The Logic of Coercion in Cyberspace

What are the dynamics of coercion in cyberspace? Can states use cyber means as independent tools of coercion to influence the behavior of adversaries? This article critically assesses traditional coercion theory in light of cyberspace's emergence as a domain in which states use force, or its threat, to achieve political objectives. First, we review the core tenets of coercion theory and identify the requisites of successful coercion: clearly communicated threats; a cost–benefit calculus; credibility; and reassurance. We subsequently explore the extent to which each of these is feasible for or applicable to the cyber domain, highlighting how the dynamics of coercion in cyberspace mimic versus diverge from traditional domains of warfare. We demonstrate that cyber power alone has limited effectiveness as a tool of coercion, although it has significant utility when coupled with other elements of national power. Second, this article assesses the viability and effectiveness of six prominent warfighting strategies in the traditional coercion literature as applied to the cyber domain: attrition, denial, decapitation, intimidation, punishment, and risk. We conclude that, based on the current technological state of the field, states are only likely to achieve desired objectives employing attrition, denial, or decapitation strategies. Our analysis also has unique implications for the conduct of warfare in cyberspace. Perhaps counterintuitively, the obstacles to coercion that our analysis identifies may prompt states to reevaluate norms against targeting civilian infrastructure.     

Rebel music: Appeals to rebellion in Zimbabwe

This paper presents a typology that is used to classify the appeals that are issued by rebel groups to mobilize mass publics to take up arms against the state. This typology is developed by building a bridge between relative deprivation and resource mobilization theory. Secondly, this paper reports the findings of a pilot study that analyzes the Chimurenga songs from Zimbabwe's rebellion.     

Relative Rebel Strength and Power Sharing in Intrastate Conflicts

According to bargaining theory, one would expect that governments in intrastate conflicts will only be willing to concede to power sharing agreements when they face relatively strong rebel groups. Previous empirical studies have not found support for this hypothesis because they have not operationalized the capability of civil war combatants in relative terms. I show that once one uses a relative measure of capability, one finds that power sharing is more likely as the strength of a rebel group increases. Additionally, the analysis indicates that the relationship between rebel strength and power sharing is stronger for political power sharing than for territorial or military power sharing.     

The Balance Between Coercion and Accommodation

1. Introduction
On the morning of April 1st, 2001, a U.S. EP-3 surveillance aircraft was conducting an intelligence flight along the Chinese territorial border in the airspace south-east of China＇s Hainan Island. Two Chinese fighter jets intercepted the spy plane and followed its flight, as is considered ordinary international practice. For reasons unknown, the EP-3 airplane made a sudden maneuver and crashed into one of the Chinese planes. The Chinese plane dropped into the sea, the pilot missing. The U.S. spy plane was also severely damaged. It intruded into Chinese territorial space and landed on Hainan Island without official permission from the Chinese side. After landing, the spy plane and 24 crew on board were detained by the Chinese authorities. This air collision episode was the first of its kind in the China-U.S. relations and an urgent diplomatic crisis ensued.     

Fragile Proxies: Explaining Rebel Defection Against Their State Sponsors

Foreign governments frequently intervene in armed conflicts by sponsoring rebels against their adversaries. A sponsorship is less costly than a direct military intervention, but rebels often defy orders, desert fighting, or turn guns against their sponsors. Under what conditions do rebels defect against their sponsors? Drawing on organizational theory, I argue that as rebel organizations become less centralized and formalized, the rebels are likely to defect against their sponsors. This occurs because non-centralized organizations have weak central leadership and allow for dispersed decision-making, both of which narrow the manipulative capacity of sponsors. Due to these disadvantages, non-centralized rebel movements are less accountable to their sponsors, cannot credibly commit to rapidly change their policies in response to changes in the sponsor’s demands, and suffer from frequent and destructive quarrels between the top and lower echelons. Using multilevel logistic models for panel data, I test my argument on a novel dataset. My quantitative analysis shows that rebel structure is a robust predictor of defection.     

Conflict Expectations and the Paradox of Economic Coercion

Despite their increasing importance, there is little theoretical understanding of why nation-states initiate economic sanctions or what determines their success. These events are often explained away as "symbolic politics" driven completely by domestic-level factors. This article develops a simple game-theoretic model of economic coercion to show that both "senders" and "targets" of economic coercion incorporate expectations of future conflict as well as the short-run opportunity costs of coercion into their behavior. Conflict expectations have a paradoxical effect on coercion events. First, senders that anticipate frequent conflicts will be more willing to initiate economic coercion, even if such attempts are costly. Senders that anticipate few conflicts will not threaten sanctions unless they incur minimal costs and the target would suffer significantly. While a robust anticipation of future disputes might make the sender prefer a coercive strategy, it also reduces its ability to obtain concessions. Target states that anticipate frequent conflict with the sender will make fewer concessions. Ironically, a sender will obtain the most favorable distribution of payoffs when it cares the least about its reputation or the distribution of gains. These hypotheses are tested statistically, with the results strongly supporting the conflict expectations model.     

Coercion and Control: Explaining India's Victory at Kargil

This article argues that most analyses of the Kargil conflict concede the important role played by the United States in understanding how India regained control of the Kargil heights, but fail to explain how India's intra-war compellent threat forced Washington to bring irresistible pressure to bear on Islamabad. The Indian decision to threaten asymmetrical escalation was the result of domestic pressures and military difficulties facing the Vajpayee-led caretaker government. The article shows that Washington pursued an “impartially” interventionist strategy until it came under Indian pressure to forsake its “balanced” approach towards ending the conflict. The article also shows how the “asymmetry of motivation” between New Delhi and Washington was an important factor in terminating hostilities in India's favor.     

Strategic Demands, Credible Threats, and Economic Coercion Outcomes

The crisis bargaining literature sees demands as endogenous to crises. However, despite the parallels between military and economic coercion, sanctions researchers have preferred to analyze economic coercion after demands have been issued, and have not explored sufficiently the possibility that when senders formulate their policy objectives, they consider the international constraints imposed by the capabilities and interests of target states. I complement the sanctions literature by deriving the implications of strategic goal formulation in a game theoretic model of economic coercion that assumes endogenous demands. The model explains the inconsistent empirical relationship between sanctions costs and outcomes as well as the paradoxical tendency of senders to select into difficult disputes. I find that threats are not always more effective than sanctions and suggest what an optimal sanctions policy might look like.     

How Great Powers Rule: Coercion and Positive Inducements in International Order Enforcement

Despite a scholarly consensus that hegemony is exercised primarily through the use of coercion and positive inducements, scholars of international relations have devoted little attention to how dominant states choose between these influence tools to impose their desired international order on weak but recalcitrant states. This article presents an analytical framework to examine the determinants of such choices. In doing so, it develops three alternative theoretical models of international order enforcement from extant international relations literature and offers a preliminary assessment of their relative merits by way of a comparative study of two cases drawn from the nineteenth-century Pax Britannica. This plausibility probe shows that social conventions can play an important role in the choice of enforcement strategies and that neither realist nor domestic-politics explanations offer useful general models of the enforcement of international order.     

Coping with Life in Rebel Captivity and the Challenge of Reintegrating Formerly Abducted Boys in Northern Uganda

In this qualitative study of 134 formerly abducted adolescentboys at four rehabilitation centres in Northern Uganda, theboys described their lives in rebel captivity and coping strategiesand suggested ways of reintegration. They witnessed, enduredand participated in hideous atrocities while in rebel captivity.Vigilance, absolute obedience, and cooperation with their captors;prayer and hope; denial, blaming others, constant preparednessto flee; use of traditional medicine; and resilience and perseverance,were some of the coping strategies they employed while in captivityand during escape. Once out of captivity, they suggested a reintegrationagenda sensitive to their economic wellbeing and social relationsin the context of their culture and tradition. They proposedpsychosocial activities, vocational and entrepreneurial skillstraining, provision of credit facilities, and an education systemthat recognizes their background and needs. However, all theseshould be viewed in the context of huge resource limitationsand the continuing conflict.     

From Israel with Deterrence: Strategic Culture,Intra-war Coercion and Brute Force

This study contributes to the debate on the role of nonnuclear (conventional) deterrence in international security by examining the Israeli practice of this strategy. By analyzing a case outside of Western strategic thought, which traditionally has dominated deterrence theory, it demonstrates how strategic thinking evolves differently in various ideational realms. The article highlights the impact of strategic culture on the Israeli conceptualization of deterrence, explores its deficits, and yields lessons for theoreticians and practitioners from the challenges of intra-war coercion operations. The study introduces the innovative term “culminating point of deterrence,” calls for improving analytical techniques for deterrence evaluation, claims that successful conventional deterrence perpetuates political conflict, stimulates the adversary's dangerous innovations, and argues for a tailored approach not only for formulating deterrence strategy, but also for exploring deterrence policies of different actors. The findings of the study are applicable beyond the Israeli case and are relevant to actors utilizing coercion strategies.     

Nonviolent Interference in Civic Life During Civil War: Rebel Service Provision and Postwar Norms of Interpersonal Trustworthiness in Sri Lanka

While previous studies focus most of their attention on the impact of civil-war violence on postwar norms of interpersonal trustworthiness, they overlook the importance of political actors' nonviolent interference in civic life during such conflicts. This paper investigates the relationship between wartime provision of public services and postwar trustworthiness norms among civilians. Using original survey data collected from Sri Lanka, empirical analysis suggests that postwar norms of interpersonal trustworthiness tend to weaken if individuals experienced higher amounts of service provision by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. To build their own apparatus to provide efficient services, the rebels deeply intervened in and altered local institutions. Such transformation of local institutions dissolves existing social groups and associations that previously tied residents together. Efforts of post-civil-war community development would be ill equipped if these institutions were treated as nonexistent. Postwar development programs need to provide new, effective local institutions to replace those established in wartime.     

Fixing the Meaning of 9/11: Hegemony,Coercion, and the Road to War in Iraq

As the costs of the invasion and occupation of Iraq mount, scholars have sought to explain how the United States came to launch this war in the first place. Many have focused on the “inflation” of the Iraq threat, and indeed the Bush administration did frame the national dialogue on Iraq. We maintain, however, that the failure of most leading Democrats to challenge the administration's case for war in 2002–2003 cannot be explained fully by the bully pulpit, Democrats' reputation for dovishness, or administration misrepresentations. Rather, we argue that leading Democrats were relatively silent in the run-up to war because they had been “rhetorically coerced”, unable to advance a politically sustainable set of arguments with which to oppose the war. The effective fixing of the meaning of the September 11 attacks in terms of the “War on Terror” substantially circumscribed political debate, and we explain why this discourse became dominant. The Bush administration then capitalized on the existing portrait of Saddam Hussein to bind Iraq tightly into the War on Terror and thereby silence leading Democrats and legitimate the war. The story of the road to war in Iraq is not only one of neoconservative hubris and manipulated intelligence. It is also the story of how political actors strove effectively after 9/11 to shape the nation's discourse of foreign affairs and of how the resulting dominant narratives structured foreign policy debate. Behind the seemingly natural War on Terror lurk political processes of meaning-making that narrowed the space for contestation over Iraq.     

Noncitizen Soldiers: Explaining Foreign Recruitment by Modern State Militaries

More than a century after citizen armies became an international norm, nearly two dozen states actively recruit foreigners into their militaries. Why do these states skirt the strong citizen-soldier norm and continue to welcome foreigners? To explain this practice, we first identify two puzzles associated with foreign recruitment. The first is practical: foreign recruits pose loyalty, logistical, and organizational challenges that domestic soldiers do not. The second is normative: noncitizen soldiers lie in a normative gray zone, permitted under the letter of international law but in tension with the spirit of international norms against mercenary armies. Next, we survey foreign military recruitment programs around the world and sort them into three broad types of programs, each with its own primary motivation: importing expertise, importing labor, and bolstering international bonds. We explain these categories and explore three exemplary cases in depth: Australia, Bahrain, and Israel. Our findings suggest that foreign recruitment can affect a state’s military operations by allowing militaries to rapidly develop advanced capabilities, by reducing the political risk associated with the use of force, and by expanding a state’s influence among former colonial and diaspora populations.     

联合自强促稳定 自主探索求发展 --2004年非洲形势综述

20 0 4年 ,非洲总体形势好转 ,非盟的凝聚力增强 ,非洲在索马里、苏丹达尔富尔、大湖地区联合自强的努力均取得重要进展 ,解决非洲和平与安全这一首要课题探索出较为成功的模式。各国政权建设注重法治化 ,多党大选制度在非洲初步扎根 ,老一辈领导人重视稳妥交权 ,新一代领导人自主探索符合国情的发展道路。各国经济的发展不均衡 ,产油国和资源大国受到更多关注 ,一体化进程缺乏内动力 ,尼日利亚、南非、埃及三国竞争安理会常任理事国席位给非洲大国关系带来新的复杂因素。非洲国家积极利用数量优势、靠集体声势、借助多边机制与大国周旋 ,西方大国也相应调整政策 ,继续在减免债务、增加援助等方面出台新举措。非洲形势发展中积极因素增加 ,但总体上仍处于量的艰难积累阶段     

2005年的拉丁美洲形势

2005年拉美形势稳中有进,进中有亮点.政治上,整个地区局势基本平稳,左派执政阵营进一步扩大;经济上,保持中高速增长势头,新一轮增长周期拉长;社会上,贫困状态有所改善,但不安宁因素犹存;外交上,多元外交活跃,联合抗美意识趋强,拉中关系步入历史最佳时期.