Trade Interdependence and the Use of Force: Do Issues Matter?

In this project, we investigate the relationship between the use of military force and trade interdependence, suggesting that the influence of trade on militarized conflict varies based on the issue under dispute. For some issues, trade is likely to attenuate the chances that states escalate a dispute to the use of military force, while for others trade can intensify disputes so that military conflict is more likely. Specifically, we hypothesize that greater trade interdependence decreases the probability of military conflict over realpolitik issues like territory. On the other hand, greater trade interdependence increases the probability that states use military force when the issue under dispute concerns the regime, policies, and conditions in the target. To test our hypotheses, we employ new data on dyadic uses of force from the International Military Intervention data set that records the initiator’s reason(s) for using force against the target. The statistical tests support our hypotheses; trade decreases the use of force against a target for territorial and military/diplomatic reasons, which is consistent with arguments from the liberal paradigm. However, trade interdependence increases the use of force for humanitarian and economic reasons as well as to affect the regime or policy of the target. Thus, our study improves upon current research about the relationship between economic interdependence and foreign policy by specifying a conditional relationship based on the issues under contention.     

Politics and Threat Perception: Explaining Pakistani Military Strategy on the North West Frontier

Abstract

Analysts and policymakers agree that the Pakistani military has engaged in selective repression of and collusion with armed groups. Yet beyond this general observation, fine-grained theory and evidence do not exist to systematically explain patterns of military strategy across groups and over time. This paper provides a theoretical framework for explaining regime perceptions of armed groups and the strategies state security managers pursue toward different types of groups. It then probes this framework using a combination of new medium-N data on military offensives, peace deals, and state–group alliances in Pakistan’s North West and four comparative case studies from North and South Waziristan. We argue that the Pakistani military—the key state institution in this context—has assigned armed groups to different political roles reflecting both their ideological affinity with the military and the operational benefits they can provide to the army. This mixture of instrumental and ideological motivations has created a complex blend of regime threat perceptions and state–group interactions across space and time. A clearer understanding of how the military views Pakistan’s armed political landscape can inform policy debates about the nature of Pakistani counterinsurgency, as well as broader theoretical debates about order and violence.     

Manpower and Counterinsurgency: Empirical Foundations for Theory and Doctrine

How does manpower affect counterinsurgency? Important debates about counterinsurgency theory, military doctrine, force planning, and ongoing military operations revolve around assumptions about the role manpower plays in determining counterinsurgency outcomes. But these assumptions have not, by and large, been subjected to large-n analysis. This paper helps serve that role by examining new data on counterinsurgents’ deployments across 171 campaigns since World War I. These data provide insight into a range of important issues, such as how force size should be measured, whether it is related to counterinsurgent success, whether troop nationality matters, and whether the role of manpower varies across contexts. Of these findings, the most notable is that conventional rules of thumb for force sizing, including the recommendation put forth in official US military doctrine, receive no empirical support. These findings therefore challenge the prevailing wisdom, while laying the groundwork for a range of future scholarship.     

Invading Europe: The British army and its preparations for the Normandy campaign, 1942-44

The combat capability of 2nd British Army during the Normandy campaign has been much deprecated. This article tries to shed new light on these criticisms by examining three neglected aspects of the army's preparations for the campaign. It examines how the army was created from formations drawn from both Home Forces and 8th Army; it explores how its formations were trained in Britain before D-Day; it considers how senior commanders were selected to lead the army; and finally it demonstrates how athese issues had a significant influence on the combat capability of British troops in Normandy.     

联合阵线与美国军事干涉

作为国际体系中的唯一超级大国,美国是冷战后海外用兵最为频繁、进行军事干涉行动次数最多的国家。研究者们通常认为,美国的军事干涉在决策和实施上具有很强的单边主义色彩,其突出特征是动辄使用或威胁使用武力,在决定使用武力时一意孤行,时常将自身意志凌驾于联合国和国际法之上。通过考察冷战后美国在伊拉克战争、阿富汗战争、利比亚战争等重大军事干涉行动中的选择可以发现,尽管美国在使用武力的决策上较少受到国际社会的有效约束,但它在军事干涉行动中既不是纯粹依靠自身力量单干,也不是依靠其缔造的多边或双边军事同盟,而是经常性地采取联合阵线的方式执行军事打击和战后维稳行动。联合阵线的目标确定性及手段灵活性为美国主导军事干涉行动提供了便利,而规避集体行动的困境、让伙伴承担军事行动的负担、为干涉行动寻找合法性以及减少美国的投入和损失等考量,也使得美国具有招募多国参与其军事行动的强烈动机。由于当前国际体系结构的制约,不少国家倾向于加入美国的军事干涉联合阵线,以便在美国主导的等级体系中获取安全保障和经济利益。     

The Use of Force—Stability and Instability: India,Pakistan, and China

This article evaluates the source of instability and stability in the India-Pakistan dyad and the Sino-Indian dyad. Challenging the dominant thesis that “means determine ends,” the article posits that the use of force by Pakistan renders the India-Pakistan relationship unstable, whereas the Sino-Indian relationship is significantly more stable because of the absence of force. The difference in the state of stability in both dyads is because the weaker state, Pakistan in its conflict with India has failed to accept the verdict of its military defeats. This failure to internalize irreversible military outcomes makes Pakistan particularly susceptible to employing forcible solutions to settle its dispute with India over Kashmir. The reality reverses in the Sino-Indian territorial dispute, in that India has implicitly accepted its military loss against China in 1962 and charted a diplomatic pathway in resolving the boundary dispute.     

Competitive Engagement: Upgrading America's Influence

America's instruments of foreign policy are weak. As a result, Washington depends much more on its military power than it should. The militarization of foreign policy is neither good for American interests nor sustainable, since many political, economic, and ideological outcomes are not attainable through the use of military force. Yet ongoing discussions about America's non- military power miss one important factor: in virtually every theater of the world, local, regional, and strategic competitions affect America's ability to exert influence through its aid and diplomacy. From Pakistan to the Middle East to Africa, ideas about how to develop economies, shape educational systems, administer health care programs, and build political institutions, are contested. Until the competitive nature of aid and diplomacy is deliberately and explicitly considered, Washington's ability to achieve outcomes using its non-military power—often called “soft” or “smart power”—will remain fundamentally limited.     

Class conflict,state terrorism and the Pakistani military: the Okara Military Farms dispute

In their dispute with their tenants, in what is known as the Okara Military Farms dispute, army landlords in the Punjab province of Pakistan resorted to state terrorism conducted by paramilitary troops, in alliance with other state agencies, in an unsuccessful attempt to break farmer resistance to attempts to remove their security of tenure. Analysis of the dispute provides strong support for the argument that state violence can, in some instances, be categorised as a specific form of terrorism. The article, therefore, aims to contribute to the growing literature on state terrorism which has been neglected as a legitimate and important topic for scholarly inquiry.     

The Alienated Frontier: Why the United States Can’t Get Osama bin Laden

Since the Russian-supplied Afghan army overthrew progressive President Daud in 1978, the nation has endured the long Soviet-Afghan war, the Taliban, and the arrival of U.S troops. These military actions have only heightened the historical alienation of the Pashtun tribes who overspread the long-contested border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. These are the people who are almost certainly sheltering Osama bin Laden. The Alienated Frontier is a centuries-old problem that must be solved if we are to win the war on terror, and solving it will require rebuilding the infrastructure, developing alternatives to poppy cultivation, and solving the “Pashtunistan” question. The capture or elimination of given individuals will achieve little if the conditions that allow radicals to thrive are not addressed     

伪满洲国日本人移民用地征购政策

伪满洲国建立后,日本便不失时机地向中国东北大规模推行日本人农业移民,以达到土地和人口的占领,进而实现长期霸占的目的。为此日本关东军等有关侵略机构便煞费苦心炮制了一系列日本农业移民用地取得的方针、政策,并以军事为后盾,对中国东北的土地进行疯狂的强行"征用"、"收买"和掠夺,给中国人民带来了深重的灾难。     

大村益次郎的军制改革

日本近代军制的确立及近代化军队的形成始于明治初期的军制改革。首任兵部大辅大村益次郎在明治初期的军制建设过程中发挥了举足轻重的作用。在大村的主导下,明治政府大刀阔斧地开始军制改革,如创建政府军,统一军制,施行国民征兵制。上述举措不仅是日本迈向军事近代化的关键步伐,而且为其日后成为军事强国奠定了基础。     

Evaluating Israel's Strategy of Low-Intensity Warfare, 1949–2006

This study examines the strategic and tactical logic of Israel's limited uses of force against Arab states and against substate actors. It evaluates the effectiveness of these policies, and their political and strategic ramifications. The study is based on a historical survey of these policies and on quantitative analysis of a dataset of the use of limited force by Israel over the 1949–2003 period. The findings suggest, first, that limited force strategies were occasionally used to foster escalation. In other cases, the mismanagement of limited engagements resulted in inadvertent escalation to full-blown wars. Second, domestic political and social considerations had important effects on the nature and intensity of Israeli uses of limited force. Third, Israeli reliance on offensive strategies has not only consistently failed, but produced adverse military and diplomatic side effects. Defensive and preventive measures have shown a much greater degree of success. The study concludes that a combination of military and diplomatic measures produces far more effective results than strictly military ones.     

Forging the Future of American Security with a Total Force Strategy

An intense debate now rages concerning whether the Army should be preparing and organizing to conduct more ambiguous, irregular operations or focus on maintaining its well honed edge in high-intensity warfare. The terms of the debate are clearly affected by the fact that United States is currently embroiled in perilous counterinsurgency and other irregular operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Should the Army recalibrate itself to wage counterinsurgency and other irregular operations more effectively, or does it need to keep doing what it does best with an eye to future conventional warfare? Given the impossibility of accurately predicting the character of future conflict, it is necessary for the Army to strike a balance between the extremes. But for the Army to effectively implement a policy of “balance,” it must be prepared to dramatically change the way it organizes itself and drop its opposition to specializing its forces for irregular and conventional warfare, respectively. The approach that the Army should take should be based upon a Total Force construct. By utilizing the entire Total Force portfolio, it should be possible to better optimize the mix of ground units prepared for conventional war, irregular war or peace operations to avoid a mis-match between national security strategy and military force. In this manner, it may be possible to stake our claim on the hard won lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, yet hedge against the unknowable future.     

The Irish republican army: An assessment of sectarianism

Although the Irish Republican Army (IRA) has been active for more than 25 years, interpretations of the motivation of the IRA are varied. For some, it is a sectarian organization engaged in a tit‐for‐tat campaign with Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. For others, it is a guerrilla army waging a military campaign against the British presence in Northern Ireland. This article assesses the degree to which the IRA was or was not engaged in sectarian activity between July 1969 and December 1993. Although the Irish Republican Army killed more than 340 Protestant civilians in this time period, this examination suggests that the IRA, in general, was not a sectarian organization.     

The beginning of a new cold war?

The proactive policies of the United States in expanding NATO, its bombing of Iraq in December 1998, NATO's air war on Yugoslavia in 1999 in which the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was accidentally bombed, and the United States’ new perspectives on the use of force in the global arena have led to increasing resentment and tensions on the part of Russia and the PRC. As Washington is seeking new rationales for the unilateral use of force worldwide, or circumventing the use of sanctions, of the UN Security Council before taking military actions, Russia and China are becoming increasingly convinced that the United States is bent upon establishing its global hegemony. Obviously, neither Russia nor China will let this increasing proactivism go unchallenged.     

“Upholding the Correct Political Direction”. The PLA Reform and Civil-Military Relations in Xi Jinping’s China

The military reform launched in late 2015 has significant implications for China’s civil-military relations. One of the stated goals of the reform is to “uphold the correct political direction” by strengthening party control over the People’s Liberation Army. This has been achieved by centralising power over the PLA in the hands of the Central Military Commission, while at the same time centralising power within the Commission in the hands of its Chairman. This dual centralisation of power might considerably change the way in which the ‘conditional compliance’ model of civil-military relations works in Xi Jinping’s China.     

Binding Prometheus: How the 19th Century Expansion of Trade Impeded Britain's Ability to Raise an Army

This article explores how the dramatic expansion of British trade in the decades prior to World War I affected Britain's ability to raise an army. We first develop a simple institutionally based model of British army recruiting which we then perturb by expanding trade while holding all other variables constant. Our theoretical analysis suggests that the expansion of trade would impede Britain's ability to raise an army, a prediction that finds substantial support in the historical record using both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that trade enhances a state's military power, we find that the expansion of trade did not ease Britain's resource constraints by making labor more freely available for military purposes. Rather, by raising the civilian demand for labor, the expansion of trade made labor more expensive and difficult to mobilize, even as a more effective army became more important to British strategy.     

The Trouble with Targeted Killing

Students of comparative military organizations have advanced three hypotheses to explain when armed forces adopt more liberal manpower policies: when a major security threat looms, when the military professionalizes, or when the surrounding society grows more tolerant of difference. This article argues that all three are theoretically and empirically problematic: they potentially have much to contribute, but only in conjunction with a perspective that is more appreciative of the centrality of political processes. Enduring reform of the military's participation policies is more productively viewed through the lens of the struggle over national and communal identity. To illustrate the power of this alternative approach, this article reconsiders cases commonly cited in support of the existing hypotheses: the racial desegregation of the U.S. military, the integration of the Druze into the Israel Defense Forces, and the imperial and independent Indian armies' policies with respect to what the British termed “class.”     

The war in Afghanistan: its background and future prospects

If the West loses in Afghanistan and its region, the most important reason will be that we are pursuing several different goals simultaneously, most of which are in contradiction to the others. Western governments need to choose between these goals, and co-ordinate a strategy in pursuit of the most desirable and achievable ones. The creation of a democratic Afghanistan needs to be recognised as a hopeless fantasy. Instead, the West should imitate the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and concentrate on creating an effective military force that can survive Western withdrawal and continue to fight the Taleban. In the meantime, something to be avoided at all costs is the further destabilisation of Pakistan, since Pakistan in the end constitutes a far greater potential threat to the region, the West and the world than does Afghanistan.     

Gendering the Cult of the Offensive

Theorists of the offense-defense balance frequently note that perceptions of technology, as well as military doctrine, play a role in states' perception of offense dominance or the “cult of the offensive.” I argue that gender may constitute the missing link in explaining this misperception and suggest three possible areas of investigation. First, the perceptions and uses of technologies are dependent upon gendered ideologies which encouraged disastrous strategies in the First World War. Second, gender is an integral part of nationalism that promotes offensive policies by defining masculinity in terms of heroic service to the nation. Third, gendered discourses of protection use the language of defense to legitimate offensive policies. By analyzing the roots of perceptions of offense dominance, feminist analysis shows how gender discourses and the production of gender identities are not confined to individuals and the private realm but rather are a pervasive fact of social life on an international scale.