In contrast to the theme of this conference, this paper argues that international crisis is not sufficient to explain the U.S. Army's recent acceptance of counterinsurgency warfare and nation building as core capabilities. I contend instead that this change in Army thinking would not have been...

China's rise has become a defining political phenomenon of world politics in the 21st century. While most scholars debate over what will happen after China rises and how the United States should deal with China's ascent, we focus on exploring China's strategic choices in the course of ascent,...

We use original survey data and administrative data from post-war Liberia to test a theory of the micro-level impacts of peacekeeping. The theory proposes that through the creation of local security bubbles and also through direct assistance, peacekeeping deployments contribute to economic and...

A recent study has shown that the democratic peace—the observation that democratic nations rarely, if ever, fight each other—may be spurious: a capitalist contract-intensive economy appears to account for both democracy and the democratic peace (Mousseau 2009). Since then several defenses of...

Sacred time has shaped military effectiveness in modern conflicts, from the American Revolution, through both World Wars, the Vietnam War, and the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, to the ongoing insurgency in Iraq. At times, initiators of conflict have timed their surprise attacks to coincide with...

Does economic inequality diminish the capacity of democracies to extract voluntary sacrifice? And does inequality undermine citizen's willingness to do their civic duty when the state is under threat? We address these questions by linking income inequality with people's willingness to fight for...

In 2005, Joseph Lane Jr. remarked: “Whenever we get a new war, we get a new Thucydides.” The fact that scholars and policymakers have turned to the History in response to the two world wars, the Cold War, the Gulf War, the more recent Iraq War and the “war on terror” demonstrates the...

Is systematically targeting an adversary's civilians in war an effective military strategy? This paper assesses the historical record of civilian victimization and interstate war outcomes from 1816 to 2003. We begin by disaggregating civilian victimization into two distinct types: coercive...

The prevailing consensus in the historical community is that Germany provoked both of the twentieth century world wars. However, the question of why Germany did so is subject to far more scholarly controversy. Broadly, the explanations fall into two groupings: those that focus on international -...