NATO enlargement

Abstract

European Union enlargement has left Russia on the margins of European political processes and led to widespread suspicion in the Moscow foreign policy establishment of European motives. This has resulted in, first, increasing resistance to the imposition of European norms and, second, a more assertive policy, particularly in the EU's and Russia's ‘overlapping neighbourhoods’. Although Moscow is likely to continue the strategy of engagement initiated under Putin, Brussels must radically rethink the nature and extent of Russia's ‘Europeanisation’. Russia's drive for modernisation will coexist with the strengthening of sovereignty and the power of the state, seen by the Putin administration as key to external and internal security. The EU will have to limit its ambition and work within this ‘window’—wider or narrower depending on state of play—of policy possibilities.     

The Future Foretold: Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Congressional Support for Israel

Lyndon B. Johnson became a senator the year of Israel’s creation: 1948. Moral, political, and strategic considerations guided Johnson’s outspoken support for Israel from an early point in his political career. This analysis reveals that Johnson’s advocacy of Israel whilst a senator foreshadowed his policy as president of championing the Israeli-American military-strategic alliance. Beginning with his time in Congress, Johnson had many Jewish American friends supporting the establishment of a Jewish state and, due to the importance of Jewish-American backing of the Democratic Party, Johnson supported Israel for significant political reasons. From a moral and strategic perspective starting in the 1950s, Johnson believed that Israel served as a humanitarian refuge for Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust and, as a liberal democracy, was well suited to oppose the expansion of Soviet influence and communism in the Cold War Middle East. For these reasons, Johnson supported the initiation of American aid to Israel in the early 1950s, which would presage decisions to arm Israel with the first American tanks and fighter jets as president. As a senator, Johnson staunchly opposed President Dwight Eisenhower’s threat to impose sanctions against Israel if it did not withdraw from Egyptian territories occupied in the 1956 Suez crisis. Johnson’s stance on Suez – that Israel deserved greater security guarantees prior to withdrawal – would starkly parallel his policy following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.     

Opening the black box – The making of India’s foreign policy

ABSTRACT

Most studies looking at India’s external policies continue to “black-box” the actual process of how Indian foreign policy is made. More specifically, most studies generally overlook how India’s complex domestic polity and bureaucratic apparatus shape India’s foreign policy outlook. Unlike works on India’s security policy which have built from and contributed to broader academic debates, studies on India’s foreign policy have failed to directly engage with concepts and theories developed by the sub-discipline of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). Why have these concepts and approaches not been consistently applied to the Indian context? There are various reasons for this, ranging from these disciplines’ excessive reliance on Western case studies, or the lack of interest in mainstream International Relations scholarship by South Asianists (in contrast to disciplines such as economics, political theory, and developmental studies, all of which have benefited from the Indian experience). This special issue is a step towards bridging this gap and to encourage a greater dialogue between FPA and the systematic study of Indian foreign policy. Through the careful analysis of specific case studies, the different papers offer a conceptually grounded and empirically innovative reading of India’s foreign policy across time, space, and themes.     

Understanding foreign policy strategies of Kazakhstan: a case study of the landlocked and transcontinental country

Abstract

Examining Kazakhstan’s foreign policy through the lens of its position as the largest landlocked, and transcontinental, country in the world, the paper presents a multidimensional analysis of the unique soft power strategy adopted recently by this nation in promoting its various international initiatives in its region. In doing so, the paper attempts to understand the implications of Kazakhstan’s distinctive geopolitical setting at the heart of Eurasia for regional integration and security-building initiatives that have been proposed and actively supported by this emerging nation. The paper focuses on investigating key political and socioeconomic aspects of the country’s location at the intersection of Europe and Asia and analyses whether a symbiotic relationship exists between Kazakhstan’s multi-vectored foreign policy and the wide range of its international initiatives aiming to promote economic development, partnership and peaceful coexistence between various nations in the region. The key findings and generalizations of the research will facilitate better understanding of the implications of landlocked geography for the direction of foreign policy, using concrete examples and manifestations of political decisions made in the area.     

The (un)making of the Pax Turca in the Middle East: understanding the social-historical roots of foreign policy

Turkey’s foreign policy activism has received mixed reviews. Some feel threatened by the alleged increasing Islamization of the country’s foreign policy, sometimes called ‘neo-Ottomanism’, which is seen as a significant revision of Turkey’s traditional transatlanticism. Others see Turkey as a stable democratic role model in a troubled region. This debate on Turkish foreign policy (TFP) remains dominated by a sense of confusion about what appear to be stark contradictions that are difficult to make sense of. Intervening in this debate, this article will develop an alternative perspective to existing accounts of Turkey’s new foreign policy. Offering a historical sociological approach to foreign policy analysis, it locates recent transformations in Turkey’s broader strategies of social reproduction. It subsequently argues that, contrary to claims about Turkey’s ‘axis shift‘, its changing foreign policies have in fact never been pro-Western or pro-American. All foreign policy ‘shifts’ and ‘inconsistencies’, we argue, are explicable in terms of historically changing strategies of social reproduction of the Ottoman and Turkish states responding to changing domestic and international conditions.     

Modeling alliance membership in a three‐dimensional space

Both Altfeld (1984) and Morrow (1991) offer theoretical foundations that explain why alliances form. Security concerns and autonomy desires are the driving force for the pursuit of allies. While this response explains why states become allies, it does not address which do. To explain with which potential allies states choose to share alliance membership, I construct a three‐dimensional space in which security, autonomy, and political system structure are each represented as one of the three dimensions of ally choice. Every state that shared alliance membership with any other given state from 1946–1992, on a yearly basis, is assigned a unique, tri‐component point in the three‐dimensional space. The distances in the space between each state and all other states’ tri‐component points are calculated, and this distance is then incorporated into a probit estimation of ally choice. By examining the role that security and autonomy trade‐offs and level of political system structure similarity play in determining ally choice, I conclude that two states are more likely to share alliance membership the more symmetrical they are in security and autonomy considerations and the more similar they are in political system structure.     

Food subsidy policy and democracy: A comparative study of Sri Lanka and Zambia

This article compares the political processes involved in food subsidy policies in Sri Lanka and Zambia and relates these experiences to the concept of ‘good government’ that western nations have been promoting. The Sri Lankan case illustrates the workings of the policy process in a democratic political system, albeit one that centralized considerably in the 1980s. The Zambian case illustrates the policy process in a one‐party state that returned to multi‐party democracy in 1991. Despite their very different political systems the nature of food subsidy policies show striking similarities: decades of high levels of non‐targeted consumer subsidies that placed great demands on public expenditure until radical reductions in expenditure occurred following an electorally based change of government and multilateral agency pressure. Differences in the processes of policy formulation and public accountability are explored. They reveal that neither case study functioned as democratic theory would predict. The conclusion points to the inability of the concept of ‘good government’ to model the empirical experiences reported in the article.     

Securitisation from below: the relationship between immigration and foreign policy in South Africa's approach to the Zimbabwe crisis

The political and economic debacle in Zimbabwe has led to a large-scale influx of Zimbabweans into neighbouring South Africa. This article argues that there is a complex and significant link between the domestic response to this immigration influx and South Africa's foreign policy towards Zimbabwe. South Africa's foreign and security policy elite preferred to use an immigration approach of benign neglect as a tool to promote its ‘quiet diplomacy’ approach towards the Zimbabwean regime, treating the influx as a ‘non-problem’. But increased xenophobic violence, vigilantism and protests in townships and informal settlements against Zimbabwean and other African immigrants, culminating in widespread riots across the country in 2008, contributed to a change not only in immigration policy but also in the mediation efforts towards the Zimbabwean parties. I argue that this foreign policy change was pushed by a process of ‘securitisation from below’, where the understanding of Zimbabwean immigrants as a security threat were promoted not by traditional security elites but by South Africa's marginalised urban poor.     

Delegating Terror: Principal–Agent Based Decision Making in State Sponsorship of Terrorism

State sponsorship of terrorism, where a government deliberately provides resources and material support to a terrorist organization, is common in the international system. Sponsorship can provide significant strategic and political benefits for a state, but there are inherent international and domestic risks associated with delegating foreign policy to these actors. Using principal–agent analysis, I develop a model that evaluates the impact of potential costs and benefits on a state’s decision to sponsor terrorism. I test my model by using a novel dataset on sponsorship behaviors that ranges from 1970 to 2008. The results of my analysis support the validity of the principal–agent model in explaining sponsorship, as states will be more likely to engage in sponsorship when the strategic benefits of weakening the targeted state are high and the risks of international reputation loss and domestic dissatisfaction are low.     

Liberal intervention in the foreign policy thinking of Tony Blair and David Cameron

David Cameron was a critic of Tony Blair's doctrine of the ‘international community’, which was used to justify war in Kosovo and more controversially in Iraq, suggesting caution in projecting military force abroad while in opposition. However, and in spite of making severe cuts to the defence budget, the Cameron-led Coalition government signed Britain up to a military intervention in Libya within a year of coming into office. What does this say about the place liberal interventionism occupies in contemporary British foreign policy? To answer this question, this article studies the nature of what we describe as the ‘bounded liberal’ tradition that has informed British foreign policy thinking since 1945, suggesting that it puts a distinctly UK national twist on conventional conservative thought about international affairs. Its components are: scepticism of grand schemes to remake the world; instinctive Atlanticism; security through collective endeavour; and anti-appeasement. We then compare and contrast the conditions for intervention set out by Tony Blair and David Cameron. We explain the similarities but crucially the vital differences between the two leaders' thinking on intervention, with particular reference to Cameron's perception that Downing Street needed to loosen its control over foreign policymaking after Iraq. Our argument is that policy substance, policy style and party political dilemmas prompted the two leaders to reconnect British foreign policy with its ethical roots, ingraining a bounded liberal posture in British foreign policy after the moral bankruptcy of the John Major years. This return to a pragmatic and ethically informed foreign policy meant that military operations in Kosovo and Libya were undertaken in quite different circumstances, yet came to be justified by similar arguments from the two leaders.     

后冷战时代日本环境外交战略研究

冷战结束后,环境议题成为日本谋求"政治大国"地位的重要手段,其纳入日本对外战略框架有着深刻的国内社会背景和国际政治环境,以对外输出资本和环保技术为主要内容的日本环境外交战略在树立环保大国形象及提高国际声誉方面取得了一定成绩,但公益性的实施方式并没有改变其作为一国外交政策的利益性本质。     

Age structure and political violence: a re-assessment of the “youth bulge” hypothesis

A popular hypothesis in international studies states that a “youth bulge”––an age pyramid dominated by large cohorts between 15 and 29 years of age––increases the risk of political violence. However, empirical evidence on this link remains inconclusive to date. In this article, we systematically assess the youth effect using new data from 183 countries between 1996 and 2015. We find that within countries, a decrease in the youth ratio is generally associated with a decrease in the number of violent deaths from terrorism or other internal conflicts, and vice versa. This is also confirmed in out-of-sample predictions. However, the association is not evident in all constellations and sensitive to modeling issues. In particular, large cohorts of young males can become a disruptive power in countries that increase enrollment in post-primary education. Although this is usually followed by fertility decline, youth bulges often remain at record levels for quite some time due to high birth rates in the past. Strong labor markets can in general suppress the detrimental consequences of youth bulges. However, the combination of growing youth cohorts and educational expansion often leads to increased political violence even in the presence of low youth unemployment.