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| 1 |
ID:
131415
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2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The outbreak of the First World War remains a great historical puzzle and a source of concern, for if we do not understand how it came about we run the risk of stumbling into a similar catastrophe. This article draws parallels between the world of 1914 and the present. It starts with comfortable assumptions made by so many, then and now, that a major conflict was impossible or improbable and then looks at the paradox that globalization not only made the world more interdependent and linked, but also fostered intense local and national identities. It suggests factors that propelled Europe to war in 1914, including national rivalries, imperialism, the arms race and a shifting power balance between rising and declining powers, as well as ideologies and assumptions such as Social Darwinism and militarism, and points out that similar forces and ideas are present today. The article also stresses the dangerous complacency that can arise as a result of decision-makers having successfully dealt with a series of crises. European decision-makers also assumed that they could successfully use war as an instrument of policy and largely ignored or explained away the mounting evidence that the advantage in conflict was swinging to the defence. Again, as the author points out, there are disquieting parallels with the present.
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| 2 |
ID:
130322
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2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Although the widening confrontation over the political future of the Crimean peninsula and other parts of the former Soviet Union has ruptured already-strained relations between Moscow and the West and put at risk the implementation of some nuclear risk-reduction initiatives and agreements, Russia is not planning to stop allowing the on-site inspections required under the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), Russian officials said last month. To protest Russia's actions to take control of Crimea, the seven non-Russian members of the Group of Eight (G-8) industrialized countries have suspended Russia's membership in the group. As part of that decision, the seven countries-Canada, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States-changed the location of their planned June summit from Sochi to Brussels. The Russian actions in Crimea have disrupted planning for the activities of the Global Partnership against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, which the G-8 launched in 2002.
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| 3 |
ID:
130356
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2014.
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The Global Nuclear Disarmament and risk reduction enterprise is at a crossroads as U.S.-Russian relations have reached perhaps their lowest point in more than a quarter century. Nevertheless, it remains in U.S. and Russian interests to implement existing nuclear risk reduction agreements and pursue practical, low-risk steps to lower tensions. Present circumstances demand new approaches to resolve stubborn challenges to deeper nuclear cuts and the establishment of a new framework to address Euro-Atlantic security issues.
Even before the recent political turmoil in Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin's extralegal occupation and annexation of Crimea, relations between Moscow and Washington were chilly. Despite U.S. adjustments to its missile defense plans in Europe that eliminate any threat to Russian strategic missiles, Putin rebuffed U.S. President Barack Obama's proposal last June to reduce U.S. and Russian strategic stockpiles by one-third below the ceilings set by the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START).
Moving forward will be difficult, but doing nothing is not an option. Through earlier crises during and after the Cold War, U.S. and Russian leaders pursued effective arms control and disarmament initiatives that increased mutual security and significantly reduced the nuclear danger. Much has been achieved, albeit too slowly, but there is far more to be done.
As the world's non-nuclear-weapon states persuasively argue, U.S. and Russian stockpiles still far exceed any plausible deterrence requirements, and the use of just a few nuclear weapons by any country would have catastrophic global consequences. As the 2015 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference approaches, pressure to accelerate action on disarmament will only grow.
For now, neither Russia nor the United States wants to scrap the existing arms control regime, including New START and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which provide greater predictability and stability in an otherwise strained bilateral relationship. A return to a period of unconstrained strategic nuclear competition would not only deepen the distrust and increase dangers for both sides, but also would undermine the NPT. Scrapping the existing nuclear risk reduction measures would do nothing to protect Ukraine from further Russian aggression or reassure nervous NATO allies.
Unfortunately, the profound tensions over Ukraine delay the possibility of any formal, bilateral talks on nuclear arms reductions and missile defense. In light of these realities, Obama and other key leaders must explore alternative options to reduce global nuclear dangers and defuse U.S.-Russian strategic tensions.
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| 4 |
ID:
052897
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| 5 |
ID:
163457
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the post-Second World War regionalization and internationalization of public health by focusing on the 1947 cholera epidemic in Egypt. We argue, first, that for the Egyptian medical profession, the epidemic served as an opportunity for both anti-colonial critique and soul-searching and self-criticism: it attested to the poor medical condition of the Egyptian countryside and the work required to ameliorate it. Second, we place the Egyptian epidemic in its regional context. We show how travel restrictions affected the mobility of people and merchandise between Egypt and its neighbours, as newly formed borders were solidified, crossed or transgressed. At the same time, the epidemic served as an opportunity for Arab solidarity. Finally, the since epidemic erupted during the short term of the WHO’s Interim Commission, Egypt served as the WHO’s first testing ground, helping to prove its capability to mobilize medical assistance, disseminate medical alerts and negotiate the abolition of quarantine restrictions. The epidemic, moreover, erupted against the background of renegotiation of international sanitary conventions, which historically placed cholera and the Muslim pilgrimage to the Hejaz at their centre. The source of the epidemic in a British military base and Egypt’s ability to contain the epidemic resonated with on-going debates over international travel restriction, international health policies and local sovereignty. The 1947 cholera epidemic was thus, a defining moment in the emerging relationship between international organizations and the decolonizing world.
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| 6 |
ID:
132032
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2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article will examine the effectiveness of the Carter administration's efforts to promote human rights in the Soviet Union. It will pay particular attention to how human rights promotion fit into a larger approach to transforming Superpower relations in ways favorable to U.S. interests called "reciprocal accommodation [détente]." The use of this framework provides an excellent way to tease out the complexities of how the administration balanced the promotion of human rights in the USSR with other important objectives such as concluding the SALT II treaty. It also helps reveal how executive branch worked to reduce Soviet human rights violations by citing the provisions of the Final Act and working with private citizens to raise international awareness about human rights issues. Without losing sight of his administration's inability to protect Soviet dissenters from arrest and harassment, this article will demonstrate that Carter had every intention of making the issue of human rights an important element of Cold War competition and implementing a new approach to détente that at least in part aimed at transforming Soviet internal behavior.
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| 7 |
ID:
101913
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2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Post-genocide Rwanda has become a 'donor darling', despite being a dictatorship with a dismal human rights record and a source of regional instability. In order to understand international tolerance, this article studies the regime's practices. It analyses the ways in which it dealt with external and internal critical voices, the instruments and strategies it devised to silence them, and its information management. It looks into the way the international community fell prey to the RPF's spin by allowing itself to be manipulated, focusing on Rwanda's decent technocratic governance while ignoring its deeply flawed political governance. This tolerance has allowed the development of a considerable degree of structural violence, thus exposing Rwanda to the risk of renewed violence.
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| 8 |
ID:
158992
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When and in what circumstances do states turn to conflict management to manage a crisis? This article identifies a set of contextual, processual, and structural variables, examining the presence and strength of their associations with the likelihood of states employing conflict management in a foreign policy crisis. I conduct an empirical analysis of more than one thousand foreign policy crises between 1918 and 2013, using the International Crisis Behavior (ICB)-2 dataset, and with the data seek to craft a comprehensive model with the capacity to reliably predict when states will turn to conflict management in a foreign policy crisis based on the context and dynamics of a crisis as well as the attributes of crisis actors. My analysis suggests that states are more likely to employ negotiation, mediation, adjudication, and arbitration in foreign policy crises where the appeal, utility, and experience of violence is diminished; in crises involving weak, nascent, and/or transitional political entities; in crises involving fewer actors and/or crises not embedded within protracted conflicts; and in crises in which International Governmental Organizations (IGOs) are significantly involved.
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| 9 |
ID:
130834
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2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The author offers opinions on the Budapest Memorandum, a 1994 agreement between Russia, Ukraine, Great Britain and the U.S. offering security guarantees for Ukraine in return for its nuclear disarmament. Citing the history of Ukraine's foreign relations since 1991, It is stated that since the U.S. and Great Britain have recognized the provision government created in 2014 while Russia has not, the Memorandum has no relevance to Russia's intervention in Crimea.
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| 10 |
ID:
130838
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| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The author offers opinions on the Budapest Memorandum, a 1994 agreement between Russia, Ukraine, Great Britain and the U.S. offering security guarantees for Ukraine in return for its nuclear disarmament. Citing the history of Ukraine's foreign relations since 1991, It is stated that since the U.S. and Great Britain have recognized the provision government created in 2014 while Russia has not, the Memorandum has no relevance to Russia's intervention in Crimea.
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| 11 |
ID:
079004
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2007.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The intersection of the study of bargaining and international crisis has proven a fertile area of inquiry that has notably excluded third-party mediation. This research chronicles this omission from the crisis bargaining literature, and seeks to identify whether mediation as a form of international crisis behavior merits inclusion in that literature. In conducting an empirical analysis of third-party mediation in international crisis, this study finds that mediation is in fact a prominent feature of international crisis, with the likelihood of mediation greatly increased in crises featuring a high overall level of violence as well as in crises of a military-security nature. On the basis of these empirical findings, this study concludes that third-party mediation is deserving of more systematic attention by scholars of crisis bargaining, offering suggestions for future inquiry to that end
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| 12 |
ID:
132324
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| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In order to assess the impact of culture on state behavior in international crises, specifically with regard to mediation and its outcome, this study tests hypotheses rooted in both the international relations and the cross-cultural psychology literatures, implementing analysis at both the international-system level and the domestic-state-actor level. At the international system level, the study finds that cultural difference between adversaries affects whether or not mediation occurs during an international crisis but has no effect on tension reduction. At the domestic state actor level, we find that there are certain facets of cultural identity that make a state more or less open to requesting or accepting third-party mediation during an international crisis, but that these facets have no effect on tension reduction.
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| 13 |
ID:
130530
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2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The eastern Mediterranean, and particularly Cyprus, had been set for some sort of international crisis throughout 2013. Many tense situations become spring loaded by their circumstances, and no one can predict what, if anything, might set them off. But in the politics of the eastern Mediterranean, there are so many hefty mice at large that it is increasingly likely that at least one of the them will run across the pressure plate, probably sooner rather than later. The fact is that Cyprus finds itself caught in the shockwaves of a number of upheavals in the Middle East and in Europe and in the increasingly fraught politics of the eastern Mediterranean itself-and at a time when the Cypriot government is least able to operate independently and navigate its own diplomacy in its own national interests.
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| 14 |
ID:
176215
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| Summary/Abstract |
Drawing on the concept of offensive coercive diplomacy, this article examines Russia’s strategy in the conflict in Eastern Ukraine and addresses the question of why Russia has failed to achieve its objectives. Through an analysis of notions such as “status quo” (in terms of who overturned it) and international law (in terms of who violated it), I attempt to show that Russia’s actions in Eastern Ukraine qualify as offensive coercion. Backed up by force, Russia demanded that Ukraine implement a decentralization process and grant a part of Eastern Ukraine (Donbas) special status. Knowing that Russia’s aim is to use Donbas as an instrument to control its political future, Ukraine refused to acquiesce to Russia’s demand without restoring its sovereignty in Eastern Ukraine. With both sides refusing to budge, the crisis turned into a zero-sum game. This article seeks to contribute to research on coercive diplomacy by focusing on offensive coercion.
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| 15 |
ID:
132022
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| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In the period from December 1972 until November 1975 the US-Australia alliance faced its greatest ever crisis. In the hands of President Richard Nixon and Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, a relationship that had endured the heights of the Cold War veered dangerously off course and seemed headed for destruction. For Whitlam the world emerging from the ashes of Vietnam offered an exciting opportunity to recast Australia's image in the eyes of the world and redefine the alliance. For Nixon, the ongoing difficulties in securing an end to the war and the mounting pressures of the Watergate scandal produced a visceral reaction to any criticism-but especially that from once close and trusted allies. In his rage he threatened to rip apart the very fabric of the alliance, asking that options be explored for pulling out top secret U.S. intelligence installations in Australia and ending all intelligence sharing. In Australia, although some saw Whitlam as the great modernizer of Australian foreign relations, others feared he was recklessly endangering the protective umbrella provided by the United States.
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| 16 |
ID:
107071
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2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Although "international crisis" is a widespread term, no common definition has yet been achieved: its features have neither been clarified in relation to contemporary events, nor has the role of diplomacy in relation to crises been outlined with precision. Diplomats have even become part of the problem, rather than the problem-solvers, as realist approaches have lost touch with today's poly-lateral world politics. To make up for these lacunae, this article enquires into the present-day nexus between international crisis and diplomacy by first illustrating what international crises mean beyond traditional state-centric definitions and then by considering what diplomacy can offer to tame such turbulent disruptions to the routine of world affairs. In doing so, it introduces a critical definition of international crisis and tests it in relation to a system-oriented description of diplomacy both in its routine and crisis dimensions. Outlining the role of "crisis diplomacy" beyond "diplomatic crises" the essay calls for both a novel understanding of the role of diplomats in these contexts and a greater awareness to the growing complexity of such engagements.
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| 17 |
ID:
181665
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A common explanation for the increasing polarization in contemporary American foreign policy is the absence of external threat. I identify two mechanisms through which threats could reduce polarization: by revealing information about an adversary that elicits a bipartisan response from policymakers (information mechanism) and by heightening the salience of national relative to partisan identity (identity mechanism). To evaluate the information mechanism, study 1 uses computational text analysis of congressional speeches to explore whether security threats reduce partisanship in attitudes toward foreign adversaries. To evaluate the identity mechanism, study 2 uses public opinion polls to assess whether threats reduce affective polarization among the public. Study 3 tests both mechanisms in a survey experiment that heightens a security threat from China. I find that the external threat hypothesis has limited ability to explain either polarization in US foreign policy or affective polarization among the American public. Instead, responses to external threats reflect the domestic political environment in which they are introduced. The findings cast doubt on predictions that new foreign threats will inherently create partisan unity.
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| 18 |
ID:
160480
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This paper examines the effect of international organizations (IOs) on the recurrence of international crises. In line with existing literature on conflict onset, I suggest that country-dyads with more co-memberships in IOs have a lower probability of fighting again. Moving beyond this claim, however, I argue that the scope and mandate of the IO are not relevant for the risk of crisis recurrence. Ultimately, all types of IOs promote links between states and strengthen their chances for effective international cooperation. Empirically, I examine the probability of crisis recurrence between 1950 and 2008, using the count of dyadic co-memberships as the main explanatory variable. The results show that co-membership in any type of IO has negative and significant impact on crisis recurrence. Moreover, the disaggregation of IOs into different categories (e.g., those dedicated to conflict prevention, peace-brokering, or security) also points to a negative effect. The effects of IOs disaggregated by type, however, are not significantly different from the overall IO impact.
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| 19 |
ID:
133405
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2012.
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In May 1998, the sun-scorched deserts of the Indian state of Rajasthan shook with a succession of nuclear explosions. Barely two weeks later, in a seemingly tit-for-tat response, Pakistan conducted its own series of detonations, in the remote western hills of Baluchistan. Both nations' previously concealed nuclear capabilities had suddenly burst out into the open, giving a new and terrifying form to the enduring rivalry that had convulsed the subcontinent for decades. Caught off guard, the international community reacted with indignation and dismay. Concerns over nuclear escalation in the event of another Indo-Pakistani conflict refocused Washington's attention on South Asia and triggered the longest sustained level of bilateral Indo-American engagement in history. This had the unexpected benefit of enabling both democracies finally to find common ground, after many years of acrimony, chronic mistrust, and squandered opportunities. Fears of mass terrorism in the wake of 9/11 and subsequent revelations of extensive proliferation emanating from Pakistan added urgency to Western desires to preserve a modicum of crisis stability in South Asia, as well as to prevent any form of escalatory behavior that could spiral into nuclear conflict or further the spread of radioactive material.
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| 20 |
ID:
056685
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