From Kurdistan to Somaliland, Xinjiang to South Yemen, all secessionist movements hope to secure newly independent states of their own. Most will not prevail. The existing scholarly wisdom provides ...one explanation for success, based on authority and control within the nascent states. With the aid of an expansive new dataset and detailed case studies, this book provides an alternative account. It argues that the strongest members of the international community have a decisive influence over whether today's secessionists become countries tomorrow and that, most often, their support is conditioned on parochial political considerations.
A developed-world consensus ties state failure to new and serious international insecurity. But that conclusion rests upon an uncertain foundation; insights into the nature and intensity of ...failure-related threats remain tentative and unsystematic. This study begins to remedy the problem, examining the broad relationships between weakness, failure, and terrorism with panel data for 153 countries (1999–2008). I argue that the quantitative literature too often disregards the political context determining terrorism's use, that terrorism is endogenous to many measures of state failure, and that estimates of the failure-related threat of terrorism are over-stated. Consistent with these expectations, I find that most failing and failed states are not predisposed to terrorism. However, among the "most failed" states, those at war or experiencing political collapse are significantly more likely to experience and produce terror. These results refine the relationship between failure and external threat and highlight the importance of terrorism's macro-level political context.
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This article introduces the Maritime Piracy Data (MPD), a dataset dedicated to understanding the nature, dynamics, and causes of contemporary piracy and armed robbery against ships. Data on maritime ...piracy are presented in two formats: an event set and an annual, country-level set. The event data track every maritime piracy attack reported to the International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Center (IMB/PRC) for a total of 3,413 events between 2000 and 2009. Entries provide event details including date, geo-coded location, attacker nationality, victim nationality, success, vessel type, violence level, loot taken, and/or ransom demanded. The annual data count the number of piracy events emanating from the world's 147 coastal countries over the same decade for a total of 1,470 observations. Entries include country-level information regarding the maritime sector including coastal shipping traffic, coastline length, seaports, distances to major sea lane chokepoints, and merchant marine size. The article describes the main features of the data, provides descriptive statistics, and briefly illustrates their potential utility for research. The MPD has potential utility for scholars examining non-traditional threats generated by non-state actors; for those studying the potential relationships between governance and conflict on land and piracy at sea; and for individuals engaged in policy-relevant analyses evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of counter-piracy strategies and tactics.
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State emergence is an essential dynamic of the international system, yet international relations scholars pay it little attention. Their oversight is all the more unfortunate because international ...politics ultimately determine which aspiring system members will succeed in becoming new states. Existing models of state emergence rely exclusively on internal or domestic-level explanations. However, the international system is inherently social; therefore any aspiring state's membership also depends on the acceptance of its peers. I present a novel, international-level model of state birth that suggests state leaders should use decisions regarding new members strategically to advance their own interests, not passively abide by domestic factors. I test this argument using a new data set on secessionism and Great Power recognition (1931–2000). I find that external politics have important, underappreciated effects on state emergence. Furthermore, acknowledging the politics of recognition's centrality to state birth alters our understanding of civil conflict dynamics and conflict resolution and suggests important implications for system-wide stability.
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5.
Dramatic Change in North Korea Coggins, Bridget L.; Lafia, Sara; Torghabeh, Behzad Vahedi
North Korean review,
04/2018, Volume:
14, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Article type: Research Paper
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Country participation in one-state, one-vote forums like the United Nations General Assembly often reflects underlying power asymmetries and endogenous political processes. Voting alignment is ...undoubtedly an important preference indicator. However, this paper contends that it is incomplete; silence is politically significant as well. Weak states use absence as a form of institutional power that shields them from geopolitical pressure and competing-principals problems. While abstention is a public signal of neutrality that undercuts voting unanimity, the ambiguous intent of absence makes it a distinct form of political expression. We examine the politics of absences at the General Assembly, highlighting how states may be strategically absent from select votes for political reasons. Building on the Bailey et al.
Journal of Conflict Resolution, 61
(2), 430–456,
2017
roll-call voting data, we distinguish strategic absences from other types of absence and provide evidence that such behavior is linked to US interests and competing-principals problems. Taking these non-random reasons for missingness into account provides a fuller picture of how weak states engage with international institutions and highlights how silence can be a consequence of larger political processes.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
Abstract
This article reconciles the conflicting evidence on the relationship between governance and maritime piracy at the macro (state) and micro (sub-state) level using original data (2000–2011) ...and a study of piracy’s emergence in and around the Horn of Africa. It finds a consistent, positive relationship between state weakness and increased piracy production cross-nationally. However, Somali piracy belies the “anarchy as opportunity” mechanism implied by the large-N study. The pirate industry there received substantial support from local authorities, more consistent with a quadratic, “stability-enabled” argument regarding governance. I conclude that each is half-right. At the macro level, anarchy presents permissive conditions for simple banditry, but limits the potential for robust organized crime unless corruptible sub-state authorities exist and can be co-opted. Policy-wise, efficient pirate deterrence programs should concentrate on regions within failed states with this mix of characteristics. Methodologically, the results point to the limitations of existing metrics of state fragility and governance, and recommend that more nuanced measures be used.
This article introduces the Maritime Piracy Data (MPD), a dataset dedicated to understanding the nature, dynamics, and causes of contemporary piracy and armed robbery against ships. Data on maritime ...piracy are presented in two formats: an event set and an annual, country-level set. The event data track every maritime piracy attack reported to the International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Center (IMB/PRC) for a total of 3,413 events between 2000 and 2009. Entries provide event details including date, geo-coded location, attacker nationality, victim nationality, success, vessel type, violence level, loot taken, and/or ransom demanded. The annual data count the number of piracy events emanating from the world's 147 coastal countries over the same decade for a total of 1,470 observations. Entries include country-level information regarding the maritime sector including coastal shipping traffic, coastline length, seaports, distances to major sea lane chokepoints, and merchant marine size. The article describes the main features of the data, provides descriptive statistics, and briefly illustrates their potential utility for research. The MPD has potential utility for scholars examining non-traditional threats generated by non-state actors; for those studying the potential relationships between governance and conflict on land and piracy at sea; and for individuals engaged in policy-relevant analyses evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of counter-piracy strategies and tactics. (Author abstract)
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