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| 1 |
ID:
136459
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| Summary/Abstract |
When Britain entered the First World War it did so as an especially hesitant belligerent. One month later, the British enthusiastically signed the Treaty of London, stating that the Entente powers would prosecute the war in common and that none would pursue a separate peace. Why would a state long known for jealously guarding its ability to maintain a free hand initiate a binding alliance that restricted its war termination prospects after one month of combat? And what were the effects of its decision to do so? Answering this question requires not only that we examine British decision making but that we understand No Separate Peace Agreements and why states sign them. I hypothesize that a state will initiate a No Separate Peace Agreement when it has reason to fear that one of its cobelligerents may defect. I also hypothesize that No Separate Peace Agreements will cause states to reconcile war aims with their allies, agreeing to different terms of peace than might have been necessary to satisfy any one of them individually. Using new archival documents, I analyze a case study of British decision making in the early weeks of World War I and find substantial support for the hypotheses.
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| 2 |
ID:
134455
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| Summary/Abstract |
Studies of public support for war highlight the importance of context. Most people do not simply support or oppose the use of force but instead assess its merits depending on various aspects of the situation. One such aspect is the extent of international backing – whether from individual states or supranational organizations – for military action. This backing may be active, notably through the contribution of troops, or more a passive matter of endorsement or authorization of action. In this article, a survey experiment embedded in a major internet survey of British foreign policy attitudes (N = 2,205) is used to explore how international backing affects public support for military action. Britain’s military potential and recent history make it an obvious case study here. Both active and endorsement backing prove to have separate and significant positive effects on support. Importantly, the absolute number of troops involved matters far less than the proportion of total troop numbers to be contributed. And the perceived strength of the enemy predicts support only when the British are to contribute a large proportion of total forces. Predispositional variables are used to investigate the sources of the experimental effects but with little success: the impact of international backing proves remarkably consistent across the sample.
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| 3 |
ID:
135339
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Anarchy was coming to Africa, Robert Kaplan warned in 1994, and a surge in conflict initially seemed to confirm that prediction. With less fanfare, however, after the year 2000, conflict in Africa declined, probably to the lowest levels ever. Recent fighting in Libya, Mali, South Sudan and elsewhere has prompted a new wave of ‘Africa falling apart’ concerns. This article reviews the history and data of conflict in Africa, from pre-colonial times to the present. Historical comparison and quantitative analysis based on the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) and Major Episodes of Political Violence (MEPV) datasets on the 1961–2013 period show that Africa has experienced a remarkable decline in warfare, whether measured in number of conflicts or fatalities. Warfare is a relatively low risk to the lives of most Africans. The years 2010–2013 saw an increase of 35 per cent in African battle deaths over 2005–2010, but they still are 87 per cent lower than the 1990–1999 average. Changes in external support and intervention, and the spread of global norms regarding armed conflict, have been most decisive in reducing the levels of warfare in the continent. Consequently, there is no Africa exception to the systemic shift towards lower levels of armed conflict.
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| 4 |
ID:
134234
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| Summary/Abstract |
On a single day in July, when ambient tensions escalated, Palestinian militants fired more than 180 rockets into Israel, and the Israelis launched airstrikes against towns throughout the Gaza Strip. Dozens of Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed. The order of daily urban life was disrupted, yet again, by warfare.
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| 5 |
ID:
134481
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The rise in lone wolf terrorist attacks worldwide in recent decades makes understanding the types of targets lone wolves choose a crucial locus of research, yet this topic remains understudied. In light of this lacuna, this article analyzes 84 lone wolf terrorist attacks that occurred in the United States between 1940 and 2012, identifies patterns in lone wolf target selection, and proposes and tests causal explanations for these patterns. I find that (1) a majority of lone wolves select civilian targets in familiar areas and (2) this is due to their relative weakness and their ideology.
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| 6 |
ID:
135340
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The United States and its allies entered Afghanistan with nearly unlimited war aims, but with the intention of only using limited force. This strategic error undermined the intervention and made success difficult or impossible. Through an examination of Clausewitzian thought about popular war, limited war and the culminating point of victory, this article shows the enduring value of Clausewitzian concepts in contemporary conflicts against non-state actors. These concepts are tested in three cases – the involvement of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France in Afghanistan – to examine the relationship between their war aims, resource commitments, and war outcome. Of the three, France deployed relatively the most forces to Afghanistan, but the allied engagement remained insufficient to overcome the insurgency. Lacking sufficient mass, the limited forces were insufficient to establish the strategic superiority necessary to achieve nearly unlimited goals. This was compounded by a failure to concentrate against the insurgents crossing the border from Pakistan. In the absence of a clear political determination to reconcile means and ends, the culminating point of victory passed in 2006. It is not the intention here to recommend that contemporary military deployments follow Clausewitzian ideas to the letter; that is not what Clausewitz intended. It is clear, however, that NATO allies in Afghanistan failed to be stronger than the enemy where it was necessary, even when the insurgent groups were diffuse and only loosely unified.
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| 7 |
ID:
135198
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In the concluding pages of his fascinating memoir, War Comes to Garmser, Carter Malkasian, a Pashto-speaking U.S. diplomat who was stationed in a volatile region of Afghanistan in 2009–11, voices a fear shared by many of the Westerners who have participated in the Afghan war during the past 13 years: "The most frustrating thing about leaving Garmser in July 2011 and now watching it from afar is that I cannot be certain that the [Afghan] government will be able to stand on its own. ... The British and the Marines had put the government in a better position to survive than it had enjoyed in the past. What they had not done was create a situation in which the government was sure to win future battles against Taliban [fighters] coming out of Pakistan."
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| 8 |
ID:
135512
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| Summary/Abstract |
Treating the information dominance corps as a general warfare competency risk weakening the skill sets of its specialists.
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| 9 |
ID:
134903
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This article challenges the standard narrative of interwar U.S. involvement in the Middle East by arguing that the United States did have both interests in and a policy concerning Iraq during that time. Despite being non-belligerents with the Ottoman Empire during the First World War and non-members of the League of Nations thereafter, the U.S. government consistently advanced the claim that the American contribution to the Allied victory entitled it to equal political and economic opportunities in the Middle East and to a voice in postwar Middle Eastern affairs. U.S. officials vigilantly intervened in the region throughout the period to ensure not only American access to petroleum resources, but also, as is shown in Iraq, to insist on political relations unmediated by Great Britain. British acceptance of this implies that the foundations had thereby been laid for an independent American role in the Middle East, preceding the later thresholds usually cited by historians. The open door policy the U.S. government set out in the correspondence with Britain in 1920–21 represents a full and cogent policy on Iraq that was advanced throughout the interwar period to protect American interests and standing in that country.
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| 10 |
ID:
136594
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In this no-holds-barred essay, former New York Times Middle East correspondent and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges examines how the United States’ staunch support provides Israel with impunity to visit mayhem on a population which it subjugates and holds captive. Notwithstanding occasional and momentary criticism, the official U.S. cheerleading stance is not only an embarrassing spectacle, Hedges argues, it is also a violation of international law, and an illustration of the disfiguring and poisonous effect of the psychosis of permanent war characteristic of both countries. The author goes on to conclude that the reality of its actions against the Palestinians, both current and historical, exposes the fiction that Israel stands for the rule of law and human rights, and gives the lie to the myth of the Jewish state and that of its sponsor, the United States.
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| 11 |
ID:
136178
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| Summary/Abstract |
Evaluate the British government’s claims for war against Iraq through a critical evaluation of the Iraq Dossier, which was published in September 2002. They argue that government officials, through intentional distortion and exaggeration of intelligence, pursued a campaign of deceptive organized political persuasion.
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| 12 |
ID:
136490
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| Summary/Abstract |
A Regional strategy with three essential elements is needed to defeat ISIS. The first involves rolling it back in Iraq and Syria by attacking its capabilities and strategies. The second is to contain it by helping fortify weaker Arab countries that might be at risk. The third is to influence the relationships between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, and Iran, countries whose efforts will be required to defeat ISIS and end the conflicts in Syria and Iraq.
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