Do Alliances Deter Aggression? The Influence of Military Alliances on the Initiation of Militarized Interstate Disputes

Scholars have long debated the effects of military alliances on the likelihood of war, and no clear support has emerged for the argument that alliances improve the prospects for peace through effective deterrence nor that they kindle the flames of war. In this study, I argue that alliance commitments affect the probability that a potential challenger will initiate a militarized interstate dispute because alliances provide information about the likelihood that others will intervene in a potential conflict. Yet, different agreements provide different information. Alliance commitments that would require allies to intervene on behalf of potential target states reduce the probability that a militarized dispute will emerge, but alliance commitments promising offensive support to a potential challenger and alliances that promise nonintervention by outside powers increase the likelihood that a challenger will initiate a crisis. As diplomats have long understood, the specific content of international agreements helps to determine their effects.     

Through a Glass Darkly: Afrocentrism,War, and World Politics

While the two dominant Eurocentric paradigms of world politics, realism and idealism, place greater emphasis on power and regime type, respectively, in their analyses of war, a recently promulgated Afrocentric paradigm of world politics suggests that cultural characteristics of states are significantly associated with the likelihood of interstate war. Drawing on these competing perspectives, I conduct a data analysis of the relationship between cultural homogeneity and interstate conflict in order to determine the extent to which Afrocentric theses on international conflict are borne out empirically. I find that cultural factors are significant correlates of interstate war as Afrocentrists suggest, although realist and idealist factors are more strongly associated with the likelihood of interstate war. In addition, the findings suggest that multiculturalism—especially ethnic diversity—is a more auspicious path for interstate peace.     

Sectarian Framing in the Syrian Civil War

How do civilians respond to civil war narratives? Do they react to ethnic frames more strongly than to alternatives? Governments and rebels battle for hearts and minds as well as strategic terrain, and winning the narrative war can shift legitimacy, popular support, and material resources to the sympathetically framed side. We examine the effect of one‐sided and competing war discourses on ordinary people's understandings of the Syrian civil war—a conflict with multiple narratives, but which has become more communal over time. We conduct a framing experiment with a representative sample of Syrian refugees in Lebanon in which we vary the narrative that describes the reasons for the conflict. We find that sectarian explanations, framed in isolation, strongly increase the importance government supporters place on fighting. When counterframed against competing narratives, however, the rallying effect of sectarianism drops and vanishes.     

Oil Wealth and Regime Survival in the Developing World, 1960–1999

This article examines contrasting claims made by scholars of oil and politics that oil wealth either tends (1) to undermine regime durability or (2) to enhance it. Using cross-sectional time-series data from 107 developing states between 1960 and 1999, I test the effects of oil wealth on regime failure, political protests, and civil war. I find that oil wealth is robustly associated with increased regime durability, even when controlling for repression, and with lower likelihoods of civil war and antistate protest. I also find that neither the boom nor bust periods exerted any significant effect on regime durability in the states most dependent on exports, even while those states saw more protests during the bust. In short, oil wealth has generally increased the durability of regimes, and repression does not account for this effect. Future research focused on the origins of robust coalitions in oil-rich states is most likely to provide fruitful explanations to this puzzle .     

Human Rights Violations,Weak States,and Civil War

This study examines the role of human rights violations as a harbinger of civil wars to come, as well as the links between repression, state weakness, and conflict. Human rights violations are both part of the escalating process that may end in civil war and can contribute to an escalation of conflict to civil war, particularly in weak states. The role of government repression and state weakness in leading to civil war is tested empirically. The results show that both closely correlate with civil war onset, especially if they are observed in combination. A two-stage model shows that, while low-level conflict leads to human rights violations, they increase the risk of an escalation to civil war in turn. Human rights violations are identified as an important aspect of understanding civil war onset as the result of an escalation over time and a clear early warning sign of wars to come.     

Decomposing the Relationship Between Contiguity and Militarized Conflict

It is well known that the majority of militarized conflicts and wars have been fought by neighbors. Yet, much remains to be learned about the relationship between shared borders and militarized conflict. This article decomposes the effects of territorial contiguity into  ex ante  "observable" and "behavioral" effects. It provides powerful empirical evidence for the claim that although neighbors are more likely to experience conflict because of  ex ante  differences in observable variables such as economic interdependence, alliance membership, joint democracy, and the balance of military capabilities, most conflicts between neighbors occur because of differences in how neighbors and nonneighbors respond to the observable variables.     

The political economy of the Kachin revolutionary household

Applying a feminist political economy analysis of the Kachin military movement, this article will be mapping women's involvement in the armed uprising since the outbreak of the conflict in 1961, demonstrating the centrality of gender relations for the war. Using primary data, this article will show how the household provides essential support to the Kachin war effort in the shape of emotional, physical and material labour, thus underscoring the critical role played by women in maintaining the conflict. Examining the relationship between narratives of gendered insecurity in the community and notions of militarized duty, this article will argue that the Kachin armed forces have employed gendered notions of security and duty to legitimize and sustain the conflict. The importance of normative gender relations for providing labour and emotional and material support for the conflict will then be examined, showing how the household is situated as the nucleus of the armed revolution. The findings in this article thus reveal a need to take into account the relationship between the household and the armed conflict, arguing that the household is a site inseparably linked to nationalistic objectives, underpinning the economic and ideological structures of military movements. Interventions aiming at resolving the conflict in Kachin must therefore consider the importance of gender relations in upholding the political-economy infrastructure of the military movement.     

Bringing Law to the Table: Legal Claims,Focal Points,and the Settlement of Territorial Disputes Since 1945

In this article, we argue that international law can help state leaders reach a settlement in territorial disputes by suggesting a focal point for negotiations. International law is more likely to serve as a focal point when the legal principles relevant to the dispute are clear and well established and when one of the states in the dispute has a stronger legal claim to disputed territory. When these two conditions are present, we expect the state with a legal advantage to push for and receive favorable terms of settlement. In our analysis of all negotiated settlements in territorial disputes from 1945 to 2000, we find strong support for the importance of international law in influencing the terms of settlements. States with a strong legal advantage are more likely to secure favorable terms, whereas states lacking a strong legal claim are more likely to receive unfavorable terms.     

Electoral Choice,Ideological Conflict,and Political Participation

Generations of democratic theorists argue that democratic systems should present citizens with clear and distinct electoral choices. Responsible party theorists further argued that political participation increases with greater ideological conflict between competing electoral options. Empirical evidence on this question, however, remains deeply ambiguous. This article introduces new joint estimates of citizen preferences and the campaign platforms chosen by pairs of candidates in U.S. House and Senate races. The results show that increasing levels of ideological conflict reduce voter turnout, and are robust across a wide range of empirical specifications. Furthermore, the findings provide no support for existing accounts that emphasize how ideology or partisanship explains the relationship between ideological conflict and turnout. Instead, I find that increasing levels of candidate divergence reduce turnout primarily among citizens with lower levels of political sophistication. These findings provide the strongest evidence to date for how mass political behavior is conditioned by electoral choice.     

Terrorism,Dynamic Commitment Problems,and Military Conflict

Since 9/11, several states have initiated military conflicts in the name of fighting terrorism. However, studies indicate that the costs of terrorism are insignificant compared to the damage created by war. This raises the question: Why do states initiate costly wars when the risk posed by terrorism appears marginal? This study presents two explanations. First, we argue that while terrorists frequently fail to achieve their strategic objectives, terrorists can accomplish tactical objectives and may transition to insurgencies by seizing control of pockets of territory. States may respond by initiating preventive wars to stop terrorists from consolidating control over their strategically valuable territories (e.g., resource‐rich areas). Second, rival states may opportunistically exploit terrorist violence by declaring that the government is a “weak state.” This allows rivals to seize portions of the government's territory under the cover of fighting terror. We test these hypotheses using post–Cold War African dyads from 1990 to 2006.     

Actor Fragmentation and Civil War Bargaining: How Internal Divisions Generate Civil Conflict

Wars within states have become much more common than wars between them. A dominant approach to understanding civil war assumes that opposition movements are unitary, when empirically, most of them are not. I develop a theory for how internal divisions within opposition movements affect their ability to bargain with the state and avoid conflict. I argue that more divided movements generate greater commitment and information problems, thus making civil war more likely. I test this expectation using new annual data on the internal structure of opposition movements seeking self‐determination. I find that more divided movements are much more likely to experience civil war onset and incidence. This analysis suggests that the assumption that these movements are unitary has severely limited our understanding of when these disputes degenerate into civil wars.     

More Than One Trap: Problematic Interpretations and Overlooked Lessons from Thucydides

Popular rendition of the so-called Thucydides’ Trap focuses excessively on only one possible explanation of interstate wars to the exclusion of others. It also commits various acts of commission and omission that threaten the validity of its central proposition. This essay reviews some of the major problems pertaining to the logic of inquiry characteristic to this genre of analysis, its interpretation of historical evidence, and its neglect of alternative explanations of war – even those that Thucydides had written about in his account. There is a danger of self-fulfilling prophecy to the extent that leaders in Beijing and Washington are inclined to believe in an analogy to an ancient war that happened some 2500 years ago. Conventional invocations of Thucydides’ Trap fail to recognize that there are several possible pathways to war. Because they offer only a structural explanation based on interstate power shifts, they give short shrift to the role of human agency and fail to attend sufficiently to what leaders can do to avoid conflict.

     

The Sino–Japanese territorial dispute and threat perception in power transition

A territorial dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands has gained a high profile in Sino–Japanese relations. Since the 2012 escalation of the territorial dispute, there is no sign of any de-escalation despite economic interdependence, which previously helped ease the tension. Drawing on the constructivist understanding of threat perception and power transition theory, this article analyzes the way in which the deepening of threat perceptions associated with a perceived regional power transition prevents Japan and China from working beyond their subjective conceptions of justice associated with boarders and history. Since 2012, the Sino–Japanese territorial dispute has increasingly fitted into a larger picture of power-political conflict taking place in a power transition in which both Japan and China aim to return to ‘normality’ by propagating their territorial claims, strengthening their military capabilities, and strategic realignment. To that end, this article first introduces a theoretical framework on the centrality of threat perceptions in power transition. Second, it traces the ways in which Japan and China have developed a threat perception of each other since 1972. The third section deals with the escalation of the Sino–Japanese territorial dispute since 2010 and highlights the deepening of mutual suspicion and threat perception exemplified at the bilateral and multilateral levels. I conclude that the Sino–Japanese territorial debate entered a new stage of normative and power-political competition in earning international support for territorial claims in the East China Sea.     

Leader Incentives and Civil War Outcomes

This article examines the influence that rebel and state leaders have on civil war outcomes, arguing that incentives to avoid punishment influence their strategic decision making during war.  Leaders in civil war face punishment from two sources: internal audiences and opponents. I hypothesize that leaders who bear responsibility for involvement in the war have a higher expectation of punishment from both sources following unfavorable war performance, and thus, have incentives to continue the fight in the hope of turning the tide and avoiding the negative consequences of defeat. These incentives, in turn, make leaders who bear responsibility more likely to fight to an extreme outcome and less likely to make concessions to end the war.  These propositions are tested on an original data set identifying all rebel and state leaders in all civil conflict dyads ongoing between 1980 and 2011.  Results support the hypothesized relationships between leader responsibility and war outcomes.     

Mutual Optimism and War

Working with the definition of mutual optimism as war due to inconsistent beliefs , we formalize the mutual optimism argument to test the theory's logical validity. We find that in the class of strategic situations where mutual optimism is a necessary condition for war—i.e., where war is known to be inefficient, war only occurs if both sides prefer it to a negotiated settlement, and on the eve of conflict war is self-evident—then there is no Bayesian-Nash equilibrium where wars are fought because of mutual optimism. The fundamental reason that mutual optimism cannot lead to war is that if both sides are willing to fight, each side should infer that they have either underestimated the strength of the opponent or overestimated their own strength. In either case, these inferences lead to a peaceful settlement of the dispute. We also show that this result extends to situations in which there is bounded rationality and/or noncommon priors.     

If They Endorse It,I Can't Trust It: How Outgroup Leader Endorsements Undercut Public Support for Civil War Peace Settlements

Civil wars are a greater source of violence than any other type of conflict, yet little is known about one of the key determinants of civil war peace settlement success: civilian support. We evaluate how a core component of nearly all peace settlements, leader endorsements, affects public support. We predict that individuals in conflict settings will view settlements endorsed by outgroup leaders as less trustworthy and that they will become less supportive. We conduct an endorsement experiment with nearly 1,000 respondents in South Sudan in 2016, taking advantage of a brief cessation in a devastating civil war. Public support for a tentative settlement drops precipitously when it is endorsed by an outgroup leader but does not increase when it is endorsed by an ingroup leader. We find suggestive evidence that effects are strongest for individuals with the greatest reason to fear outgroup leaders: those whose communities were targeted most violently by that outgroup.     

Elections and the Development of Civil War: An Empirical Study of Sri Lanka

Present empirical research on the connection between elections and civil war often treats causality as a one-way effect because it focuses exclusively on either the onset or the consequence of civil war. What is omitted in the literature is the endogenous nature of the election–conflict nexus throughout a civil war. This article dedicates itself to filling that gap. Treating administrative units in conflict as part of a rebellion network, we apply a stochastic actor-oriented model (SAOM) to the case of Sri Lanka. We find that, on the one hand, rebellion is less likely to occur in Tamil regions if national winners in presidential elections enjoy high local approval ratings (selection effect). On the other hand, regions involved in the rebellion network converge in terms of their local support for the national winner of the presidency (influence effect). Overall, our model-based simulation analysis shows that the influence effect has a larger impact on the endogenous relationship than the selection effect.     

A left-libertarian proposal for egalitarian world ownership

In this paper I advocate a left-libertarian approach to egalitarian world ownership that combines common ownership of land, following Henry George (where private appropriation is subject to the payment of rent), with joint ownership of finite and exhaustible resources such as oil (where use is subject to a collective decision-making process and tax paid at the point of extraction). This rent and tax together create a common fund available for global distribution. I argue that this approach offers improvements on Hillel Steiner’s proposal for a global fund, and Thomas Pogge’s proposal for a Global Resources Dividend (GRD) since it does not penalize states for the inclusion of valuable resources within their territory that are not being used, while it also does not allow states to benefit from the use of resources elsewhere while simultaneously refusing to exploit the resources within their own borders. Moreover, joint ownership need not conflict with the libertarian commitment to self-ownership, as is often thought to be the case, and when supplementing common ownership of land it can provide an egalitarian outcome as well as greater protection for future generations and the environment.     

Disputes, Democracies, and Dependencies: A Reexamination of the Kantian Peace

Militarized interstate disputes are widely thought to be less likely among democratic countries that have high levels of trade and extensive participation in international organizations. We reexamine this broad finding of the Kantian peace literature in the context of a model that incorporates the high degree of dependency among countries. Based on in-sample statistical tests, as well as out-of-sample, predictive cross-validation, we find that results frequently cited in the literature are plagued by overfitting and cannot be characterized as identifying the underlying structure through which international conflict is influenced by democracy, trade, and international governmental organizations. We conclude that much of the statistical association typically reported in this literature apparently stems from three components: (1) geographical proximity, (2) dependence among militarized interstate disputes with the same initiator or target, and (3) the higher-order dependencies in these dyadic data. Once these are incorporated, covariates associated with the Kantian peace tripod lose most of their statistical power. We do find that higher levels of joint democracy are associated with lower probabilities of militarized interstate dispute involvement. We find that despite high statistical significance and putative substantive importance, none of the variables representing the Kantian tripod is associated with any substantial degree of predictive power.     

Power Sharing: Institutions,Behavior, and Peace

Grievances that derive from the unequal treatment of ethnic groups are a key motivation for civil war. Ethnic power sharing should therefore reduce the risk of internal conflict. Yet conflict researchers disagree on whether formal power‐sharing institutions effectively prevent large‐scale violence. We can improve our understanding of the effect of power‐sharing institutions by analyzing the mechanisms under which they operate. To this effect, we compare the direct effect of formal power‐sharing institutions on peace with their indirect effect through power‐sharing behavior. Combining data on inclusive and territorially dispersive institutions with information on power‐sharing behavior, we empirically assess this relationship on a global scale. Our causal mediation analysis reveals that formal power‐sharing institutions affect the probability of ethnic conflict onset mostly through power‐sharing behavior that these institutions induce.