Funding,capabilities and the use of child soldiers

Recent years have seen increased scholarly attention given to the issue of child soldiering. Primarily dedicated to the decision-making calculus of rebel groups, this body of work has generally emphasised supply-side versus demand-side arguments. We contribute to this growing literature by explicitly investigating a previously untested aspect of the latter. Prior scholarship has made vague references to a potential association between economic endowments and child soldiering, including natural resource wealth, but scant empirical attention has been given. We argue that the specific type of endowment has important consequences for the decision to utilise child soldiers. We argue access to and exploitation of lootable natural resources (e.g. gemstones) to be especially likely to promote the use of child soldiers due to their ease of access, the low skills required to harness them and the heightened likelihood that groups will become more profit-oriented. A systematic cross-national investigation of rebel groups provides robust evidence that lootable resources such as diamonds and gemstones are strongly associated with the use of children, while non-lootable resources such as oil are not.     

Give them toys? Military allocations and regime stability in transitional democracies

In contrast to the conventional wisdom that democratization reduces coups, 46% of coups targeted democracies from 2000–2009, twice the rate seen in the prior half-century. Efforts to explain coups have arrived at wildly varied conclusions regarding the vulnerability of democracies. We argue that this is attributable to regime type acting as a conditional influence. We theorize that democratization incentivizes old elites to veto the process, and these vetoes are more likely to occur when the new regime cannot credibly commit to the military’s corporate interests. Using cross-national data for 172 states for the years 1952–2009, we find that though young democracies are more vulnerable to coups than either civilian authoritarian regimes or older democracies, this vulnerability is mitigated when military expenditures are near or above the sample mean. We also find that commonly argued determinants of coups appear to be driven by their influence in democracies, suggesting the need for scholars to revisit commonly held assumptions regarding autocratic survival.     

Cognition of cognition part I

Journal of Indian Philosophy -     

Big Windows and Little Windows: Implementation in the 'Congested State'

This paper argues for the need to re-assess models of policy implementation in the 'congested state'. This re-appraisal focuses on two main directions. The first involves locating implementation in the context of wider models of the policy process. We fuse three models, those of Kingdon, Wolman, and Challis et al ., to form a new 'policy streams' approach. The second examines implementation in multi-level governance. In the UK and elsewhere, much of the focus of traditional implementation studies has been on the link between one central government department and a local agency. However, this vertical (central-local) dimension fails to give sufficient stress to the other horizontal dimensions of 'central-central' and 'local-local'. Paraphrasing Kingdon's terms, implementation models also need to incorporate the 'little windows' at local level as well as the 'big' windows at national level. Using evidence relating to the implementation of UK policy towards health inequalities, this paper argues successful implementation is more likely when the three policy streams are linked across the three dimensions. The model is thought to be applicable to other areas of the public sectors and complex issues facing all governments.