Explaining Israel's Misuse of Strategic Assassinations

This study explains Israel's insufficiently discriminate use of strategic assassinations during the last two decades. It shows that the tool's misuse considerably diminished its overall contribution to Israel's national security. It identifies five dimensions of systematic misuse: timing, political views of the targets, organizational affiliation, domestic political consequences for the adversary, and the visibility of Israel's responsibility. It finds three clusters of causes for these patterns of misuse: a flawed decision-making culture, the prevalence of false causal stories, and the pernicious effect of norms. This study could not find evidence for a direct link between domestic political pressures to any systematic pattern of misuse.     

Elite defection and grassroots democracy under competitive authoritarianism: evidence from Burkina Faso

One determinant of the success or failure of political revolutions is whether there is a split among the ruling elites. Elite defections in a competitive authoritarian regime can tip the balance in favour of regime change and democratization. This article examines when and why elites defect through the case of Burkina Faso. In October 2014, President Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso was forced to step down after 27 years in power and multiple term limits contraventions. We propose a new theory linking growth in democratic attitudes at the grassroots to elite defection from hegemonic parties. We argue that a broad increase in popular democratic attitudes can both decrease the costs and increase the benefits of elite defection, creating conditions that enable elites to rescind their loyalty to the regime. We support this argument with interviews with ruling-party defectors in Burkina Faso and two rounds of Afrobarometer survey data. Our findings demonstrate that democratic attitudes can grow under competitive authoritarian regimes, and that these citizen attitudes can impact regime change by increasing the likelihood of elite defection.     

The Israeli defense forces and unconventional warfare: The Palestinian factor and Israeli national security doctrine

The basic premises of the Israeli national security doctrine were laid down by the first Prime Minister, David Ben‐Gurion, who emphasized the decisive role of the neighboring sovereign states as the crucial enemy. This view continues to guide the architects of Israeli strategic thought despite the growing importance of a non‐state actor, that is, the Palestinian national liberation movement.     

The Usefulness of Examining Terrorists’ Rhetoric for Understanding the Nature of Different Terror Groups

ABSTRACT

This study advances a distinction between two generic types of terrorists’ rhetoric: (1) ideological rhetoric candidly reflecting the terrorists’ genuine beliefs and values regarding their military targeting policy (who is a legitimate target), even when adopting such rhetoric involves high image/diplomatic costs; and (2) a PR-oriented rhetoric which consciously misrepresents the terrorists’ intentions and behavior in an attempt to project a more benign and humane image, thus maintaining sympathy and rebuffing criticism. We contend that such a distinction can provide a highly useful metric for assessing terrorists groups’ rationality and pragmatism: the most pragmatic groups will shift between these two types of rhetoric depending on changing strategic needs. To show the practical usefulness of this distinction we provide criteria for categorizing terrorists’ rhetorical responses to (mostly liberal-minded) criticism that they have killed innocent civilians in their enemy’s camp. We apply our criteria by examining terrorists’ (sincere and insincere) apologies.     

Evidence-Fabricating in Asymmetric Conflicts: How Weak Actors Prove False Propaganda Narratives

As part of their common efforts to undermine public support for their militarily-stronger adversaries' war efforts, insurgents and other militarily weak actors often accuse governments of fighting in a brutal manner and of committing brutal acts such as deliberately targeting innocent civilians. While sometimes there is sufficient evidence to support this claim of the government's deliberate brutality, other times militarily-weak actors will lack sufficient evidence to support this allegation. In such situation of lack of evidence, instead of making only those minimal allegations which can still be support by existing available facts, some weak actors decide nevertheless to make unsubstantiated claims and resort to fabricating the necessary evidence. This behavior presents a challenge not only for many counterinsurgent governments but also for the larger international community (most notably by diverting attention away from real atrocities). We identify some of the most common evidence-forging techniques recently employed by weak actors designed to create the factual basis to support of their chosen (often false) narratives of government brutality. The study also discusses some implications for international actors to prevent rewarding faking of atrocities.     

Making good on donors’ desire to Do Development Differently

Foreign aid donors are increasingly focused on changing the way their development agencies function. This discourse has focused on desired qualities, including greater knowledge of local contextual realities, appropriate adaptation to context and greater flexibility to respond to changing circumstances. We argue that more attention needs to be devoted to the achievement of these qualities and turn to contingency theory to identify some under-exploited ways to ‘do development differently’. The qualities sought by donors are emergent properties of complex organisational systems and will only be achieved through a micro-level and interlinked focus on the fundamentals of organisation.