Chinese Military Power: What Vexes the United States and Why?

The enhancement of Chinese military power over the past decade is generating ample debate over its meaning and consequences for American security interests. China's characterization in larger conceptions of U.S. national security strategy has experienced repeated shifts over the decades. China is now an arrived major power according to virtually all relevant power criteria, without U.S. policy makers conclusively resolving the implications of China's military modernization for American security interests. Comparable uncertainties bedevil Chinese thinking about American military power. The latent elements of strategic rivalry (if not outright confrontation) are beyond dispute, and could readily take deeper root in the bureaucratic processes of both countries. Without leaders in both systems fully imparting and communicating to one another their respective strategic equities in Asia and the Pacific, the emergence of a reconfigured regional security order fully accepted by both states remains very uncertain.     

Interagency bargaining and international negotiation: Lessons from the open skies treaty talks

Internal bargaining among government agencies has a direct effect on the formal external negotiation, particularly with regard to the flexibility of the negotiators and their ability to reach agreements. This article illustrates how interagency bargaining within the U.S. and Soviet governments affected the negotiation of the 1992 Open Skies Treaty between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the former Warsaw Pact.He is currently directing a research project at the center on the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons.     

‘Dancing with the prince’: Ngo's survival strategics in the Afghan conflict

Afghan NGOs have been a major provider of humanitarian aid throughout the Afghan conflict. They remained operational during this period by 'dancing' with and between the various parties to the conflict, their survival contingent on their ability to build ad hoc patterns of alliance and cooperation. This article explores the nature of 'the dance' between NGOs, the warring parties, and the NGOs' constituencies. It asks whether 'dancing with the prince' represents an accommodation with violence or is a necessary compromise which will ultimately contribute to resolving the conflict. It concludes by drawing out key lessons for donors who support indigenous NGOs operating in complex political emergencies.     

The governance of urban regeneration: a critique of the 'governing without government' thesis

This paper offers a critique of the concept of governance as networks. Using the complementary concept of regime governance, it argues that networks are not the primary mode of governance in the politics of urban regeneration in the UK. Drawing on primary and secondary material, it is argued that Central Government is becoming more influential in the local policy arena. In the 'mix' of market, hierarchy and network, hierarchy is more pervasive than network. It is therefore argued that partnerships should be treated as a distinct mode of governance. These conclusions demonstrate that despite the fashion for copying urban policies from the USA, local politics in the UK remain very different. Ironically, the transfer of policies developed in the USA has tended to entrench divergent practices and outcomes. The UK does not, therefore, appear to be moving toward the US model of regime politics. It is concluded that the partnership and network/regime models of governance should be subjected to rigorous comparative studies.     

The rise of religion and the fall of the civilization paradigm as explanations for intra-state conflict

The study presented here compares the impact of Samuel Huntington's concept of civilizations and that of religion on domestic conflict between 1960 and 2004 using the State Failure data set. The results show that examining the religious dimension of domestic conflict provides a better understanding of the dynamics of domestic conflict than does Huntington's concept of civilization. The results show that Huntington's predictions for conflict have not come to fruition as of 2004. Civilizational conflicts are a minority of all conflicts. Muslims, while engaging in a significant amount of inter-civilizational or inter-religious conflict, primarily fight other Muslims. When one takes population size into account, Muslims participate in a disproportionate amount of conflict. In absolute terms, Muslims participated in the majority of all religious conflict for the entire period covered by this study and in 2003 and 2004. Finally, religion increasingly impacts on domestic conflict. Religious conflicts—including religious wars like those in Afghanistan and Algeria, which are not civilizational but clearly between factions within the same religion—are consistently more common than civilizational conflict and became a majority of all conflict starting in 2002. This rise in religious conflict as a proportion of all domestic conflict is not a post-9/11 phenomenon, but is, rather, the result of processes that date back at least to the late 1970s.     

Justice and Emotions

Sociological theories of justice emphasize (a) the level of discrepancy or congruence between shares of resources received relative to individuals’ perceptions of “just shares” and (b) the emotions aroused with either discrepancy or congruence. While these theories tend to have precision and elegance, they generally do not specify the full range of reference points that can be used to establish what is considered a “just share,” nor do they explore the complete array of emotions (and targets of these emotions) aroused during justice evaluations. In this article, an effort is made to expand the conception of reference points elicited in justice evaluations, the structural processes that determine the specific emotions that will be aroused during justice evaluations, and the psychodynamics that mediate among reference points, structural processes, emotional arousal, and targeting of emotional reactions onto self, others, and social structures. The article concludes with some hypotheses about the emotions aroused and targeted during justice evaluations employing varying reference points and arising under specific structural conditions.