Deconstructing the ASEAN security community: a review essay

Once viewed as a bastion of stability and economic growth, theAssociation of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is now besetwith a variety of seemingly intractable problems ranging fromterrorism to internal secessionist conflict and economic stagnation.The central and evolving role of ASEAN in the internationalrelations of Southeast Asia since 1967 raises the question ofhow we should conceptualize the organization. This review articleargues that Amitav Acharya's recent claim that a nascent securitycommunity is emerging in Southeast Asia is flawed for at leastfour reasons. First, a variety of problems surround the independentvariable – norms – that Acharya uses to explainASEAN's emergence as a security community. The author failsto adequately explain why the norms he privileges emerged asASEAN's dominant norms. The lack of a convincing explanationfor the origins of the author's favored ASEAN norms is damagingbecause, prima facie, other kinds of norms – ‘perversenorms’ – appear to give us greater purchase in understandingthe organization. Second, a critical flaw in Acharya's argumentrelates to its tautological nature. Third, from an empiricalperspective, the dependent variable, the nascent ASEAN securitycommunity has arguably never existed. Finally, alternative explanationsfor ASEAN are not fully explored. While Acharya examines neo-liberalinstitutionalism and neo-realism, he overlooks the possibilitythat a form of realist institutionalism may most accuratelyexplain ASEAN's history, and perhaps even predict its future.     

The state of anthropology in and of Japan: a review essay

As there are many anthropologists in Japan, including those who work elsewhere, the focus here is largely on foreign anthropologists who choose Japan as a field, and whose numbers have increased exponentially during the working lifetime of the author. The perspective is from Europe, but the vital cooperation of local anthropologists in Japan is acknowledged from the outset. The paper recounts ways in which these anthropologists have themselves cooperated, reviews a selection of the theory and ethnography they have espoused, and demonstrates the importance of anthropology as a discipline essential for a good understanding of Japan and its inhabitants.     

A Rising Power & the Coming of a Great War

This article examines the strategic decisions that led to the struggle between Britain and Germany, exploring how a great war involving Europe's leading powers could come to pass. In 1914, there were no forces beyond the control of decision makers pushing them into the grisly war of attrition that destroyed the social and political fabric of nineteenth-century Europe and ushered in the horrors of the twentieth century. Rather, those horrors resulted from poor policy and strategic choices made by the leaders of the great powers. The war's outbreak underscores history's contingent nature, dramatically showing how errors in judgment on the part of political and military leaders can ruin great countries. One stark lesson of the Great War is that no leader sought as an outcome the conflagration produced by their decisions. Today, China's weapons programs and foreign policy assertiveness conjures up fears that Beijing seeks to establish a new international order, much as Germany's rulers tried to do a hundred years ago with such catastrophic consequences. Shaping the internal debate among China's rulers, so that they judge self-restraint in armaments and strategy as being in their best interest, will test the strategic acumen of American leaders in the years ahead.     

Aid Politics and Electoral Politics: Japan, 1970–1992

We broaden the analysis of aid flows by investigating the effects of domestic and transnational electoral politics on Japanese overseas development assistance(ODA). We also consider measures of external financial balance and Japan's importance in the international trading system. We present a method for assessing shifts in Japanese ODA policy. We find that Liberal Democratic Party popularity affects the size of the Japanese ODA budget and the way that ODA is allocated. There is also limited evidence that ODA allocations are sensitive to the timing of U.S. elections. By contrast, Japan's changing importance in the international trading system and its current account and exchange rate positions account for little of the inter-temporal variation in Japanese ODA policy.     

观察文明冲突的另一种视角——《文明内部的冲突与世界秩序》评析

上个世纪90年代美国学者塞缪尔·亨廷顿提出了引起广泛关注的"文明冲突论".他认为冷战后的世界将会沿着文明的界限进行重组.     

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     

Determinants of Military Strategy, 1903–1994: A Quantitative Empirical Test

Military strategy is centrally important to understanding the causes, conduct, and outcomes of war. Several foreign policy theories make predictions as to what military strategies a state will choose. This article presents the first quantitative, empirical tests of hypotheses of strategy choice. Analysis was conducted on a random sample of country-years taken from the population of all countries from the years 1903 to 1994. Military strategy is classified as being either maneuver, attrition, or punishment. Empirical findings reveal that democracies and industrialized states are more likely to choose maneuver strategies, and that a state's own experiences affect the likelihood of it choosing maneuver. Factors found not to affect strategy choice include terrain, the level of external threat, troop quality, whether a state is democratizing, whether a state is a mixed regime, whether a state is a military regime, and vicarious experiences.     

Television and conflict in Africa: a role for the African public broadcasting foundation

In Western societies, television plays a central role in informing people about events in all parts of the world and the political forces that shape them. Television provides a platform for a range of views within modern Western societies. In sub‐Saharan Africa, this type of television coverage is just starting to develop. The African Public Broadcasting Foundation has been set up to provide assistance to the development of the public service elements of television broadcasting in sub‐Saharan Africa.     

Discrimination and ethnic conflict: a dyadic analysis of politically-excluded groups in sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT

The literature on political exclusion and conflict tends to treat grievance-based mechanisms with broad-brush strokes and does not differentiate between types of political exclusion. This study disaggregates politically-excluded groups into two subgroups: groups that experience political discrimination from the state, and groups without political power that are not explicitly discriminated against. We posit that discriminated groups are more likely to experience grievances and therefore are more prone to conflict than excluded groups that are not actively discriminated against. We further posit that the effect of discrimination on conflict is moderated by interactions with economic inequalities and the share of elites. Using dyadic data for 155 ethnic groups in 28 Sub-Saharan African countries, we find that among politically-excluded groups it is indeed discriminated groups that are responsible for most of the association between political exclusion and conflict. Groups that face active, intentional, and targeted discrimination by the state are significantly more likely to be involved in conflict than excluded groups who do not face this explicit form of discrimination. Additionally, we find that discriminated groups who also experience economic inequalities are less likely to engage in conflict, whilst an increased presence of elites within discriminated groups can precipitate the chances of conflict.     

Egypt's Wall with Gaza & the Emergence of a New Middle East Alignment

In December 2009, Egypt began construction of an underground steel wall on its border with Gaza in a move designed to halt the smuggling of illegal weapons and other contraband via the Hamas-run underground tunnel network. Egypt's initiative, which is being carried out in the name of its own strategic-national interests, has been the subject of intense criticism throughout the region. This article examines the emergence of a new alignment in the Middle East, based upon a new fault line between moderates and radicals. This alignment is manifested in Egypt's construction of its underground steel wall. By exploring the motivations, responses, and implications of building such a wall, it will become apparent that two camps have emerged in the region on this issue and that their stances are but an illustration of the aforementioned shift.     

Religion as a Factor in Ethnic Conflict: Kashmir and Indian Foreign Policy

ABSTRACT

Ethnic conflicts with a strong religious component do not have merely domestic or foreign causes and consequences. As a result, internationalization of ethnic conflict has become an important subject of inquiry both in terms of pure research and policy-oriented studies. This article presents a case study of Indian-Pakistani relations over Kashmir, used to evaluate the role of religion and the explanatory power of the approach presented here. The aim of the study is to apply a foreign policy approach that simultaneously incorporates domestic and external factors in an analysis of how and in what ways religious elements of the Kashmir question affect India's foreign policy. The approach, an application of “systemism,” contributes to current developments in the realist school of international relations through its emphasis on the need to look at both international and state levels in combination. Earlier applications of realism, as both neotraditional and structural realism clearly demonstrate, tend to remain restricted to one level or the other. In this approach, a religious dynamic can have a domestic source yet be effectively examined in terms of international ramifications.