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Force structure and counterinsurgency outcome: the case of the Cyprus Emergency (1955-1959)
Abstract
This article examines the Cyprus Emergency (1955–1959) to test the force structure thesis. According to the thesis, armies that deploy more manpower per armored vehicle would succeed in counterinsurgency because they could win people’s trust, secure intelligence from civilians, and use force selectively. Using the congruence method of within-case analysis, I show that the causal process and logic of the force structure argument are not confirmed in the favorable case of Cyprus. Despite its preference for infantry and police units, the British garrison failed to win over the people and persuade civilians to share information about the insurgent; besides, Britain’s intelligence breakthroughs and selective violence did not result from the logic of the force structure thesis, nor did the conflict end as the argument would predict. Political conditions, instead, played a greater role. Ultimately, the case of Cyprus warns against the reassuring belief, inherent in the force structure thesis, that military organizational adjustments in favor of manpower can pave the way to victory against irregular opponents.
... 22 Similarly, Scarinzi finds a mix of both approaches in his review of successful COIN operations in 1955-1959 Cyprus. 23 These suggest that contrary to current stark divisions in COIN theory past COIN conflicts utilize hybrid models. Having reviewed the main COIN force employment approaches, we next survey studies examining COIN force structure, specifically, mechanization. ...
Are some conventional military units better equipped to conduct counterinsurgency (COIN) operations than others? COIN theorists and practitioners disagree about mechanization’s impact on COIN effectiveness. We suggest that mechanization is not the critical determinant of COIN effectiveness. Rather, mechanization’s effects vary based on a unit’s force employment approach within local scope conditions. To test our hypothesis, we explore how mechanization impacts COIN operations in Ramadi and Basra and find that force employment is the critical determinant in COIN effectiveness. We introduce an adaptive force employment hypothesis that outlines how mechanization includes costs to exposing dismounted troops and benefits in information-sharing, conditional on local insurgent strength. This hypothesis suggests that mechanized forces provide significant benefits to counterinsurgents when clearing high strength insurgents, outweighing benefits from dismounted civilian interaction. Following successful clearance operations when government control is increased and insurgent strength is reduced, requirements for armored protection decrease while civilian tips become increasingly important to target remaining insurgents. In the hold and build stages, counterinsurgents can increasingly rely on dismounted troops.
Rwandan military behavior in Mozambique operationalizes Kigali’s rhetorical commitment to aggressively defend endangered civilians. The counterinsurgency doctrine applied in Cabo Delgado balances insurgent pursuit and civilian protection through a combination of contact patrolling and tactical restraint. This formula demonstrates learning from the country’s past experience with domestic rebellion and international peacekeeping but contrasts sharply with Rwandan army conduct in eastern Congo. The disparity suggests Rwandan battlefield demeanor is conditioned by institutional culture and role conception. The campaign underscores the influence of ideology on Rwandan soldiers' self-understanding and complicates the equivalence of nondemocratic regime type with repressive strategies of counterinsurgency.
This study emamines the Cyprus Question within a historical period
beginning in 1960 and ceasing in 1963. It sheds light on international actors',
particularly Turkey’s attitudes towards Cyprus. It reaches to the conclusion
that Turkey and Turkish Cypriot leadership aimed for preservation of the
constitutional order as well as the international status quo provided by Zurich�London treaties. Nevertheless, Greek Cypriot leadership was displeased with
the treaties and constitutional order. It aimed for fundamental revisions in
Zurich-London treaties as well as significant constitutional amendments to
pave the way for Enosis. The political tension on the island had, since the very
beginning, been considerably high. In November 1963, Greek Cypriot
leadership demanded a set of constitutional amendments that would terminate
Turkish Cypriots’ status as the equal partners of the state. This led to a sharp
political conflict, an international crisis and ethnic violence.
Despite the emphasis in doctrine and academia that counterinsurgency is in its essence political, these operations are all too commonly discussed and approached as primarily military endeavors. Informed by the need to refocus counterinsurgency studies, this article revisits a foundational case of the canon – the Malayan Emergency – to discuss its political (i.e., not military) unfolding. The analysis distinguishes itself by emphasizing the diplomatic processes, negotiations, and deals that gave strategic meaning to the military operations underway. In so doing, the article also generates insight on the use of leverage and elite bargains in creating new political settlements and bringing insurgent conflicts to an end.
Why, in spite of past failures, do liberal democracies continue to intervene militarily and fight counterinsurgency wars? The answer is grounded in learning. Liberal democracies acknowledge past failures, tracing them to the interaction between the events on the battlefield and society at home. Specifically, they identify the educated middle class and its mix of expedient and altruistic motivations as preventing effective military campaigns and victory. Hence, the main effort of liberal democracies is that they aim to fight wars that are divorced from society. At their disposal are advanced military technology, the professional all-volunteer force, proxies and alliance partners, and private military companies. The desocialising effects of these are complemented by control of the media and thereby the flow of information from the battlefield to society. Liberal democracies have found a way to continue to play the violent game of world politics, but they do so less democratically as they fight asocial wars.
The paper gives an overview of how the armed struggle of EOKA against the British colonial rule in Cyprus between 1955 and 1959 affected relations between Greece and Great Britain. More specifically, it focuses on the Greek perspective on how the Anglo-Greek relation was evolved due to EOKA’s insurgency, by exploring the attitude of Athens towards EOKA, by investigating whether or not the Greek government backed the armed organisation (and by explaining its reasons for doing so) as well as by dealing with the debate between Greece and Britain at the United Nations in order to support their position in relation to EOKA’s insurgent activities. It argues that Athens perceived EOKA’s struggle as a calamity on Anglo-Greek relations and to a great extent as an additional obstacle in the way for solving the Cyprus question. For this reason, it is suggested that, by making EOKA dependent on supplies from Greece, the Karamanlis’s government, tried to exercise indirect control over its activities.
Recent historical research exposed the myth of self-restraint as the distinctive feature of British counterinsurgency during decolonisation. This article shows that the revisionist historiography of British counterinsurgency has important, but unnoticed, implications for political scientists. Specifically, historical scholarship challenges the predictions and causal mechanisms of the main social scientific theses of civilian victimisation in counterinsurgency. Using revisionist historians’ works as a source of data, I test those theses against Britain’s decolonisation conflicts. I find that they do not pass the test convincingly. I conclude that political scientists should be more willing to explore the theoretical implications of new historical evidence on counterinsurgency campaigns.
This article argues that militant clients should be understood as a pillar of Iran's grand strategy and an extension of its military power. The article examines why Iran has relied on militant clients since the 1979 revolution and the benefits and costs of its client approach. In evaluating these issues, it identifies five main areas where Iran has gained from its client strategy: 1) maintaining independence from the West; 2) successfully exporting its religio-political worldview; 3) extending its military reach and power; 4) reducing political costs of its foreign activities; and 5) establishing needed regional allies. It further identifies five main dangers that Iran faces by continuing its strategic behavior: 1) increased pressure from the United States and a broader US military regional footprint; 2) more unified regional adversaries; 3) the risk of unintended escalation with the United States and regional adversarial states; and 4) enduring regional instability and insecurity.
Why do some civil conflicts end quickly, while others last for years? We argue that an incumbent government’s military forces play a crucial role in conflict duration. Specifically, combined arms militaries—which bring to bear a mixture of mechanized infantry, armor, and aircraft—make short conflicts more likely. The use of mechanized ground forces in combination with airpower increases the likelihood of decisive engagements early in a conflict, helping to mitigate information asymmetries that can drive violence. By contrast, less-mechanized forces face greater difficulty bringing the fight to the enemy. Combined arms militaries therefore tend to bring conflicts to more rapid conclusions. However, like maneuver warfare in conventional interstate conflict, these outcomes do not always favor incumbent governments. To test this argument, we employ new, detailed data on military mechanization and airpower from civil conflicts between 1967 and 2003. The results indicate that national militaries with high combined arms capabilities are associated with significantly shorter conflicts. Perhaps surprisingly, this relationship remains robust even when we limit the analysis to insurgencies.
Debates over how governments can defeat insurgencies ebb and flow with international events, becoming particularly contentious when the United States encounters problems in its efforts to support a counterinsurgent government. Often the United States confronts these problems as a zero-sum game in which the government and the insurgents compete for popular support and cooperation. The U.S. prescription for success has had two main elements: to support liberalizing, democratizing reforms to reduce popular grievances; and to pursue a military strategy that carefully targets insurgents while avoiding harming civilians. An analysis of contemporaneous documents and interviews with participants in three cases held up as models of the governance approach—Malaya, Dhofar, and El Salvador—shows that counterinsurgency success is the result of a violent process of state building in which elites contest for power, popular interests matter little, and the government benefits from uses of force against civilians.
Historically, insurgency is one of the most prevalent forms of armed conflict and it is likely to remain common in the foreseeable future. Recent experiences with counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan offer many lessons for future counterinsurgents, but the discourse on the subject continues to be mired in a traditional dichotomy pitting population-centric approaches to counterinsurgency against enemy-centric approaches. Historical analysis suggests that this traditional dichotomy is not a sufficiently nuanced way to understand or plan for such operations. Instead, discussions of counterinsurgency should focus on two dimensions: actions (use of physical force vs. political or moral actions) and targets (active insurgents vs. insurgent support). This perspective divides the space of possible counterinsurgency efforts into four quadrants, suggesting that effective counterinsurgency campaigns find a balance of effort across the four quadrants that is well matched to the specific context.
Can former insurgents in the service of counterinsurgent paramilitaries be considered a perfectly loyal force? What mechanisms may help to deter subsequent defections of individuals who have already “betrayed” once? Drawing on a unique set of primary data, this article examines the effective counter-defection practices of Chechnya’s pro-Moscow paramilitaries toward prospective defectors from among ex-insurgents. It explores three interwoven mechanisms employed with various intensities to avert “double defections” at the peak of the locally fought counterinsurgency in Chechnya from 2000 to 2005. These mechanisms are: a) extrajudicial executions of recidivists and their relatives, b) initiation violence targeting insurgents’ relatives, and c) disclosure of the identities of defected insurgents who were responsible for killing insurgents in combat to the families of slain insurgents.
During the Cyprus Emergency the British administration made considerable use of both Cypriot and Turkish collaborators as policemen and civil servants. Most were able to sink back into the safety of their own ethnic community after the Emergency, but some had become pariahs and had to look to the departing British for succour. They were the small group of Greek Cypriots who actively collaborated with the British against EOKA (National Organization of Cypriot Fighters), and the even smaller group of Turkish Cypriots who worked with them against the Turkish underground organisation, TMT. This article uses newly released archival materials to explore the history of these collaborators, asking questions about their recruitment, their actions, and the risks and dangers they faced. Evidence emerges as to how the British rewarded and subsequently treated these collaborators, how those who applied for asylum fared, and what happened to them once they arrived in Britain.
A commonly held Greek Cypriot opinion is that the EOKA struggle failed to achieve its objective of enosis because of some dark machination. According to this view, the 'heroic' struggle of EOKA was frustrated either because of the inept handling of the Cyprus problem by the Greek government and/or Makarios or because of some international intrigue which undermined the 'fair' demand for enosis resulting in the reluctant independence of 1960. This paper will assess these claims in light of the available historical evidence and demonstrate that they are fundamentally flawed. It will argue that no conspiracy took place in the 1950s against the Greek Cypriots and that independence was a consequence of the forces that were set in motion in 1955. Finally it will discuss both the reasons for the proliferation of such theories and whether there is a need for mainstream history to respond to such theories.
'The experience of numerous small wars has provided the British Army with a unique insight into this demanding form of conflict.' (Ministry of Defence, 2001). Over the next decade these claims unravelled spectacularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, and this book suggests that one reason for that was because contemporary British counter-insurgency doctrine was based upon a serious mis-reading of the past. Many observers believed that during their wars of decolonisation in the two decades after 1945 the British had discovered how western liberal notions of right and wrong could be made compatible with the imperatives of waging war amongst the people, that force could be used effectively but with care, and that a more just and prosperous society could emerge from these struggles. By using only the minimum necessary force, and doing so with the utmost discrimination, the British were able to win by securing the 'hearts and minds' of the people. But this was a serious distortion of actual British practice on the ground. The main contention of this book is that the British hid their use of naked force behind a carefully constructed veneer of legality. In reality they commonly used wholesale coercion, including cordon and search operations, mass detention without trial, forcible population resettlement, and the creation of free-fire zones, to intimidate and lock-down the civilian population. They were nasty, not nice, to the people amongst whom they were operating.
This article fills the gap in existing scholarship on asymmetric conflict, indigenous forces, and how socio-cultural codes shape the dynamics and outcomes of conflict transformation. Specifically, it identifies three key socio-cultural values commonplace in honorific societies: retaliation, hospitality, and silence. As sources of effective pro-insurgent violent mobilisation and support from among the local population, these values provide insurgents with an asymmetric advantage over much stronger incumbents. Using the case studies of the two Russian counterinsurgencies in Chechnya, the article shows the mechanisms on the ground through which Moscow’s deployment of indigenous forces against insurgents helped to stem the tide of conflict, reversing the insurgents’ initial advantage in terms of asymmetry of values.
The Cyprus Emergency is often lumped together with Malaya and Kenya as an example of British counter-insurgency practice in the 1950s. Malaya and Kenya in particular are often used as models of how to succeed. The general perception is that these counter-insurgency campaigns, which are often connected with the strategy of ‘winning hearts and minds’, were highly successful,1 1. Newsinger, British Counterinsurgency, 1. View all notes and have ‘become synonymous with the conduct of a successful counter-insurgency campaign’,2 2. Benest, ‘Aden to Northern Ireland 1966–76’, 119. View all notes in contrast with the methods employed by the French in Indo-China and Algeria, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique, the Americans in Vietnam, and the Soviets in Afghanistan. However, Cyprus, which tends to be comparatively neglected and less studied, presents a far less rosy and more problematic picture of British counter-insurgency practices in the 1950s. The geography and politics of Malaya and Kenya make them unsuitable as a model for counter-insurgency operations in the very different situation in Cyprus between 1954 and 1959. Rather than the usual comparison with Malaya and Kenya, Cyprus should be seen in parallel not only with Palestine, Aden, and Northern Ireland but also with Portugal and Rhodesia.
This article analyses the steps taken by the Russian government, with the aid of a powerful local clan, the so-called Kadyrovtsy, to subdue the Chechen insurgency. It highlights the strategy used by Russia, under whose patronage former anti-Russian guerrilla fighters were transformed into paramilitary allies of the Russian government; later these former insurgents were incorporated into the regular Russian army and other state security forces. The article also identifies problems that are connected with the activities of the Kadyrovtsy in Chechnya and Russia, and the spillover into the diaspora; it also contextualises the issues faced by the contemporary Chechen ruling clan and the geopolitics of the Caucasus within the research framework of paramilitarism and counterinsurgency.
The Cypriot Orthodox Church played an essential role in the Greek-Cypriot struggle for political unification with Greece (enosis) during the 1950s. Church support was both ideological and material, providing the philosophical basis for the campaign directed against British rule and partnering with the armed group EOKA; in this way, the church shaped the struggle’s inception and its course. But the struggle also inherited the church’s limitations; irredentist, Christian-Orthodox, and anti-communist, its rigid ideology excluded and antagonized Cyprus’s Turkish minority and the Greek-Cypriot left wing, fatally pigeon-holing enosis as a movement of the Greek-Cypriot right. At the same time, church leaders, particularly Archbishop Makarios III, struggled with the idea of employing fatal violence to further the cause. This tension eventually undercut the use of violence to achieve enosis and contributed to the negotiated compromise of independence.
Traditionally, the development of a secular identity within the Muslim minority on Cyprus has been attributed to the British administration as part of a ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.1 Those who accept this argument have implied that Turkish-Cypriot nationalism is to some extent less genuine than Greek-Cypriot nationalism, an artificial identity imposed by an external source. Yet not only does this ignore the nature of national identity, which has been overlooked in the discussion of nationalist development on Cyprus, it also seems to credit the British with too much foresight and control. This article questions whether the development of a Turkish identity within the Muslim population was primarily based on British encouragement. It also argues that Turkish-Cypriot nationalism, rather than being ‘late’ or ‘imposed’, emerged similarly to other national identities. As the 1950–1951 attempt to appoint a mufti demonstrates, Turkish-Cypriot leadership appeared in spite of rather than because of the colonial administration. Indeed, the incident shows how British officials misunderstood the desires and concerns of the Turkish Cypriots just as much as they did Greek-Cypriot feelings regarding Enosis.
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.
A recent article, ‘Rage Against the Machines’, does a disservice to the debate over what explains counterinsurgency (COIN) success. While it establishes a negative correlation between the diffusion of military mechanization in the state system and COIN success, its theoretical argument does not hold up under close scrutiny and its micro-case comparison of two units in Iraq during 2003–2004 ignores obvious counter-examples and factors that influence COIN success, such as leadership. A deeper inquiry would have revealed that there is much more to COIN success than simply not having access to vehicles.
This article examines the ambiguous role played by the Cyprus Police Force during the Greek Cypriot insurgency against Britain between 1955 and 1959. A multiethnic force policing a multiethnic society, the CPF struggled to fulfill its duties. Greek Cypriot officers became ineffective as sympathy for, or fear of insurgents undermined their ability to function. Some collaborated, others resigned. Those who stayed became targets of their own people. Turkish Cypriot officers, recruited in greater numbers to compensate for a reduction in Greek Cypriot officers, worked to enforce the law, but exacerbated intercommunal relations in doing so. In spite of the peculiar conditions present in Cyprus, the case has valuable implications for contemporary policymakers on the vulnerabilities inherent in the use of local police forces to restore law and order in ethnically divided societies.
What can explain the decline in incumbent victory in counterinsurgency wars? Political scientists offer a variety of explanations for these trends. Some focus on the structure and doctrine of counterinsurgent forces, while others emphasize the lethality and motivation of insurgent adversaries. I challenge these explanations. Declines in incumbent victory in counterinsurgency wars are not driven by fundamental shifts in the character of these conflicts, but in the political context in which they take place. Nineteenth-century colonial incumbents enjoyed a variety of political advantages-including strong political will, a permissive international environment, access to local collaborators, and flexibility to pick their battles-which granted them the time and resources necessary to meet insurgent challenges. In contrast, twentieth-century colonial incumbents struggled in the face of apathetic publics, hostile superpowers, vanishing collaborators, and constrained options. The decline in incumbent victory in counterinsurgency warfare, therefore, stems not from problems in force structure or strategy, but in political shifts in the profitability and legitimacy of colonial forms of governance.
A capital- and firepower-intensive military doctrine is, in general, poorly suited for combating an insurgency. It is therefore puzzling that democracies, particularly the United States, tenaciously pursue such a suboptimal strategy over long periods of time and in successive conflicts. This tendency poses an empirical challenge to the argument that democracies tend to win the conflicts they enter. This apparently nonstrategic behavior results from a condition of moral hazard owing to the shifting of costs away from the average voter. The voter supports the use of a capital-intensive doctrine in conflicts where its effectiveness is low because the decreased likelihood of winning is out-weighed by the lower costs of fighting. This theory better explains the development of the United States' counterinsurgency strategy in Vietnam during Lyndon Johnson's administration compared to the dominant interpretation, which blames the U.S. military's myopic bureaucracy and culture for its counterproductive focus on firepower and conventional warfare.
Why did violence decline in Iraq in 2007? Many policymakers and scholars credit the "surge," or the program of U.S. reinforcements and doctrinal changes that began in January 2007. Others cite the voluntary insurgent stand-downs of the Sunni Awakening or say that the violence had simply run its course with the end of a wave of sectarian cleansing; still others credit an interaction between the surge and the Awakening. The difference matters for policy and scholarship, yet this debate has not moved from hypothesis to test. An assessment of the competing claims based on recently declassified data on violence at local levels and information gathered from seventy structured interviews with coalition participants finds little support for the cleansing or Awakening theses. Instead, a synergistic interaction between the surge and the Awakening was required for violence to drop as quickly and widely as it did: both were necessary; neither was sufficient. U.S. policy thus played an important role in reducing the violence in Iraq in 2007, but Iraq provides no evidence that similar methods will produce similar results elsewhere without local equivalents of the Sunni Awakening.
The paper begins by presenting 10 reasons for the enduring Greek–Turkish rivalry and indicates that all of them can be overcome (and at times have been overcome). Yet they retain their salience, with no resolution of the outstanding Greek–Turkish differences in sight in spite of extensive bilateral talks. The thrust of the paper is that the non-resolution of the Greek–Turkish conflict is less due to the incompatibility of tangible interests and above all the result of their chosen national identities cum historical narratives: their collective identities which are built on slighting and demonizing the ‘Other’ and concomitant national historical narratives, both of which are presented in detail. The article concludes with ‘what is to be done’ by, inter alia, using Alexander Wendt’s approach of critical thinking and attitude change.
Will a strategy change toward one of “hearts and minds” alter the eventual outcome of the American-led allied war effort in Afghanistan? We investigate this question by analyzing 66 cases of counterinsurgency warfare from the twentieth century in which a foreign power seeks to defend a central authority in a state or colonial territory against an insurgency. We identify whether and when a foreign power implemented a change in its counterinsurgency strategy, whether said change involved a shift toward a strategy reflecting a hearts and minds emphasis, as well as the foreign power's eventual success or failure in prevailing over insurgents. We find that while shifting toward a strategy of hearts and minds increases the chances for success, the improvement is modest and requires nearly a decade to produce. Furthermore, we find that the impact of a strategy change is conditional on the timing of the change, with a “window of opportunity” associated with success closing after approximately eight years of war. Our findings bode poorly for allied efforts in contemporary Afghanistan.
This paper seeks to explore how a particular narrative focused on population-centric counterinsurgency shaped American strategy during the Autumn 2009 Presidential review on Afghanistan, examine the narrative's genealogy and suggest weaknesses and inconsistencies that exist within it. More precisely our ambition is to show how through a process of ‘rhetorical re-description’ this narrative has come to dominate contemporary American strategic discourse. We argue that in order to promote and legitimate their case, a contemporary ‘COIN Lobby’ of influential warrior scholars, academics and commentators utilizes select historical interpretations of counterinsurgency and limits discussion of COIN to what they consider to be failures in implementation. As a result, it has become very difficult for other ways of conceptualizing the counterinsurgency problem to emerge into the policy debate.
How does manpower affect counterinsurgency? Important debates about counterinsurgency theory, military doctrine, force planning, and ongoing military operations revolve around assumptions about the role manpower plays in determining counterinsurgency outcomes. But these assumptions have not, by and large, been subjected to large-n analysis. This paper helps serve that role by examining new data on counterinsurgents’ deployments across 171 campaigns since World War I. These data provide insight into a range of important issues, such as how force size should be measured, whether it is related to counterinsurgent success, whether troop nationality matters, and whether the role of manpower varies across contexts. Of these findings, the most notable is that conventional rules of thumb for force sizing, including the recommendation put forth in official US military doctrine, receive no empirical support. These findings therefore challenge the prevailing wisdom, while laying the groundwork for a range of future scholarship.
Counterinsurgency (COIN) has again emerged as a topic of both contemporary and historical interest in the age of what has been called a global counterinsurgency. However, little attention is being paid to the historical lineage of a COIN doctrine that is being rediscovered and promoted by an enthusiastic group of military intellectuals and commanders as the basis for US Army and Marine Corps doctrine. This article argues that historical claims for COIN success, based on courting popular gratitude by improving economic conditions, are at best anchored in selective historical memory, when not fantasy fabrications. The first argument of this article is that COIN does not constitute a distinct form of warfare, but merely a sub-set of minor tactics. Second, ‘hearts and minds’, so-called population-centric warfare, has seldom been a recipe for lasting stability. Rather, historically counterinsurgency succeeded when it has shattered and divided societies by severely disrupting civilian life. In fact, COIN is a nineteenth century legacy of empire whose uniqueness and impact was mythologized in its own day, and that is unlikely to prove a formula for strategic success in the twenty-first century.
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.
Recent research suggests that a crucial factor in understanding the outcomes of military conflicts is the extent to which militaries are mechanized—that is, their relative dependence on tanks and armored vehicles compared to manpower. Since World War II, militaries have become increasingly mechanized both among the great powers and in unexpected quarters of the developing world. Yet the extent of military mechanization varies widely across states. Why have some states adopted highly mechanized force structures, while others have not? This paper tests several hypotheses about the determinants of military mechanization. One perspective suggests that strategic factors—including the force structures of adversaries and neighbors, recent combat lessons, and internal insurgency threats—shape a military’s mix of manpower and vehicles. A second set of hypotheses points instead to domestic institutions such as democracy and civilian control of the military. Still other theories emphasize economic forces and international norms. To test these and other hypotheses, we construct a new data set containing mechanization rates for more than 150 militaries from 1979 to 2001. Broadly, we find significant support for the strategic perspective and little support for domestic institutional explanations. In addition, the results suggest systematic and predictable differences in the ways states structure their militaries in response to security pressures.
Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences. By Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 331p. 20.00 paper.
In recent years, there has been a surge in work on what has come to be known as “qualitative methods.” The trend is essentially reactive, developing as a response to the outpouring of work on quantitative and formal methods and the assertions by scholars in those areas that case studies and historical work are impressionistic, unscientific, and noncumulative. To counter such claims, some of the field's most distinguished qualitative scholars (e.g., Stephan Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science, 1997; James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds., Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, 2003; and Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History, 2006) have spent much time and ink to show that researchers who eschew regressions or game theory can be just as methodologically aware and sophisticated as those who embrace them. Alexander George and Andrew Bennett's Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences is an impressive and welcome addition to this literature.