Balance of Power or the State-to-Nation Balance: Explaining Middle East War-Propensity

The Middle East is one of the most war-prone regions in the international system. What is the most powerful explanation of the war-propensity of this region? I argue that neither realism nor liberalism are able to account for variations in regional war-proneness. Instead, I advance an alternative explanation based on the concept of the state-to-nation balance in the region. This balance refers to the degree of congruence between the division of the region into territorial states and the national aspirations and political identifications of the region's peoples. The balance also refers to the prevalence of strong versus weak states in the region. Thus, I explain the Middle East's high war-proneness by focusing on its relatively low level of state-to-nation balance. This imbalance has led to a powerful combination of revisionist ideologies and state incoherence. While other regions suffer from state incoherence, powerful revisionist nationalist forces, notably pan-nationalist and irredentists (the “Greater State”), aggravate this problem in the Middle East. These revisionist forces are often transborder and are especially powerful in the Middle East because of the high degree of external/transborder incongruence in comparison with all other regions. The combination of nationalist revisionism and state incoherence has made the Middle East more prone to violence than most other regions.     

Editor's note

This article examines the argument that the ability of a government to generate “audience costs”—to create a situation, that is, in which it would pay a domestic political price for backing down—plays a key role in determining how international crises run their course. It does this by looking at a dozen great power crises to see how well various aspects of the audience costs argument hold up in the light of the historical evidence. The audience costs mechanism, it turns out, does not play a major role in any of those crises—a conclusion which, the author claims, has certain important methodological implications.     

Americans and the Rise of China as a World Power

The rapid ascendency of China has attracted considerable attention from American scholars, policymakers, and media. Yet what does the American public think about the rise of China as a world power? In this paper we use survey data collected by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and other organizations to explore the nature and causes of Americans' views. It turns out that most Americans are well aware of the rise of China. Some are apprehensive about that rise, chiefly for national security (rather than economic) reasons, and many favor a degree of off-shore ‘balancing’ of the sort that realists recommend. But few Americans want to actively work to limit the rise of China. Very few favor the use of troops to defend Taiwan. Very few favor a nuclear-armed Japan. Large majorities of Americans take stands more akin to those of neo-liberals than realist theorists, favoring cooperation and peaceful engagement with China.     

A post-residential-treatment follow-up of socially and emotionally deviant adolescents in Israel

Fifty-five emotionally and socially deviant but normally intelligent adolescents who had spent 2–7 years in a children's and apprentice home in Israel were followed up 5–9 years after they had left the institution. Their postresidential social and vocational careers were evaluated by means of personal interviews, home visits, and reports from employers, and it was found that good adjustment was substantially related to family background variables (having lived with biological parents prior to residential placement, mutual positive relationship between parent and child, being first born) as well as to satisfactory behavior and performance in peer group, school, and workshop during residence. Level of intelligence, unrelated to overall adjustment, correlated positively with vocational status and income at followup. On the other hand, length of stay in the apprentice home had no impact on postresidential adaptation to work and society. Fewer than 10% of exinmates expressed retrospectively a negative attitude toward their stay in the institution. The importance of paying more attention to the eventual long-term and enduring impact of family relationship on the residential and postresidential behavior of adolescents is discussed, suggesting a shift of emphasis in evaluating factors involved in institutional treatment. Findings also indicate that later social and vocational success may be fairly predicted from observation of behavior during the stay in the institution.The empirical study reported in this article was supported by a grant from the Australian Women's International Zionist Organisation (WIZO), through the initiative of Mrs. Martha Jacobson, Melbourne, chairman of the board of directors.Received his Ph.D. in Psychology and Special Education from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, in 1954. Main research interests are normal and abnormal child development, high-risk infants, adolescence, and handicapped children.Main research interest is institutional care.     

The human ear: its role in forensic practice

The human ear has much to offer investigators in relation to many areas of forensic practice including forensic pathology, anthropology, identification and facial reconstruction and yet its full potential is often overlooked. This review paper explores current knowledge related to the human ear drawing attention to those situations where the ear could play a valuable role in a forensic investigation.     

On collective goods,private wealth,and the core solution of simple games with sidepayments

This essay identifies consequences for the core solution in a class of social decision problems concerning the provision of collective goods (or bads) if the rules are modified to permit sidepayments. In these problems, a kind of formal decision procedure that includes any weighted or unweighted majority rule governs only the decision about collective goods. Each decision about collective goods, however, implies a vector of the agents' endowments of private wealth that can, but need not, vary across the alternatives. Any agent may offer to make sidepayments from this endowment that are contingent on the collective goods decision, but the agent holds preferences that, given any fixed decision about collective goods, strictly increase in the agent's own wealth. The results indicate that the core's response to introducing the possibility of sidepayments depends on whether any agent possesses a veto over the collective goods decision. If no one has a veto, then an outcome belongs to the core of the game with sidepayments only if no sidepayment is made and the same decision about collective goods belongs to the core of the associated game without sidepayments. In this case, introducing the possibility of sidepayments does not bring a new collective goods decision into the core. Indeed, merely adding the possibility of sidepayments can cause the core to vanish. On the other hand, if at least one agent possesses a veto, then introducing sidepayments can (but need not) lead to a new core solution concerning the decision about collective goods. In any such new solution, at least one agent who has a veto — but no one who lacks it — receives a sidepayment.