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1171. How to End the Occupation of Iraq: Outmaneuver the War Proponents

Author:
Gareth Porter
Publication Date:
04-2005
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Foreign Policy In Focus
Abstract:
For an anti-war activist of the Vietnam era, the current search for a political strategy for ending the U.S. occupation of Iraq brings to mind the very similar problems facing the movement to end the Vietnam War in 1968-69. In fact, a review of the strategy that the anti-war movement pursued at that juncture of the Vietnam War helps clarify the choices before the present movement and their likely consequences. It should serve as a warning against ignoring the possibility of embracing the negotiation of a compromise peace agreement with those resisting the U.S. occupation as an anti-war strategy.
Topic:
International Relations and War
Political Geography:
United States, Iraq, Middle East, and Vietnam

1172. Kashmir: From Persistence to Progress?

Author:
Cyrus Samii
Publication Date:
08-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
International Peace Institute
Abstract:
Jammu and Kashmir (J) has been a continual bone of contention, the object of three wars and a theater of engagement in a fourth war, between the two countries. Since 1989, insurgency has consumed Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir (IJK), claiming at least 45,000 lives. All major attempts at resolution by the international community have failed, including those through the United Nations. With overt "nuclearization" by India and Pakistan in 1998, and with "jihadist" militants playing an increasingly prominent role in the insurgency since the mid-1990s, the Kashmir conflict also bears the marks of a distinctly twenty-first century security predicament.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Human Welfare, and War
Political Geography:
Pakistan, Middle East, India, and Jammu and Kashmir

1173. Natural Resources and Contemporary Conflicts

Author:
Jean-François Gagné
Publication Date:
09-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Raoul Dandurand Chair of Strategic and Diplomatic Studies, Université du Québec à Montréal
Abstract:
Natural resources are frequently associated with violence or at least with tensions: 85% of countries where wars (in most cases, civil wars) were under way in 2003 possessed abundant natural resources. While there are no precise figures on low-intensity conflicts, we do know that many ad hoc armed interventions, popular uprisings and other destabilizing events that have the potential to lead to larger flare-ups are also concentrated in resource-rich countries.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Development, Economics, and War

1174. The New Bolsheviks: Understanding Al Qaeda

Author:
Frederick W. Kagan
Publication Date:
11-2005
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Abstract:
Victory in war, and particularly in counterinsurgency wars, requires knowing one's enemy. This simple truth, first stated by Sun Tsu more than two millennia ago, is no less important in the war on terrorism today. It has become almost common wisdom, however, that America today faces an enemy of a new kind, using unprecedented techniques and pursuing incomprehensible goals. But this enemy is not novel. Once the peculiar rhetoric is stripped away, the enemy America faces is a familiar one indeed. The revolutionary vision that undergirds al Qaeda's ideology, the strategy it is pursuing, and the strategic debates occurring within that organization are similar to those of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism at various periods. What's more, the methods that led to the defeat of that ideology can be adapted and successfully used against this religious revival of it.
Topic:
International Relations, Security, Terrorism, and War
Political Geography:
America

1175. The War against Reserves

Author:
Frederick W. Kagan
Publication Date:
08-2005
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Abstract:
U.S. defense policy today rests heavily on two basic assumptions: that the American armed forces will make perfect decisions and take perfect actions, and that the enemy will never surprise us or offer us unexpected opportunities to exploit. These assumptions can be seen in the elimination of reserve forces from all echelons of the military structure and the heavy burden that the current war has placed on the Army Reserves and National Guard. The result of these decisions has been to leave the United States with little ability to react to unforeseen difficulties, either in Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere. If this policy continues, it will place American national security in grave jeopardy for years to come.
Topic:
Security, Defense Policy, Government, and War
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, United States, Iraq, and America

1176. The Battle over the Draft

Author:
Leon Aron
Publication Date:
07-2005
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Abstract:
On December 29, 2004, Russia's minister of defense, Sergei Ivanov, announced plans to eliminate draft deferments for college students. Predictably, the popular reaction was so uniformly negative and furious that the abolition of deferments has been postponed—but not eliminated from the Kremlin's agenda.
Topic:
Civil Society, Government, and War
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Asia

1177. The Powers and Pathologies of Military Networks: Insights from the Political Cybernetics of Karl W. Deutsch and Norbert Wiener

Author:
Hayward R. Alker
Publication Date:
04-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for International Studies, University of Southern California
Abstract:
Probably best known nowadays as a distinguished political scientist, a scholar of nations, nationalism and the formation of international security communities, Karl W. Deutsch also wrote a lot about networks before they were popular subjects for strategic analysis Indeed, Deutsch's title for The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control explicitly parallels Norbert Wiener's specificational subtitle of his subject-defining book on cybernetics: Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. One of Deutsch's greatest passions was the development and application of cybernetic theories to the “nerves” or “neural networks” of social, including governmental and inter-governmental, entities and processes, including the development and disintegration of nations and international communities. So conceived, they can have important human-like capacities. For example, “will may be defined in any sufficiently complex net, nervous system or social group [e.g. a nation] as the set of … internally labeled decisions and anticipated results, proposed by the application of results from the system's past and by the blocking of incompatible impulses or data from the system's present or future.” Indeed, Deutsch defined a nation as a special kind of people -- “a large, general-purpose communication net of human beings.” Like some states, pluralistic, multi-national security communities -- whose prevalence in the modern North Atlantic Area is perhaps the most often noted discovery of Deutsch's collaborative work on international community formation -- develop in adaptive, feedback-governed “learning nets,” “networks” or in part anticpatory “communication grids” with multiple, interdependent nodes. Perhaps, he argues in rather cybernetic language, such developments require “the development and practice of habits and skills of mutual attention, communication, and responsiveness, so as to make possible the preservation of the autonomy and substantial sovereignty of the participating units, and the preservation of stable expectations of peace and peaceful change among them”, all processes taking place within networks of human social communication.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, International Organization, Politics, and War

1178. Peacekeeping and the Peackept: Where Peacekeepers Go

Author:
Virginia Page Fortna
Publication Date:
03-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for International Studies, University of Southern California
Abstract:
Because peacekeeping is not distributed to conflicts at random, to understand its effects, we need to understand where it tends to be used. This chapter investigates the question of where peacekeepers get sent – what distinguishes conflicts that receive international peacekeeping from those that do not? Why were peacekeepers sent to El Salvador and Namibia but not to the Philippines or Palestine? Why no peacekeeping in Northern Ireland, monitors to South Africa, traditional peacekeepers to Papua New Guinea, a multidimensional mission to Cambodia, and an enforcement mission to Liberia? Why peacekeeping in Mozambique and, eventually in Sierra Leone, but not in Bangladesh? What explains this variation across civil war cases?
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, International Organization, Politics, and War
Political Geography:
Bangladesh, South Africa, Philippines, Palestine, Cambodia, Liberia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Ireland, and Papua

1179. Two-Level Theories and Fuzzy-Set Analysis

Author:
Gary Goertz and James Mahoney
Publication Date:
03-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for International Studies, University of Southern California
Abstract:
Two-level theories explain outcomes with causal variables at two levels of analysis that are systematically related to one another. Although many prominent scholars in the field of comparative analysis have developed two-level theories, the empirical and methodological issues that these theories raise have yet to be investigated. In this article, we explore different structures of two-level theories and consider the issues involved in testing these theories with fuzzy-set methods. We show that grasping the overall structure of two-level theories requires both specifying the particular type of relationship (i.e., causal, ontological, or substitutable) that exists between and within levels of analysis and specifying the logical linkages between levels in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. We argue that for the purposes of testing these theories, fuzzy-set analysis provides a powerful set of tools. However, to realize this potential, investigators using fuzzy-set methods must be clear about the two-level structure of their theories from the onset. We illustrate these points through an empirical, fuzzy-set test of Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Political Economy, Politics, and War

1180. The Dilemma of the Prisoners' Dilemmas

Author:
Daniel G. Arce M. and Todd Sandler
Publication Date:
02-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for International Studies, University of Southern California
Abstract:
In a variety of social, economic, and political situations, the Prisoners' Dilemma (PD) game is the most studied of the 78 distinct binary games. When characterizing Olson's (1965) analysis of collective action, Russell Hardin (1982, Chapter 2) goes so far as equating all collective action problems to Prisoners' Dilemmas. Although a variety of game forms are now associated with collective action problems (Sandler 1992), there is no question that the PD game occupies a central place in the analysis of diverse social science phenomena. PD games are used to investigate arms races, treaty adherence, the tragedy of the commons, counterterrorism, logrolling, public good provision, altruism, boycotts, and many other issues.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Political Economy, Politics, and War