The Rise of Gulf War Paradigm 2.0

The adage that “it is always easier to fight the last war” is one that readily can be applied to the United States and its armed forces for not predicting the scale and type of operations encountered in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. This article argues that the lack of preparation in the post-invasion phases arose from an institutional attachment to a preferred paradigm of warfare, as exemplified by the Persian Gulf War of 1991. This paradigm, though, has been substantially resurrected and re-configured to suit the fighting preferences of the American armed forces in its protracted encounters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Far from re-orienting its organization and mindset to meet the challenges of so-called counterinsurgency campaigns, as much current advocacy maintains, the military has reverted to the form of warfare it knows best.     

The fairness of sanctions: some implications for optimal enforcement policy

In this article we incorporate notions of the fairness of sanctionsinto the standard model of public enforcement. When both theprobability and magnitude of sanctions may be varied, the usualsolution involves a very high sanction and a relatively lowprobability of enforcement if individuals are risk neutral.When the issue of fairness is added to the analysis, the optimalsanction generally is not extremely high because such a sanctionwould be seen as unfair. The optimal probability of imposingsanctions may be higher than in the usual case (to offset thelower sanction) or lower than in the usual case (because thelower sanction reduces the effectiveness of enforcement).     

J.M. Keynes and the Personal Politics of Reparations: Part 2

The second part of this article shows that John Maynard Keynes worked closely with the German Finance and Foreign ministries as a supposed neutral expert in October 1922. He supported passive resistance to the French in the Ruhr without regard to its effects on the currency, secretly collaborated in writing the German reparations note of June 1923, and then praised his own work in a weekly that he controlled. Keynes opposed the 1929 Young Plan that re-scheduled the German debt and declined to accept modern thinking on overcoming the transfer problem.     

Editorial

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

The Poverty of Democracy: Neoliberal Reforms and Political Participation of the Poor in Mexico

Twenty years after governments across Latin America began implementing neoliberal reforms in earnest, concern is growing about their impact on the quality of democracy in the region. This article examines this issue in the case of Mexico by exploring how patterns of political participation, especially among the rural and urban poor, have changed since the implementation of free market reforms. It asks whether the institutional innovations associated with free market reforms make it easier or more difficult for the poor to participate in Mexico's political process. The answer is not encouraging. Despite democratic openings, the new linkages between the state and citizens established as a result of the transition to a free market development model stifle the voice of the poor not through the threat of force or coercion, but by creating obstacles and disincentives for political mobilization that affect the poor more severely than other groups.