Showing 1 - 10 of 10
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013140179
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013140305
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013140320
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013140333
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013140372
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013140398
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013140534
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 -...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013140948
This paper is a first cut at the analysis of a new (and as of this writing) incomplete database on bombing and territorial control in the Vietnam War. The aim of the paper is to evaluate the logic of attrition in insurgencies at the village level. More specifically, I address two questions....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013069555
This paper analyzes the uses of force in two successful counterinsurgency (COIN) campaigns to delineate under what conditions the use of military force serves the state's strategic ends, and under what conditions it hinders them. The conventional wisdom prescribes the strictly limited use of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013008844