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.     

Armies of God,Armies of Men: A Global Comparison of Secular and Religious Terror Organizations

This article compares the violent activity of secular and religious terror organizations. Utilizing data compiled by the Global Terrorism Database cross-referenced with secondary and primary sources regarding the degree of religious components embedded in organizations’ ideologies, it tests the violent patterns of activity carried out by organizations guided by predominantly secular, secular/religious, and religious ideologies, between the years 1970 and 2012. The findings confirm that a) religious ideology correlates with specific, more deadly, attack tactics and violent patterns; and b) the degree of religious components within terror organizational ideology should be tested along a spectrum: the more religious an organization is, the more attacks it tends to carry out, and the deadlier its attacks become.     

Threats at Home,Threats Abroad: Bargaining and War in the Shadow of Coups and Revolutions

I analyze a two-level game in which a leader bargains over the spoils of international bargaining with a domestic opposition that can threaten her with a coup or revolution. While fighting an international war shrinks the domestic pie, it also alters the distribution of domestic power. This has three main implications. First, if war will undermine the opposition, fighting may be so attractive that leaders demand more for peace than foreign states are willing to give, leading to war. Second, if war will bolster the opposition, leaders accept harsh terms to avoid fighting—strategic selection that has implications for the observed relationship between war and political survival. Finally, prospective shifts in the distribution of domestic power caused by war can reduce the effects of international asymmetric information, though the result may be to increase or decrease the chances of war.     

Cantankerous Cooperation: Democracies,Authoritarian Regimes,and the Prisoner's Dilemma

One of the most important debates in the field of international relations is over the effect of regime type on militarized conflict. This debate, however, has rarely extended to how regime type influences other aspects of foreign policy. Using a computer simulated intergroup prisoner's dilemma, we investigate whether democratic decisionmaking groups are more cooperative than authoritarian decisionmaking groups. We argue that differences between cooperation tendencies of groups can be explained by the structure of the decision process. Repeated simulations show that democracies tend to be more consistent in their decisions in comparison to authoritarian groups. Implications for international relations theory and policy are discussed.     

Fencing in Warfare: Threats,Punishment, and Intra-war Deterrence in Counterterrorism

New theoretical approaches have been developed that apply deterrence and coercion to counterterrorism. Critics have suggested, however, that in the particular case of deterring terrorism by threats of punishment, a mismatch exists between deterrent goals and counterterrorism intentions: the twin aims of destroying and deterring a single opponent is logically and theoretically incompatible. These criticisms, however, neglect to take two important factors into consideration. First, threats of punishment in counterterrorism can be applied against a wide assortment of actors involved in and associated with terrorism and political violence. Second, the concept of “intra-war deterrence” suggests ways in which a state can deter certain behavior or a specific form of warfare while engaging in open conflict with that same adversary. In exploring both factors, this article posits that states can gain coercive leverage over different actors involved in terrorism, including organizations with which they are actively hoping to defeat.     

Authoritarian legacies,transitional justice and state crisis in Portugal's democratization

The nature of the Portuguese transition to democracy and the consequent state crises created a ‘window of opportunity’ in which the ‘reaction to the past’ was much stronger in Portugal than in the other Southern European transitions. The transition's powerful dynamic in itself served to constitute a legacy for the consolidation of democracy. This article analyses how the nature of the transition affected the legacy of authoritarianism superseding and transmuting that regime's impact on the ‘quality’ of Portugal's democracy, and illustrating how the majority of ‘authoritarian legacies’ were more a result of the nature of the transition than they were of the authoritarian regime.     

Security Threats,Enemy-Contingent Policies,and Economic Development in Dictatorships

In this article, I introduce, discuss, and formalize the argument that the type of security threat a dictatorial regime faces has implications for economic policy making and, consequently, economic outcomes. Dictators who mainly face internal threats often have incentives to conduct policies that are harmful to economic development, like underproviding productive public investment. However, dictators who mainly face external threats are more likely to conduct economic development–enhancing policies. The type of security threat facing a dictator thus contributes to explaining the large variation in economic development among dictatorships. The argument finds empirical support in cases from different geographical regions and historical periods. One particularly illustrative example, addressed in the article, is Japan in the nineteenth century, where the sharply increased severity of external threats from Western countries induced the selection of development-enhancing policies in the last half of the century.     

Strategies,capabilities, and demands: Explaining outcomes in violent intrastate nationalist conflicts

The study of nationalist and ethnic conflict has undergone considerable growth since the end of the Cold War. Much of the effort has been focused on ascertaining the nature and origins of such conflicts, and less on their process and termination. Those studies that do focus on conflict termination have generally done so using case‐study or idiosyncratic methods. Hence, we do not yet have much large‐N or statistical evidence that might suggest broad trends in how such conflicts end, or even much experience in measuring the relevant concepts in a manner conducive to such methods. This paper will address these questions by introducing a theoretical framework that seeks to explain the outcomes of violent intrastate nationalist conflicts. It will discuss measurement issues for relevant independent variables, and present data for a group of 75 violent, intrastate nationalist conflicts from 1945–1996. This data will then be used to test propositions derived from the model. The aim is to provide a useful building block for the study of the process and outcome of conflicts which political scientists now recognize to be some of the most important for the coming century.     

Authoritarian Elections in Egypt: Formal Institutions and Informal Mechanisms of Rule

In recent years, electoral processes in non-democratic settings have been analysed either within the framework of transitology or disregarded entirely by scholars of comparative politics. Analysing the Egyptian case, this article proposes a different conceptual framework. The interaction between electoral institutions and authoritarian dynamics is conceptualized in terms of the relationship between formal and informal institutions. In the Egyptian authoritarian political system, informal mechanisms of neopatrimonial rule not only take precedence over formalized rules and procedures but integrate formal electoral institutions into the authoritarian system. Drawing on empirical evidence from legislative elections under the rule of President Husni Mubarak, this article identifies three main functions for electoral processes in non-democratic settings: (1) Electoral contests serve to periodically renew channels of clientelist inclusion, drawing both voters and deputies into networks of patronage culminating at the top of the political system. (2) Formal inclusion of parts of the opposition into the electoral arena enhances the range of means available to the ruling elite in order to control these actors. (3) Pitted against each other in electoral contests, individual members of the ruling elite's lower echelons are effectively controlled and tied to the informal structures of rule. Thus, the principal traits of the Egyptian neopatrimonial regime remain unchanged, with formal electoral processes subverted by informal institutions of authoritarian rule to an extent as to fulfil distinctly authoritarian functions.     

Strong State,Smothered Society: Explaining Terrorist Violence in Thailand's Deep South

Why have militants in southern Thailand utilized anonymous and at times indiscriminate terrorist violence against civilians? This article gauges three explanations: resource wealth, weak states, and strong states. I argue that terrorist violence against civilians in southern Thailand is partially sustained and largely structured by the considerable institutional strength of the Thai state. This helps sustain the conflict by providing an additional grievance and it structures the form of violence by forcing militants underground and severing their links to civilians. A potential response would be to trim state agencies and scale back the presence of the state in Patani.     

Explaining Rivalry Escalation to War: Space, Position, and Contiguity in the Major Power Subsystem

Vasquez's (1996) rivalry escalation theory stressed territorial disputes as the principal focus for a two-path explanation of war. Neighbors fight over adjacent space and non-neighbors sometimes join ongoing wars between neighbors. But major powers are also much concerned with positional issues. Expanding the war motivation focus to encompass both spatial and positional issues facilitates the development of a new, more elaborate theory from which several new hypotheses can be derived, in addition to the older ones. Testing of the new theory can also proceed with rivalry data not based on dispute density measures, different types of contiguity can be assessed, and the presence of spatial-positional issues can be measured directly, as opposed to relying on a proximity proxy. The empirical outcome strongly supports the two-path, two-issue theory. In the major power subsystem, noncontiguous rivals outnumber contiguous rivals, dyadic wars are scarce, and war joining has been the norm. Spatial issues alone would have a hard time accounting for this pattern. Variable mixes of spatial and positional issues are able to account for it and a number of derived hypotheses reasonably well. This is not the last word on rivalry escalation to war but it appears to be an additional step in the right direction.     

中国的国际组织外交:态度、行为与成效

本文概述了中国对国际组织的基本态度演变所经历的四个历史阶段:尝试性接受、相对排斥、有限参与和积极参与,探讨了中国积极开展国际组织外交过程中所表现出的行为特征,并对中国国际组织外交的成效进行了简要的评估.文章指出,中国的国际组织外交在维护了本国的安全和发展利益的同时,对地区及全球事务的治理发挥了积极的作用.     

An Autocracy at War: Explaining Egypt's Military Effectiveness, 1967 and 1973

In the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Egypt shocked the world with its atrocious performance in battle, only to stun the world again with its remarkable military turnaround in the October 1973 war. Existing studies, which emphasize culture, social structure, and regime type, have a difficult time explaining why this single autocratic state, in such a short period of time, exhibited such extremes in its military competence. None can explain both why Egypt performed so poorly in 1967 and improved so significantly in 1973. Other explanations such as military strategy and learning explain the puzzle in part, but they alone cannot account for the outcome. This article presents a theory that accounts for the divergence in effectiveness, focusing on underlying differences in the fabric of the autocratic regime. It argues that changes in the balance of civil-military power in the state—born from more fundamental differences in domestic politics in the autocracy—shaped three areas of military activity critical to military effectiveness: strategic assessment, command, and control, and leadership. In developing this argument, the article both contributes to growing scholarship on the sources of states' military effectiveness and explains why Egypt's performance varied so significantly in these historically consequential wars.     

Sometimes You Just Have to Leave: Domestic Threats and Forced Migration, 1964-1989

In this study we explore why persons flee their homes to become refugees and internally displaced persons. We contend that individuals will tend to flee when the integrity of their person is threatened. Further, we argue that they will flee toward countries where they expect conditions to be better. We conduct statistical analyses using fixed effects least squares, on a pooled cross-sectional time-series data set, consisting of data from 129 countries for the years 1964-1989. Our findings support the conclusion that threats to personal integrity are of primary importance in leading people to abandon their homes. Measures of state threats to personal integrity, dissident threats to personal integrity, and joint state-dissident threats each have statistically significant and substantively important effects on migrant production. We also find that countries making moves toward democracy tend to have greater number of forced migrants, once other factors are considered. We conclude the analysis by identifying several lucrative areas for further investigation.     

Explaining the Awakening: Engagement,Publicity, and the Transformation of Iraqi Sunni Political Attitudes

This article explores the reasons for the dramatic change in Sunni Arab Iraqi attitudes toward the United States from 2004 to 2007, which made possible the “Awakenings,” local groups of mostly Sunni tribes and former insurgents that decided to cooperate with the United States against al Qaeda in Iraq. While there have been many studies of the military strategy, there has been little attention paid to the reasons for the underlying attitude change. This article argues that the dramatic changes in the information environment and in the nature of direct contacts across a range of Sunni society played a crucial role. It draws on a wide range of Arabic language primary sources that have generally been neglected in U.S. military-centric accounts. No single dialogue flipped the Sunnis, and the change would not likely have happened without the material changes underpinning their interests. But years of ongoing, intensive dialogues across a wide range of interlocutors reshaped the foundations of the relationship and to convince those involved individuals of the possibility of a strategic shift. American counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine and the surge helped by proliferating the points of contact with Iraqis and by transforming the relations at the individual level. This has broad implications for key debates in contemporary U.S. foreign policy, as well as for counterinsurgency and international relations (IR) theory.     

Global Threats and American Strategies: From Communism in 1955 to Islamism in 2005

America's current security threats—the insurgency in Iraq, Islamic terrorism, and Iran's efforts to obtain nuclear weapons—seem strange and unprecedented. Parallels can be drawn, however, between the security threats of 2005 and those of fifty years ago. The U.S. foreign policy developed to confront the communist threat offers lessons as we develop strategies to combat today's threat. Two contemporary perspectives on strategic issues—one conservative/realist, one neoconservative/idealist—apply lessons of the Cold War to today's U.S. foreign policy, but each has serious flaws. A third, neorealist perspective, suggests that by leveraging the divisions already present in the Muslim world, the United States can win the global contest against Islamic terrorism. However, this would require a transformation in American strategy that will not be easily achieved.