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ID:
181031
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| Summary/Abstract |
Little is known about how air strikes influence insurgent behavior toward civilians. This study provides evidence that air strikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) by counterinsurgency forces were a contributing factor in its civilian victimization. I theorize that air strikes expanded the distribution of insurgent fatalities to include higher-echelon membership and, at the same time, imposed psychological impairments on its fighters. As a consequence, these changes relaxed restraints on civilian abuse at the organizational and individual levels. This theory is informed by interviews of ISIS defectors and translations of ISIS documents and tested through a statistical analysis of granular-level data on air strikes and one-sided violence during ISIS’s insurgency. These findings contribute to our knowledge of insurgent behavior and provide important policy implications in the use of air strikes as a counterinsurgency (COIN) tool.
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| 2 |
ID:
181029
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article seeks to explain states’ success, either full or partial, in obtaining a place in an exclusive managerial forum and the managerial privileges this entails. We argue that the ability to join an exclusive forum and gain these privileges depends on three factors: the extent to which the potential junior partners’ assets seem attractive to the forum’s leaders; the extent of potential junior partners’ solidarity with the leading powers; and the leading powers’ ability to obtain legitimacy for including new members from the other states subject to the authority of the forum. These arguments are demonstrated through an examination of two test cases: the United Kingdom’s partial success in achieving integration at the end of the 1940s by gaining informal privileges from the United States, and France’s failure to gain institutionalized integration a decade later and its refusal to be satisfied with informal privileges.
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| 3 |
ID:
181028
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| Summary/Abstract |
Why do some states develop conscript armies, whereas others rely on volunteers? Most theories of military design describe domestic elites as making decisions based on rational security demands or cultural understandings of what a military should look like. Contrary to these explanations, many states faced with the challenge of building a military are dependent on powerful military patrons with strong beliefs about how to design their clients’ militaries. When states that are building new militaries have foreign military patrons, they are likely to emulate their patron’s recruitment practices. Patrons with sufficient interest and will to engage in security force assistance use their influence to shape recruitment practices in new or postconflict states. This article describes the dynamics of military patronage as they relate to recruitment decisions and finds support for the argument using both original quantitative data and a brief case comparison.
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| 4 |
ID:
181027
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| Summary/Abstract |
Overt interventions to forcibly promote regimes abroad are often a risky undertaking. If successful, they can replace or rescue regimes and signal resolve in the process. But open meddling can also trigger large-scale escalation, incite nationalist backlash, and harm a state’s reputation. Despite an emerging consensus that states often prefer covert action to avoid these liabilities, leaders sometimes opt for overt action anyway. Why? Drawing on the concept of loss aversion, this article argues that leaders’ tolerance for risk differs depending on whether the goal is to overthrow a foreign regime or prop one up. Because regime rescue approximates loss prevention, leaders are more likely to pursue risky intervention strategies than they are to change regimes, a prospective gain. This framework helps explain why leaders are more likely to accept the risks of overt action when saving a foreign regime and more likely to go covert when deposing one. I evaluate this theory using the Eisenhower administration’s covert regime change efforts in Syria (1956–57) and overt regime rescue attempts in Lebanon (1958).
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| 5 |
ID:
181030
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| Summary/Abstract |
Leaders often emerge from a face-to-face interaction with an implicit understanding on who is expected to stand firm and, conversely, to back down, on a disputed issue. How is that possible? In this article, I develop a theory of resolve performance. I argue that expressions of resolve are speech acts. To establish resolve, leaders must perform such acts competently, there and then, both verbally and behaviorally. A successful (or what speech act theory calls “felicitous”) performance also depends on the reaction of one’s counterpart. By virtue of the intersubjective belief they share about their respective performances—who has carried the day and who has “blinked”—a “focal point” often arises regarding how they are expected to proceed on the disputed issue. I elaborate on several types of speech acts leaders use to perform resolve (threats, implicatures, assertions, and challenges), and illustrate my theory with an in-depth case study on the two days of meetings between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961. The leaders left the summit with the focal point that Kennedy was irresolute and Khrushchev was emboldened to make a move on Berlin. I discuss how such a focal point led to escalation of tensions between the two superpowers and what can be learned about the causal significance of face-to-face diplomacy in international politics.
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