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...

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...

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 -...

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....

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...