Pioneers of peace research VII: Edward E. Azar: Apostle of events

Azar's COPDAB is the most comprehensive world events data bank for the years 1948–1978. His scale from cooperation to conflict has been researched more than any other such scale. More research is needed on the concepts of cooperation and conflict so far as these have been operationalized by judges’ values. While cooperation is generally desirable in our culture, and conflict is generally undesirable, empirical results suggest that cooperation also has its undesirable component and conflict also has its desirable component, so far as it is sometimes directed toward the elimination or reduction of structural violence. Consequently, both cooperation and conflict are more complicated than they seemed at first glance. Events data have their limitations in that they hardly explain themselves, so that events studies have to be supplemented by attitude studies, attribute studies, historical studies, and social studies. Peace was defined in terms of containing and managing behavioral violence in the beginning of Azar's work, but it was later defined in terms of development defined in terms of equality rather than growth. Since the research results themselves motivated these theoretical changes, this suggested that peace research is a self‐correcting and self‐developing process that facilitates and promotes its own progress.     

Pioneers of peace research V: Anatol Rapoport: Apostle of collective rationality

Rapoport challenged the strategic theory of rationality in terms of individual interest, because this theory of rationality led to its own contradiction when confronted with game theory. In order to avoid the irrationality of self‐contradiction, Rapoport defined rationality in terms of social interest. On this basis, Rapoport challenged and criticized the rationality of the two superpowers, whose war machines were a threat to humanity. Rapoport saw war as an organized crime, rather than as a natural disaster or a disease or a political instrument. He proposed that peace researchers should try to show that these war machines were illegitimate, immoral, and irrational. If war were seen as an organized crime, this would facilitate dismantling the war machines. At the same time that he challenged and criticized the war machines of this world, Rapoport also challenged the value‐free notion of science, which enabled scientists to serve the war machines without making any value judgments about the ethics of their behavior. But scientists, like everyone else, should be held responsible for their behavior and its consequences. In order for science to be ethical, scientists should ally the truth with other basic values such as love, freedom, and equality. Far from being value‐free, a science without value would be a contradiction in terms. Peace research cannot be value‐free, but neither can military research.     

Democracy and civil war: A note on the democratic peace proposition

Democracies may not fight each other, but do they fight themselves? Despite the need to better understand internal wars, empirical investigations of the democratic peace have focused on international war between democracies. We test the effect of regime type on civil wars, a class of events that is widely overlooked in the study of conflict. We find that regime type strongly affects civil war participation.     

Pioneers of peace research VI: Norman Z. Alcock: Apostle of cycles and builder of bridges

From the beginning of his peace research in 1961, Alcock expected some happy combination of disarmament and world government to lead to world peace. By 1971 this happy combination included world development, which involved a world government in redistributing the savings from disarmament. Since no progress resulted from arms control and disarmament talks and treaties by 1978, and since no progress was made in revising the United Nations charter toward an effective world government, Alcock proposed reducing military expenditures instead of arms, since the reduction of military expenditures 10% per year could be verified by fiscal inspection; aid could be transferred from nations with the most money to nations with the most people; and Peace‐keeping forces could be established to operate automatically on the basis of action criteria or tension readings independently of United Nations voting. In this manner, disarmament, aid, and peacekeeping would simultaneously reduce civil, international, and structural violence, leading to a happier, healthier, wealthier, and wiser world at peace. Unfortunately, the United Nations Special Sessions on Disarmament in 1978 and 1982 paid little attention to proposals such as these.     

Peace amidst development: 1 a conceptual agenda for conflict and peace research

In recent years, the focus of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency/Cybernetics Technology Office (DARPA/CTO) has become increasingly applied in nature. Concurrently, an explicit concern with coordinating and integrating research and analysis has pervaded the DARPA/CTO milieu. These emphases mirror trends in certain segments of political science; both policy‐relevance and cumulativeness have emerged as prominent themes in disciplinary communication and research evaluation processes.¹     

Threat and alignment behavior

Alliance formation and termination are examined in the context of the impact of international threats on efforts to enhance national security. Threats against allies are shown to provide diagnostic information about the prospects that a state will be threatened. This diagnostic information is shown to lead to more sucessful national security‐enhancing actions than do threats against the state itself. The theoretical foundation on which the analysis is based is an expected utility approach to conflict decision making. The empirical domain is the European system from 1816 to 1965.     

Attacks on Civilians in Civil War: Targeting the Achilles Heel of Democratic Governments

Previous research has indicated that democracy decreases the risk of armed conflict, while increasing the likelihood of terrorist attacks, but we know little about the effect of democracy on violence against civilians in ongoing civil conflicts. This study seeks to fill this empirical gap in the research on democracy and political violence, by examining all rebel groups involved in an armed conflict 1989–2004. Using different measures of democracy, the results demonstrate that rebels target more civilians when facing a democratic (or semi-democratic) government. Democracies are perceived as particularly vulnerable to attacks on the population, since civilians can hold the government accountable for failures to provide security, and this provides incentives for rebels to target civilians. At the same time, the openness of democratic societies provides opportunities for carrying out violent attacks. Thus, the strength of democracy—its accountability and openness—can become an Achilles heel during an internal armed conflict.     

Lost in Translation: The Problem of Perceptual Limitations in Civil War Peace Negotiation

This article examines the negative role that actors' perceptual limitations play in civil war peace negotiation by reviewing the Sino-Khmer Rouge interplay during the Cambodian peace negotiations (1987–1993). The study contends that China continually failed to challenge the Khmer Rouge's negotiation strategies, which were founded on the faction's flawed understanding of its situation. Moreover, the inadequate communication between China and its client faction and the Khmer Rouge's lack of institutions for obtaining and analyzing information are identified as the two main reasons for the failure of Chinese intervention.     

Sustaining the Peace: Determinants of Civil War Recurrence

Over half of all civil wars that began and ended between 1944 and 1997 were followed by at least one if not more episodes of civil war. We present a model to explain which characteristics of a civil war and the post-war environment make civil war more or less likely to recur. We test this model with data on civil wars that began and ended between 1944 and 1997. Findings suggest that civil wars are less likely to recur following rebel victories and peace agreements supported by peacekeeping forces. Post-war economic development also reduces the probability of civil war recurrence, and the longer the peace can be sustained, the less likely civil war is to recur. These effects hold regardless of whether the previous war was ethnically based or not, and whether it was secessionist or revolutionary.     

The Structure of Negotiation: Lessons from El Salvador for Contemporary Conflict Resolution

During more than a decade of violent conflict (1980–1992) involving the military, rebel forces, and paramilitary "death squads," El Salvador suffered some 75,000 casualties, mostly civilians. After three years of negotiations, the government and the largest rebel group signed a historic comprehensive peace accord that brought an end to the war and instituted wide-reaching political and social reforms. This agreement, and the peace process that produced it, has been widely hailed as a successful example of a negotiated end to civil war. In order to understand the conditions that led to the 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accords ending the war, this article tests ripeness theory in the context of the Salvadoran peace process.
This article affirms the validity of theories of ripeness and the mutually hurting stalemate as structural explanations for the initiation of dialogue and notes the role of "indicators of ripeness" in forcing the parties to recognize a hurting stalemate that may already exist. It also proposes several hypothesized explanations for the effectiveness of the Salvadoran negotiations themselves. These explanations include the presence of strong, empowered policy entrepreneurs on both sides with the political will and capability to make credible commitments; the combination of internal and external pressure for a negotiated solution that raised the cost of defection; and the active involvement, based on consent of both parties, of a neutral, empowered, and credible mediator who provided both technical assistance and vigilance to move the process forward. After analyzing the Salvadoran case through this theoretical lens, the article applies the same concepts to contemporary conflict cases such as Iraq and Colombia, discussing how the lessons learned in El Salvador do and do not provide instructive guidance for managing civil conflicts today.     

Intergovernmental Organization Memberships: Examining Political Community and the Attributes of International Organizations

Why are states jointly members in certain intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) but not others? Despite the proliferation of IGOs and renewed interest in this topic, we lack systematic research to answer this question. Our theory of political community explains why dyads of states are likely to be common members in particular types of IGOs. We analyze and compare functionalist and Deutschian communitarian perspectives about IGO memberships. We test our theory using newly available data on IGO mandates and institutional structure, which allows us to make specific predictions about the types of IGO to which dyads become members. We show that dyads that are economically dependent, and/or democratic and enjoying enduring peace, are more likely to join those IGOs that possess high levels of institutional structure. Militarized interstate conflicts reduce the likelihood of states sharing membership in common IGO, but not substantially, whereas development and alliances also increase IGO memberships between states. Trade ties, however, are the most important determinant of joint membership between states in the most institutionalized IGOs, which is congruent with security communities.     

The tyranny of distance: Redefining relevant dyads

A variety of definitions of “crisis” plague the study of international crisis. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate the reasons for the divergence and a possible solution to the problem.

Definitions of “crisis” tend to incorporate a variety of elements. Some focus on the micro‐level of decisionmakers in particular countries; others look at the macro‐level of international system change; still other definitions are multi‐level, incorporating both micro‐ and macro‐components. A second set of differences is rooted in metaphysical assumptions. Some definitions look at “crisis” as something recognized by the mind of the individual, a perceptual process that is basically mental; other definitions, which tend to equate “crisis” with “stress,” assume that “crisis” is a physical phenomenon that can be measured by information flows, physiological tensions, or other objective observable behavior. A dualist approach insists that “crisis” is simultaneously physical and nonphysical is also evident in the literature. A third aspect of “crisis” definitions is whether the researcher seeks to stipulate an arbitrary meaning for the term on the basis of supposed self‐evident logic or whether data are collected prior to an effort to define the term; this is the familiar distinction between rationalism and empiricism, with facet theory as an approach that combines elements of both approaches.

Various approaches attempt to test theories of “crisis” with definitions determined by their metaphysical foundations. The models identified are as follows: hostile interaction, individual stress, physiological overload, organizational response, and cost calculation. Findings based on various empirical tests of the theories show that there is very little agreement in the literature on variables associated with “crisis”; more often than not, if a variable is linked with “crisis” positively in one study, the same variable is either linked negatively or has no correlation with “crisis” in a second study. The source of the empirical divergence may be that the various studies sample different cases—or differing definitions may account for the lack of consensus in the field.

The paper concludes by urging that research on international crisis should be absorbed into larger theoretical concerns that focus on the objectives motivating the studies, as this appears to be one way to maintain definitional uniformity. Studies on crisis anticipation and crisis management should be viewed as efforts at war prevention. Studies on crisis management, which aim to reduce foreign policy fiascoes should be conceived in terms of foreign policy management. Findings of such studies can then be appraised in terms of the goals they seek.     

Propaganda and United States foreign policy: The case of panama

Abstract

This paper probes the use of propaganda by the U.S. government as a device for generating domestic public support for its invasion of Panama. The findings indicate that the government did succeed in influencing domestic public opinion. What accounted for the success? First, through the propaganda technique of selection, the U.S. government carefully chose those “facts” that supported its predetermined objective of removing General Manuel Noriega from power. Concomitantly, it concealed the information that would have undermined the veracity of its story: (1) the fact that Noriega was its Frankenstein monster; (2) its poor record on democracy in Panama; (3) the fact that there was no serious threat to American lives or interests; (4) the enormous human and material carnage occasioned by the invasion; and (5) the various violations of international law. Further, the traditional sources of public influence—the Democratic party, major opposition party to the Republicans, and the American press—failed to provide competing perspectives. In fact, they joined the government's propaganda bandwagon. The result was that the American public became convinced that the Bush administration's “official story” was the truth.