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CATASTROPHIC SUCCESS? FOREIGN-IMPOSED REGIME CHANGE AND CIVIL WAR
Abstract
Foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC) has been argued to have a pacifying effect on interstate relations: when a victorious power changes the composition of its defeated rival's government, a recurrence of armed conflict between them becomes very rare. Yet the domestic effects within states that experience FIRC may be less benign. This paper investigates the extent to which FIRC might be a form of "catastrophic success," dampening international conflict but exacerbating internal conflict. My analysis differentiates between FIRCs that bring entirely new leaders to power versus those that restore a recently overthrown ruler to office. I argue that the former disrupts state power and foments grievances and resentments, whereas the latter does not. Analyzing a dataset of country-years from 1816 to 2008 that includes one hundred FIRCs, I find that only new leader FIRC significantly increases the risk of civil war in the short-term aftermath. New leader FIRC is also especially damaging to the prospects for domestic peace when it is inflicted in conjunction with defeat in an interstate war, and in poor or ethnically heterogeneous countries.
... impuso un modelo de dominio en múltiples esferas que han abarcado lo económico, lo sociocultural, lo religioso y, si era necesario para imponerse, la manipulación de cambios políticos mayores, llegando al regime change (Downes 2021), e inclusive el uso de la fuerza militar, si se podía elaborar una narrativa que la justificara. Más aún, una forma de mantener el control sobre el resto del mundo habría sido la creación y el sostenimiento de conflictos y tensiones regionales que evitaran el surgimiento de polos alternativos de desarrollo a partir de la colaboración y la confianza entre pares (O'Rourke, 2021). ...
... Western countries) have experienced IIH, this novel interpretation of hierarchy with FIRCs offers new pathways for comprehending the emerging patterns of conflict in the postcolonial age. State instability has been attributed to economic, cultural, structural, systemic, religious, sectarian and internal political structure (democracy vs. authoritarianism) causes (Gent 2008;Peic and Reiter 2010;Savun and Tirone 2012;Downes 2013;Vogt 2018). With a few exceptions (Cunningham 2016, O'Rourke 2017McCormack 2018), many analyses ignore the significant impact of international hierarchies in mobilising patterns of political unrests or civil conflicts. ...
In international relations, hierarchy is generally understood as the relational contract by which two states legitimately acknowledge their superior and subordinate ranks. Empirical studies, however, show that some states experience distinctive hierarchical patterns, such as military intervention and nation-building. This study calls them the ‘informal imposed hierarchy’ (IIH after this) because they all install favoured leaders, governmental structures and/or troops in target states without the consent of the target states’ population. Using state clusters from 1945 to 2003, we found that four sorts of states experienced IIHs: those having counter-hegemonic actors, signalling a move to the rival hierarchy, seeking an exit door from the current hierarchical system, and perceived to present new security risks (e.g. terrorism). IIH likely generates instability since it installs and protects illegitimate rulers in the target state. It can aggravate internal war in subordinate states with single-party governments or heterogeneous communities. In order to assess the model’s and the arguments’ explanatory power, the study selects the relevant universe cases. The next, it examines pre- and post-Soviet eras in Afghanistan and the 2001 and 2003 US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as control cases. These cross-cases illustrate the change of IIH’s motives over time and across hierarchies.
... It also increases the likelihood of individuals with various preexisting grievances against the government deciding to create a new terrorist group in order to pursue them. 26 Second, in a related point, an overt electoral intervention may have stronger effects on the perceived efficacy of peaceful politics. An overt electoral intervention is also a situation where there is widely known and incontestable evidence that the results of the nationallevel elections are being significantly affected by a factor other than the preferences of the electorate or through a blatant manipulation of these preferences. ...
What are the effects of partisan electoral interventions on terrorism in the intervened countries? Attempts by the great powers to affect the election results in other countries have been quite common in the postwar world with electoral interventions occurring in nearly one of every nine competitive elections between 1946 and 2000 as well as in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. However little research has been done on the possible effects such interventions can have on the target countries chances to suffer from domestic terrorism. In this paper I analyze the effects of electoral interventions on terrorism utilizing measures of domestic terrorism and of terrorist group emergence between 1970 and 2000 and 1968 and 2000 respectively. I find that while not all electoral interventions have terrorism inducing effects, overt interventions of this kind significantly increase the amount of domestic terrorism in the target as well as the probability of new domestic terrorist groups emerging
... Los intentos de expulsar y derrotar a los talibán en Afganistán han sido costosos y de hecho han fallado. A pesar de la enorme superioridad militar de Estados Unidos, en Afganistán los estrategas no han logrado conseguir los resultados deseados: la insurgencia, el tribalismo y el nacionalismoreligioso-desempeñan un rol crucial a la hora de entender las razones del fi asco estadounidense (Downes, 2010;cfr. Walt, 2011;Layne, 2006;Boot, 2013). ...
In this article we will see that the actions of Al-Qaeda can be studied using a realistic link with the international system dominated by states. We will hold that these actors try to promote or to accelerate the changes in the structure of power, where there stands out the American hegemony and the search for balance by various actors that implement asymmetric strategies as counter-hegemonic responses.
... Enterline and Greig (2008) show that imposed polities are more likely to face domestic challenges. Downes (2010) finds that 2 Findings in the domain of psychology, microeconomics, and sociology help explain how political dislocation increases the likelihood of resistance. Political dislocation is a perceived negative shift in power compared to the status quo. ...
There have been some 163 foreign occupations since 1900. In many cases, military occupations have led to bloody and protracted resistance. More than a mere byproduct of conflict, this resistance can be a decisive factor in interstate war. This article seeks to explain the puzzle: under what conditions do foreign occupations produce consequential resistance? Explanations in the existing literature have centered on nationalism, opportunity structures, or international context. However, states exhibit different levels of resistance to different occupiers, indicating that not only the nature of the occupied but also the nature and the policies of occupiers play a role. Specifically, I look at the role of political dislocation and trust. First, domestic groups that would have otherwise waited out the occupation may be driven to resistance when occupiers implement policies or establish institutions that permanently weaken their relative domestic position, what I call political dislocation. Second, resistance will be muted when occupiers can credibly commit to treating the population benignly and vacating occupied territory promptly. I argue that democracies, international organizations, and co-religionists are better able to make credible commitments and therefore more likely to elicit trust among occupied communities. Conversely, occupiers that victimize the occupied population will also face greater resistance. I test these hypotheses on an original dataset of occupier fatalities in every occupation since 1900. I find that political dislocation, in the form of forceful regime change, increases the likelihood of resistance. I also find that occupations led by democracies, international organizations, and co-religionists are less likely to face resistance. Thus, the nature and context of occupation are some of the most important predictors of resistance. Notably, measures of nationalism are found to be poor predictors of resistance to occupation.
... They would also provide at least some ammunition for those involved in the deliberations who were skeptical about the ultimate success of the US intervention in Afghanistan. Downes (2010) finds that foreign imposed regime changes significantly increase the risk of the civil wars in the targets of those changes, especially if leaders brought to power have not previously ruled in those societies, and if the country in question is poor and ethnically heterogeneous. ...
The Obama administration decided in December of 2009 to commit 30,000 additional troops to the war in Afghanistan. The decision was apparently inspired to some extent by the apparent success of the surge (and COIN) strategy in the war in Iraq adopted in 2007. Foreign policy decision makers seem with some regularity to base decisions in important part on historical precedents and analogies.An examination of processes within both the Bush and the Obama administrations for dealing with economic policy decisions, on the one hand, and for addressing foreign policy issues, on the other, suggests that economists play a more prominent role in those processes addressing economic issues (such as arose during the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession in 2009), than political scientists do when important foreign policy issues (such as the possible “surges” in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) arise.It is difficult at best to argue persuasively that foreign policy decisions would be more prudent and successful if political scientists were given more prominent roles in decision making processes. However, since most foreign policy decisions are based in important part on information and data regarding precedents and allegedly analogous cases, it is possible to develop a logical argument that analysis of that information and those data is consistently a crucial step in the formation of successful foreign policies. If political scientists were given roles in foreign policy making processes more similar to those assigned to economists in policy making processes addressed to economic issues, they might provide policy makers better informed, more coherent, penetrating, and perceptive analyses of information and data pertaining to historical precedents and prior cases. One possibly helpful step toward providing political scientists a more prominent role in future foreign policy making processes would involve the appointment of political scientists as National Security Advisors.
Resenha do livro: FUKUYAMA, Francis (2006). America at a Crossroad: Democracy, power and the Neoconservative Legacy.
RESUMEN
En el contexto posterior a la Guerra Fría, una creciente conciencia mundial sobre las violaciones de los derechos humanos ha captado la atención de la comunidad internacional más que nunca. El desplazamiento forzado ha creado un desafío sin precedentes y la cuestión de la protección humana se ha convertido en un asunto grave de controversia en la agenda humanitaria, que implica repensar el significado de la soberanía estatal con respecto al suministro de ayuda en crisis humanitarias y el concepto de la Responsabilidad de Proteger, así como la cuestión sobre los criterios fundamentales a los que se recurre para justificar una intervención humanitaria. En el marco de la presente tesis, por lo tanto, será señalada la necesidad urgente de reformas en numerosos ámbitos para poder suministrar el apoyo humanitario a las internally displaced persons (IDP) de forma eficaz y duradera. Asimismo, se mostrará que es imprescindible efectuar cambios en cuanto a una restructuración interna de las Naciones Unidas, en la esfera jurídica y económica, así como en las medidas de protección y seguridad in situ para los desplazados. Será crucial identificar las circunstancias interdependientes entre una intervención humanitaria llevada a cabo en nombre de los derechos humanos y la protección civil, y el impacto que conlleva sobre el desarrollo de una crisis migratoria. Con el ejemplo de Libia, se demostrará cómo se condicionaron la intervención militar por la OTAN en 2011 y la crisis de desplazamiento que ha desencadenado progresivamente tras la caída del régimen de Gadafi y el estallido de la guerra civil en 2014. Partiendo de los orígenes de la crisis humanitaria en Libia, se investigarán las normas vigentes en las relaciones internacionales, el desarrollo de una obligación normativa internacional de protección e intervención humanitaria, los criterios de evaluación de una intervención militar (just cause), la adecuación de la intervención en Libia, así como las causas de la guerra en el país más allá de los motivos oficiales de la seguridad humana y la protección de la población civil. La investigación de los crímenes de guerra cometidos por las partes beligerantes involucradas en el conflicto libio desde 2011, así como el significado de la justicia transicional y la reconciliación nacional para el futuro de la nueva Libia constituyen otros temas centrales. Asimismo, será de interés fundamental examinar la aplicación del sistema internacional de protección y del apoyo humanitario en el caso real de Libia. A este respecto, el análisis práctico del Global Protection Cluster y de los Principios Rectores de los Desplazamientos Internos, así como su implementación sobre el terreno es un aspecto clave. La Libia post-revolucionaria se está enfrentando a desafíos enormes como polarización política, anarquía y la guerra civil continua. Con el fin de alcanzar la paz, seguridad y estabilidad duraderas, Libia todavía deberá emprender amplias reformas legales, judiciales y políticas, fomentar el diálogo nacional y comprometerse a respaldar procesos inclusivos de reconciliación nacional mediante el apoyo de la comunidad internacional, ONGs, las autoridades nacionales y locales, así como la sociedad civil, mujeres y tribus.
Palabras clave: desplazamiento interno, Libia, IDP, refugiados, intervención militar, soberanía estatal, Responsabilidad de Proteger, crisis humanitaria, guerra civil, Naciones Unidas, sistema de protección, apoyo humanitario, Principios Rectores de los Desplazamientos Internos, Global Protection Cluster, derechos humanos, derecho internacional, crímenes de guerra, reformas, transición, justicia transicional, reconciliación nacional, paz.
ABSTRACT
In the post-Cold War context, growing global consciousness of human rights violations has captured the attention of the international community as never before. Forced displacement has created an unprecedented challenge and the issue of human protection has become a serious issue of controversy in the humanitarian agenda. This involves rethinking the meaning of state sovereignty with regard to providing assistance in humanitarian crises, the concept of the Responsibility to Protect and the question of fundamental criteria used to justify humanitarian intervention. Therefore, in the context of this thesis, the urgent need for reforms in many pertinent areas will be demonstrated in order to ensure the provision of humanitarian support to internally displaced persons (IDP) in an effective and enduring manner. Furthermore, the necessity of essential changes in terms of an internal restructuring of the UN, as well as in the legal and economic field, and in the protection and security measures on site for the displaced will be shown. It will be crucial to identify the interdependent circumstances between a humanitarian intervention carried out in the name of human rights and civil protection, and the impact it has on the development of a migratory crisis. Based on the example of Libya, it will be demonstrated how the NATO-led military intervention in 2011 is interrelated with the displacement crisis progressively triggered by the fall of the Gaddafi regime and the outbreak of civil war in 2014. Starting from the origins of the humanitarian crisis in Libya, the following will be explored: the existing standards in international relations; the development of an international regulatory obligation to protect and to intervene on humanitarian grounds; the assessment criteria of a military intervention (just cause); the appropriateness of the intervention in Libya; as well as the causes of the war behind the official reasons of human security and protection of the civilian population. The investigation of war crimes committed by the warring parties involved in the Libyan conflict since 2011, as well as the significance of transitional justice and national reconciliation for the future of the new Libya are further central aspects. In addition, another major concern is to examine the application of the international protection system and humanitarian support in the actual case of Libya. In this regard, the practical analysis of the Global Protection Cluster and the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, as well as their implementation on the ground constitutes a key aspect. Post-revolutionary Libya is facing enormous challenges, such as political polarization, anarchy and the ongoing civil war. In order to achieve durable peace, security and stability, Libya must undertake extensive legal, judicial and political reforms, encourage national dialogue and engage in inclusive processes of national reconciliation with the support of the international community, NGOs, national and local authorities, as well as civil society, women and tribes.
Keywords: internal displacement, Libya, IDP, refugees, military intervention, state sovereignty, Responsibility to Protect, humanitarian crisis, civil war, United Nations, protection system, humanitarian support, Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, Global Protection Cluster, human rights, international law, war crimes, reforms, transition, transitional justice, national reconciliation, peace.
Do covert regime change operations lead to civil war? Analyzing a sample of 63 American-backed covert regime change attempts during the Cold War (1947–1989), I find that the states targeted for covert regime change were more likely to experience civil war in the 10 years following intervention. Successful regime change attempts – where the target government was replaced – led to civil war by installing domestically unpopular rulers and reducing the new government’s ability to suppress armed opponents. Failed attempts at covert regime change – where the target government remained in power – fostered civil war by destabilizing their targets, undermining peace agreements, and introducing self-reinforcing mechanisms into ongoing civil wars that increased their duration and intensity. Statistical support for the argument comes from bivariate correlation and multivariate probit of a matched sample of cases.
The decisive defeat of an enemy in conventional war-conquest-frequently brings about peace on the victor's terms; in some cases, however, conquest does not end the violence, but instead marks a transition to guerrilla war. What determines whether conquest results in war termination? While traditional theories of insurgency would predict that peace depends on appealing to the hearts and minds of the defeated population, I argue that conquerors in conventional wars cannot expect to win over the defeated population, and hence that avoiding post-conquest resistance requires quick and often brutal responses to initial opposition to deter potential challengers. I test this argument both statistically and through two sets of short paired case studies.
State failure is becoming increasingly prevalent across the globe, creating human suffering, black markets, lost economic opportunities, and safe havens for militant actors. It is imperative that the international community find a way to combat state failure. This study investigates the effects of irregular leadership transitions on state failure recovery. Irregular leadership transitions occur when the executive of a state comes to power through unconstitutional means. Regular leaders are more likely than irregular leaders to have personal experience as a ruler, beneficial domestic and international ties, and familiarity among the population. Irregular transitions may damage bureaucracies, damaging government functionality and halting development projects that had already been underway. Regular leaders benefit from a legacy that was likely able to pass spoils onto an elite group. This elite group is likely to resist relative losses to power more than lower status groups would fight to gain power because of the cognitive principles of risk aversion, and the sensitivity to status inherent to social identity theory. Regular leaders also have traditional legitimacy, while irregular leaders are more likely to have to gain legitimacy. State failure and failure recovery are overdetermined, so it is impossible to be able to confidently determine the direction of causal flow. Every determinant of failure is related to every other, and it is difficult to separate their effects. The role of leadership regularity is therefore investigated as a proxy that can predict variation on the rate of failure recovery. The quantitative analysis consisted of multi and bivariate regressions investigating the effects of leadership regularity on failure duration, as well as the relative explanatory power held by several factors associated with leadership regularity. Robustness checks were performed using Bayesian statistics, and survival analyses. Irregular leadership transitions were found to predict a roughly five year increase in state failure duration. The Afghan Civil War was used as an illustrative case, describing the ways in which Daoud, Taraki, Amin, Karmal, Massoud, Hekmatyar, and Mullah Omar all overcame, or failed to overcome, different obstacles associated with their irregularity and how these obstacles affected their relative levels of success attempting to extend governance.
Theory creating and hypothesis testing are both critical components of social science, but the former is ultimately more important. Yet, in recent years, International Relations scholars have devoted less effort to creating and refining theories or using theory to guide empirical research. Instead, they increasingly focus on ‘simplistic hypothesis testing,’ which emphasizes discovering well-verified empirical regularities. Privileging simplistic hypothesis testing is a mistake, however, because insufficient attention to theory leads to misspecified empirical models or misleading measures of key concepts. In addition, the poor quality of much of the data in International Relations makes it less likely that these efforts will produce cumulative knowledge. This shift away from theory and toward simplistic hypothesis testing reflects a long-standing desire to professionalize and expand the International Relations field as well as the short-term career incentives of individual scholars. This tendency is also widening the gap between the ivory tower and the real world, making International Relations scholarship less useful to policymakers and concerned citizens. Unfortunately, this trend is likely to continue unless there is a collective decision to alter prevailing academic incentives.
Coherent democracies and harshly authoritarian states have few civil wars, and intermediate regimes are the most conflict-prone. Domestic violence also seems to be associated with political change, whether toward greater democracy or greater autocracy. Is the greater violence of intermediate regimes equivalent to the finding that states in political transition experience more violence? If both level of democracy and political change are relevant, to what extent is civil violence related to each? Based on an analysis of the period 1816-1992, we conclude that intermediate regimes are most prone to civil war, even when they have had time to stabilize from a regime change. In the long run, since intermediate regimes are less stable than autocracies, which in turn are less stable than democracies, durable democracy is the most probable end-point of the democratization process. The democratic civil peace is not only more just than the autocratic peace but also more stable.
Previous statistical studies of the effects of UN peacekeeping have generally sug- gested that UN interventions have a positive effect on building a sustainable peace after civil war. Recent methodological developments have questioned this result because the cases in which the United Nations intervened were quite different from those in which they did not. Therefore the estimated causal effect may be due to the assumptions of the model that the researchers chose rather than to peacekeeping itself. The root of the problem is that UN missions are not randomly assigned. We argue that standard approaches for dealing with this problem (Heckman regression and instrumental variables) are invalid and impracticable in the context of UN peacekeeping and would lead to estimates of the effects of UN operations that are largely a result of the assumptions of the statistical model rather than the data. We correct for the effects of nonrandom assignment with matching techniques on a sample of UN interventions in post-Cold-War conflicts and find that UN inter- ventions are indeed effective in the sample of post-civil-conflict interventions, but that UN interventions while civil wars are still ongoing have no causal effect.
The transfer of power through the use of military force is a commonplace event in world affairs. Although no two coups d'etat are alike, they all have a common denominator: poverty. We analyze political and economic data from 121 countries during the period 1950–1982 and find that the probability of a government's being overthrown by a coup is significantly influenced by the level of economic well-being. Thus, even authoritarian governments have powerful incentives to promote economic growth, not out of concern for the welfare of their citizens, but because poor economic performance may lead to their removal by force. When the simultaneity of low income and coups is accounted for, we find that the aftereffects of a coup include a heritage of political instability in the form of an increased likelihood of further coups. Although the effect of income on coups is pronounced, we find little evidence of feedback from coups to income growth.
Post-9/11 security concerns and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq have renewed scholarly interest in nation-building as a form of externally fostered democratization. The selected works assess Iraq and its precursors, seeking general lessons for establishing new democracies. They principally conclude that successful nation-building depends on sustained commitments of time, matériel, and manpower. Although this thesis improves upon earlier studies of democracy promotion, which often treated intentions as determinative, it does not fully reckon with the effect of antecedent conditions on external intervention. As this review addresses, American efforts at nation-building have historically been enabled or constrained by local political institutions. Rather than autonomously reengineering the target society, nation-builders have buttressed bureaucracies and parliaments where they were already available (Germany, Japan) and foundered in countries that lacked such institutions (Somalia, Haiti). In sum, nation-building has been most effective when pursued least ambitiously, amid functioning states with prior experience in constitutional government.
Democracy promotion has been an explicit doctrine of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the cold war. Between 1990 and 2003 resources for democracy programs increased by over 500 percent. Has this policy worked? Prior research has been inconclusive, relying either on case studies or on quantitative efforts that have not distinguished overall foreign assistance from democracy promotion. The authors answer this question using a new data set that includes program information for 165 countries for the years 1990–2003. The analysis distinguishes between direct and indirect causal mechanisms and employs a variety of statistical models that allow the authors to control for the unique democratization trend in each country when assessing causal effects, as well as for the potential endogeneity of U.S. democracy assistance. The analysis shows that democracy assistance does indeed have a significant impact.
To explain the distribution of civil wars, guerrilla warfare, and revolutionary outbreaks, the literature on modern political violence has shifted, broadly speaking, from a modernization perspective that emphasized the role of material conflict and of grievances to a more recent research program that stresses the geographical and organizational opportunities that insurgents may have to engage in violence. Drawing on those lines of inquiry equally, this article offers an integrated analytical model that considers both the motives and the opportunities of states and rebels. Civil wars, guerrillas, and revolutionary outbreaks are seen as a result of the nature and distribution of wealth in each country. Systematic and organized violent conflicts are most likely in economies where inequality is high and wealth is mostly immobile, that is, in societies where those worse off would benefit substantially from expropriating all assets. Violence is conditional on the mobilizational and organizational capacity of challengers and on the state capacity to control its territory. The theory is tested on data on civil wars from 1850 to 1999 for the whole world and on data on guerrilla warfare and revolutionary episodes spanning the years from 1919 to 1997 across all countries.
Can liberal interventionism build liberal democracy? This manuscript examines the military interventions undertaken by the U.S., U.K., France, and the UN in the post-World War II era to see if they had a positive impact on democracy in target countries. Empirical analysis centers on multivariate time series, cross section PCSE and relogit regressions of political liberalization and democratization from 1946 to 1996. The former is operationalized with annual difference data drawn from the Polity IV data collection, whereas the latter is a binary variable denoting countries that cross a threshold commonly used to indicate the establishment of democratic institutions. An updated version of the International Military Intervention data set enumerates foreign military interventions. We find little evidence that military intervention by liberal states helps to foster democracy in target countries. Although a few states have democratized in the wake of hostile U.S. military interventions, the small number of cases involved makes it difficult to draw generalizable conclusions from the U.S. record. We find stronger evidence, however, that supportive interventions by the UN's “Blue Helmets” can help to democratize target states.
Explaining cross-country differences in growth rates requires not only an understanding of the link between growth and public policies, but also an understanding of why countries choose different public policies. This paper shows that ethnic diversity helps explain cross-country differences in public policies and other economic indicators. In the case of Sub-Saharan Africa, economic growth is associated with low schooling, political instability, underdeveloped financial systems, distorted foreign exchange markets, high government deficits, and insufficient infrastructure. Africa's high ethnic fragmentation explains a significant part of most of these characteristics. Copyright 1997, the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Clarify is a program that uses Monte Carlo simulation to convert the raw output of statistical procedures into results that are of direct interest to researchers, without changing statistical assumptions or requiring new statistical models. The program, designed for use with the Stata statistics package, offers a convenient way to implement the techniques described in: Gary King, Michael Tomz, and Jason Wittenberg (2000). "Making the Most of Statistical Analyses: Improving Interpretation and Presentation." American Journal of Political Science 44, no. 2 (April 2000): 347-61. We recommend that you read this article before using the software. Clarify simulates quantities of interest for the most commonly used statistical models, including linear regression, binary logit, binary probit, ordered logit, ordered probit, multinomial logit, Poisson regression, negative binomial regression, weibull regression, seemingly unrelated regression equations, and the additive logistic normal model for compositional data. Clarify Version 2.1 is forthcoming (2003) in Journal of Statistical Software.
Kristian Gustafson’s Hostile Intent reexamines one of the most controversial chapters in U.S. intelligence history, the Central Intelligence Agency’s covert operations in Chile from 1964 to 1974. At the request of successive U.S. presidents, the CIA in conjunction with the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency first acted to prevent Chilean socialist Salvador Allende from becoming the democratically elected president of his country and then tried to undermine his government once he was in office. Allende’s government eventually fell in a bloody military coup on September 11, 1973. President Richard Nixon’s administration and corporate interests were not sorry to see him go, but did U.S. covert operations actually play a decisive role in Allende’s downfall? The declassification of thousands of U.S. government documents over the last several years demands that historians take a new look. Since 1973, most observers have maintained that U.S. machinations were responsible for the success of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s coup that forced Allende’s fall and suicide. This assessment has been based on a thin documentary record of U.S. activity, the myth of an all-powerful CIA, and the CIA’s checkered history of covert action in Latin America. However, Gustafson convincingly shows the conventional wisdom about the impact of U.S. actions is badly flawed. His meticulous research is based upon an intensive examination of previously unavailable U.S. records as well as interviews with key figures. Hostile Intent is the most comprehensive account to date of U.S. involvement in Chile, and its provocative reinterpretation of this involvement will shape all future debates.
The shifting nature of international conflict has prompted a rethinking of the Correlates of War Project's classification of wars. This research note describes the new expanded war typology and the resultant three war data sets. Lists of the qualifying wars in the inter-state, extra-state, and intrastate categories during the 1816-1997 period are appended.
If you were to examine an 1816 map of the world, you would discover that half the countries represented there no longer exist. Yet since 1945, the disappearance of individual states from the world stage has become rare.State Deathis the first book to systematically examine the reasons why some states die while others survive, and the remarkable decline of state death since the end of World War II.Grappling with what is a core issue of international relations, Tanisha Fazal explores two hundred years of military invasion and occupation, from eighteenth-century Poland to present-day Iraq, to derive conclusions that challenge conventional wisdom about state death. The fate of sovereign states, she reveals, is largely a matter of political geography and changing norms of conquest. Fazal shows how buffer states--those that lie between two rivals--are the most vulnerable and likely to die except in rare cases that constrain the resources or incentives of neighboring states. She argues that the United States has imposed such constraints with its global norm against conquest--an international standard that has largely prevented the violent takeover of states since 1945.State Deathserves as a timely reminder that should there be a shift in U.S. power or preferences that erodes the norm against conquest, violent state death may once again become commonplace in international relations.
Gleditsch and Ward (1999) examined the criteria for membership in the international system employed by the Correlates of War (COW) project and developed a revised list of independent nation states since 1816. These revisions in turn have implications for other datasets based on the COW system membership classification. This article suggests various revisions to the COW project's list of wars to create a dataset compatible with the revised list of independent states. It identifies additional wars that qualify as interstate or civil wars as well as additional participating states to these wars. I show how the COW project's criteria, based on recognition by France and the UK to identify states as system members in the Nineteenth century and early Twentieth century, understate the total amount of conflict between and within the independent states identified by the Gleditsch and Ward list. An appendix to the article displays a revised list of wars since 1816, with updates for 1997 to 2002 based on data compiled by the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University, and details several changes to the current release of the COW war data over the previous 1994 ICPSR release. The article concludes by outlining an agenda for future collection and improvement of data on wars.
Can foreign invaders successfully exploit industrial economies? Since control over economic resources is a key source of power, the answer affects the likelihood of aggression and how strenuously states should counter it. The resurgence of nationalism has led many policymakers and scholars to doubt that conquest still pays. But, until now, the "cumulativity" of industrial resources has never been subjected to systematic analysis.
Does Conquest Pay? demonstrates that expansion can, in fact, provide rewards to aggressor nations. Peter Liberman argues that invaders can exploit industrial societies for short periods of time and can maintain control and economic performance over the long term. This is because modern societies are uniquely vulnerable to coercion and repression. Hence, by wielding a gun in one hand and offering food with the other, determined conquerors can compel collaboration and suppress resistance. Liberman's argument is supported by several historical case studies: Germany's capture of Belgium and Luxembourg during World War I and of nearly all of Europe during World War II; France's seizure of the Ruhr in 1923-24; the Japanese Empire during 1910-45; and Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe in 1945-89.
Does Conquest Pay? suggests that the international system is more war-prone than many optimists claim. Liberman's findings also contribute to debates about the stability of empires and other authoritarian regimes, the effectiveness of national resistance strategies, and the sources of rebellious collective action.
theoretical rigor and empirical depth to a long-standing question of securities studies. He explores how various government leaders assess the cost of war in terms of domestic politics and their own postwar fates. Goemans first develops the argument that two sides will wage war until both gain sufficient knowledge of the other's strengths and weaknesses so as to agree on the probable outcome of continued war. Yet the incentives that motivate leaders to then terminate war, Goemans maintains, can vary greatly depending on the type of government they represent. The author looks at democracies, dictatorships, and mixed regimes and compares the willingness among leaders to back out of wars or risk the costs of continued warfare. Democracies, according to Goemans, will prefer to withdraw quickly from a war they are not winning in order to appease the populace. Autocracies will do likewise so as not to be overthrown by their internal enemies. Mixed regimes, which are made up of several competing groups and which exclude a substantial proportion of the people from access to power, will likely see little risk in continuing a losing war in the hope of turning the tide. Goemans explores the conditions and the reasoning behind this "gamble for resurrection" as well as other strategies, using rational choice theory, statistical analysis, and detailed case studies of Germany, Britain, France, and Russia during World War I. In so doing, he offers a new perspective of the Great War that integrates domestic politics, international politics, and battlefield developments.
Death rate from political violence is postulated to vary cross-nationally as a positively accelerated time-lagged function of income inequality and as a nonmonotonic inverted "U" function of regime repressiveness. The former hypothesis is consistent with approaches to the explanation of collective political violence that emphasize the general concept of discontent or, more specifically, relative deprivation; the latter hypothesis is consistent with a political-process version of the resource mobilization approach. In the context of a multivariate model estimated across two decades, 1958-67 and 1968-77, support is found for the inequality hypothesis. Support also is found for the regime repressiveness hypothesis in the decade (1968-77) for which the index of regime repressiveness is available. The U-curve effect of regime repressiveness appears to have stronger impact on variation in rates of deadly political violence than the positively accelerated effect of income inequality.
Audience costs enable leaders to make credible commitments and to communicate their intentions to their adversaries during a crisis. I explain audience costs by simultaneously modeling crisis behavior and the domestic reelection process. I assume that a leader's ability influences the outcome of a crisis. As such, voters use outcomes as a signal of their leaders' quality. Leaders have incentives to make statements that deter their enemies abroad, since these statements also enhance their standing at home. Yet, such "cheap talk" foreign policy declarations are only credible when leaders suffer domestically if they fail to fulfill their commitments. In equilibrium, false promises are only made by the least competent types of leaders. Leaders that break their promises suffer electorally. Because initial domestic conditions and institutional arrangements affect the vulnerability of leaders to these domestic costs, such factors influence the credibility of policy declarations and, therefore, the crisis outcome.
The shifting nature of international conflict has prompted a rethinking of the Correlates of War Project's classification of wars. This research note describes the new expanded war typology and the resultant three war data sets. Lists of the qualifying wars in the inter-state, extra-state, and intra-state categories during the 1816-1997 period are appended.
The empirical literature on civil war has seen tremendous growth because of the compilation of quantitative data sets, but there is no consensus on the measurement of civil war. This increases the risk of making inferences from unstable empirical results. Without ad hoc rules to code its start and end and differentiate it from other violence, it is difficult, if not impossible, to define and measure civil war. A wide range of variation in parameter estimates makes accurate predictions of war onset difficult, and differences in empirical results are greater with respect to war continuation.
Most tests of hypotheses about the effects of “ethnicity” on outcomes use data or measures that confuse or conflate what are termed ethnic structure and ethnic practice. This article presents a conceptualization of ethnicity that makes the distinction between these concepts clear; it demonstrates how confusion between structure and practice hampers the ability to test theories; and it presents two new measures of ethnic practice—ECI (the ethnic concentration index) and EVOTE (the percentage of the vote obtained by ethnic parties)—that illustrate the pay-offs of making this distinction and collecting data accordingly, using examples from the civil war literature.
International Security 29.1 (2004) 49-91
When Gen. Eric Shinseki, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, testified in February 2003 that an occupation of Iraq would require "something on the order of several hundred thousand troops," officials within George W. Bush's administration promptly disagreed. Within two days, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared, "It's not logical to me that it would take as many forces following the conflict as it would to win the war"; Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz characterized Shinseki's estimate as "wildly off the mark." More than a year after the occupation of Iraq began, the debate continues over the requirements and prospects for long-term success. History, however, does not bode well for this occupation. Despite the relatively successful military occupations of Germany and Japan after World War II, careful examination indicates that unusual geopolitical circumstances were the keys to success in those two cases, and historically military occupations fail more often than they succeed.
Why do some military occupations succeed whereas others fail? Although the occupation of Iraq has prompted a slew of analyses on op-ed pages, there is almost no academic literature answering this question. The most relevant studies choose "nation building" as their primary subject of interest and focus on liberal democracy and successful economies as key objectives. Nation building, however, is not the central goal of occupations, and, further, not all occupations aim to build nations. Rather, the primary objective of military occupation is to secure the interests of the occupying power and prevent the occupied territory from becoming a source of instability. When creating certain political or economic systems, such as liberal democracy or an open economy, has been the goal of an occupying power, it has been so because it was thought that democracy and open markets would further the occupying power's security goals. Security objectives and nation-building objectives sometimes coexist within occupations, but conflating occupation success with the establishment of liberal democracy and functioning economies is misguided. This study recognizes the different goals of military occupation and includes occupations with objectives other than nation building.
Further, in these studies of nation building, the logic of case selection is usually not explicitly presented. Discussions of the current occupation of Iraq often either turn to the relatively successful cases of post-World War II Germany and Japan or randomly select a subset of occupations to examine, but a valid study of occupations must examine both successes and failures. I present a data set of twenty-four military occupations since the Napoleonic Wars, which allows for a more systematic examination of the causes of occupation success and failure.
Finally, many studies of nation building offer interesting and provocative arguments, but they stop short of answering the most important questions. For example, a recent RAND study concludes that successful nation building requires a lengthy time commitment, normally at least five years, but that study does not ask what conditions are conducive to occupiers making the costly commitment to a lengthy occupation and to occupied populations accepting the extended presence of a foreign power. I explain why some occupations last long enough to succeed whereas others end prematurely and why some occupations, such as the U.S. occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the early twentieth century, fail despite their protracted nature.
The crux of my argument is that military occupations usually succeed only if they are lengthy, but lengthy occupations elicit nationalist reactions that impede success. Further, lengthy occupation produces anxiety in impatient occupying powers that would rather withdraw than stay. To succeed, therefore, occupiers must both maintain their own interest in a long occupation and convince an occupied population to accept extended control by a foreign power. More often than not, occupiers either fail to achieve those goals, or they achieve them only at a high cost.
Three factors, however, can make a successful occupation possible. The first factor is a recognition by the occupied population of the need for occupation. Thus, occupation is more likely to succeed in societies that have been decimated by war and require help in rebuilding...
This paper examines the relationship between foreign imposed regime change and war participation. The oppertunity and willingness of an opponent to impose a new regime on a war participant affects the likelihood that such a change will occur. Results from a logistic regression model suggest that (1) winning or losing the war, (2) the amount of war costs the participant endures, (3) the power of the participant relative to its opponent, (4) the amount of war costs the opponent endures, (5) the occurrence of a domestic regime change during the war, and (6) the difference between the authority structures of the war participant and its opponent all have a significant and sizable impact on the probability that a war participant endures a foreign imposed regime change. The first three variables measure the opponent's opportunity to force a regime change, while the last three measure its willingness. I suggest that these results increase our ability to evaluate the likely consequences of a war, and may have important implications for our understanding of the decision to enter and terminate a war.
Since the end of the Cold War the United States has led six major nation‐building operations – that is to say, the use of military force in the aftermath of a conflict to underpin a transition to democracy. In Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and most recently Iraq, the US has renewed with varying success a form of activity upon which it had embarked in Germany and Japan at the end of the Second World War. Study of these past missions suggests a host of lessons applicable today in Iraq, and raises the question of why, in light of its substantial and recent experience, the US government's learning curve appears so flat.
This article proposes that foreign-imposed regime changes (FIRCs) make civil war onset more likely when they damage state infrastructural power, as in the context of interstate war, and when they change the target’s political institutions as well as leadership. Using rare events logit to analyse civil war onset from 1920 to 2004, it is found that interstate war and institutional change are virtually necessary (though not sufficient) conditions for an FIRC to cause a civil war. Many control variables are included. The results are robust to different research design specifications; nevertheless, they cannot confirm that occupation troops make an FIRC more likely to spark civil war.
International peacebuilding can improve the prospects that a civil war will be resolved. Although peacebuilding strategies must be designed to address particular conflicts, broad parameters that fit most conflicts can be identified. Strategies should address the local roots of hostility; the local capacities for change; and the (net) specific degree of international commitment available to assist change. One can conceive of these as the three dimensions of a triangle, whose area is the "political space"—or effective capacity—for building peace. We test these propositions with an extensive data set of 124 post-World War Two civil wars and find that multilateral, United Nations peace operations make a positive difference. UN peacekeeping is positively correlated with democratization processes after civil war and multilateral enforcement operations are usually successful in ending the violence. Our study provides broad guidelines to design the appropriate peacebuilding strategy, given the mix of hostility, local capacities, and international capacities.
Researchers typically analyze time-series-cross-section data with a binary dependent variable (BTSCS) using ordinary logit or probit. However, BTSCS observations are likely to violate the independence assumption of the ordinary logit or probit statistical model. It is well known that if the observations are temporally related that the results of an ordinary logit or probit analysis may be misleading. In this paper, we provide a simple diagnostic for temporal dependence and a simple remedy. Our remedy is based on the idea that BTSCS data are identical to grouped duration data. This remedy does not require the BTSCS analyst to acquire any further methodological skills, and it can be easily implemented in any standard statistical software package. While our approach is suitable for any type of BTSCS data, we provide examples and applications from the field of International Relations, where BTSCS data are frequently used. We use our methodology to reassess Oneal and Russett's (1997) findings regarding the relationship between economic interdependence, democracy, and peace. Our analyses show that (1) their finding that economic interdependence is associated with peace is an artifact of their failure to account for temporal dependence yet (2) their finding that democracy inhibits conflict is upheld even taking duration dependence into account.
Does ethnicity matter for explaining violence during civil wars? I exploit variation in the identity of soldiers who conducted so-called “sweep” operations (zachistki) in Chechnya (2000–5) as an empirical strategy for testing the link between ethnicity and violence. Evidence suggests that the intensity and timing of insurgent attacks are conditional on who “swept” a particular village. For example, attacks decreased by about 40% after pro-Russian Chechen sweeps relative to similar Russian-only operations. These changes are difficult to reconcile with notions of Chechen solidarity or different tactical choices. Instead, evidence, albeit tentative, points toward the existence of a wartime “coethnicity advantage.” Chechen soldiers, enmeshed in dense intraethnic networks, are better positioned to identify insurgents within the population and to issue credible threats against civilians for noncooperation. A second mechanism - prior experience as an insurgent - may also be at work. These findings suggest new avenues of research investigating the conditional effects of violence in civil wars.
Do superpower interventions to install and prop up political leaders in other countries subsequently result in more or less democracy, and does this effect vary depending on whether the intervening superpower is democratic or authoritarian? While democracy may be expected to decline contemporaneously with superpower interference, the effect on democracy after a few years is far from obvious. The absence of reliable information on covert interventions has hitherto served as an obstacle to seriously addressing these questions. The recent declassification of Cold War CIA and KGB documents now makes it possible to systematically address these questions in the Cold War context. We thus develop a new panel dataset of superpower interventions during the Cold War. We find that superpower interventions are followed by significant declines in democracy, and that the substantive effects are large. Perhaps surprisingly, once endogeneity is addressed, US and Soviet interventions have equally detrimental effects on the subsequent level of democracy; both decrease democracy by about 33%. Our findings thus suggest that one should not expect significant differences in the adverse institutional consequences of superpower interventions based on whether the intervening superpower is a democracy or a dictatorship.
In most studies of the impact of ethnic diversity on economic growth, diversity is hypothesized to affect growth through its effect on macroeconomic policies. This article shows that most measures of ethnic diversity (including the commonly used ELF measure) are inappropriate for testing this hypothesis. This is because they are constructed from enumerations of ethnic groups that include all of the ethnographically distinct groups in a country irrespective of whether or not they engage in the political competition whose effects on macroeconomic policymaking are being tested. I present a new index of ethnic fractionalization based on an accounting of politically relevant ethnic groups in 42 African countries. I employ this measure (called PREG, for Politically Relevant Ethnic Groups) to replicate Easterly and Levine's influential article on Africa's “growth tragedy.” I find that PREG does a much better job of accounting for the policy-mediated effects of ethnic diversity on economic growth in Africa than does ELF.
In 2003, American policymakers linked the democratization of Iraq with greater peace, democracy, and prosperity in the Middle East. We elaborate this regional-level policy argument theoretically and test it empirically on a global sample of states for the twentieth century. We differentiate the impact of fully and weakly democratic externally imposed polities (“bright” versus “dim” beacons, respectively) on regional interstate war, democratization, and economic growth. We conclude that (1) bright beacons reduce, while dim beacons increase war; (2) bright beacons do not stimulate democratization, while dim beacons undermine democratization; and (3) bright beacons stimulate prosperity, while dim beacons undermine prosperity.
Although published works rarely include causal estimates from more than a few model specifications, authors usually choose
the presented estimates from numerous trial runs readers never see. Given the often large variation in estimates across choices
of control variables, functional forms, and other modeling assumptions, how can researchers ensure that the few estimates
presented are accurate or representative? How do readers know that publications are not merely demonstrations that it is possible to find a specification that fits the author's favorite hypothesis? And how do we evaluate or even define statistical properties
like unbiasedness or mean squared error when no unique model or estimator even exists? Matching methods, which offer the promise
of causal inference with fewer assumptions, constitute one possible way forward, but crucial results in this fast-growing
methodological literature are often grossly misinterpreted. We explain how to avoid these misinterpretations and propose a
unified approach that makes it possible for researchers to preprocess data with matching (such as with the easy-to-use software
we offer) and then to apply the best parametric techniques they would have used anyway. This procedure makes parametric models
produce more accurate and considerably less model-dependent causal inferences.
Civil war is the most prevalent form of large-scale violence and is massively destructive to life, society, and the economy. The prevention of civil war is therefore a key priority for international attention. We present an empirical analysis of what makes countries prone to civil war. Using a global panel data set we examine different determinants of civil war for the period 1960–2004. We find little evidence that motivation can account for civil war risk but we suggest that there is evidence to support our feasibility hypothesis: that where a rebellion is financially and militarily feasible it will occur.
JEL classifications: O10, D74.
This research note develops a new explanation of postwar peace duration: periods of peace following wars last longer when the war ends in foreign-imposed regime change. This study tests this hypothesis on a new data set (an expansion of Fortna's (2004) data) of all periods of peace following interstate war cease-fires, over the period 1914 2001. It also tests for other possible factors affecting postwar peace duration, including international institutions, the revelation of information during war, third-party intervention during war, postwar changes in the balance of power, regime type, past conflict history, and others. The article finds strong support for the central hypothesis that peace lasts longer following wars that end in foreign-imposed regime change. This pacifying effect diminishes over time when a puppet is imposed, but not when a democracy is imposed. There are other results, including that the strength of a cease-fire agreement has almost no impact on peace duration.