Using over twelve thousand previously classified documents made available through the Freedom of Information Act, David Cunningham uncovers the riveting inside story of the FBI's attempts to ...neutralize political targets on both the Right and the Left during the 1960s. Examining the FBI's infamous counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) against suspected communists, civil rights and black power advocates, Klan adherents, and antiwar activists, he questions whether such actions were aberrations or are evidence of the bureau's ongoing mission to restrict citizens' right to engage in legal forms of political dissent. At a time of heightened concerns about domestic security, with the FBI's license to spy on U.S. citizens expanded to a historic degree, the question becomes an urgent one. This book supplies readers with insights and information vital to a meaningful assessment of the current situation.There's Something Happening Herelooks inside the FBI's COINTELPROs against white hate groups and the New Left to explore how agents dealt with the hundreds of individuals and organizations labeled as subversive threats. Rather than reducing these activities to a product of the idiosyncratic concerns of longtime director J. Edgar Hoover, Cunningham focuses on the complex organizational dynamics that generated literally thousands of COINTELPRO actions. His account shows how--and why--the inner workings of the programs led to outcomes that often seemed to lack any overriding logic; it also examines the impact the bureau's massive campaign of repression had on its targets. The lessons of this era have considerable relevance today, and Cunningham extends his analysis to the FBI's often controversial recent actions to map the influence of the COINTELPRO legacy on contemporary debates over national security and civil liberties.
Theories of conflict emphasize dyadic interaction, yet existing empirical studies of civil war focus largely on state attributes and pay little attention to nonstate antagonists. We recast civil war ...in a dyadic perspective, and consider how nonstate actor attributes and their relationship to the state influence conflict dynamics. We argue that strong rebels, who pose a military challenge to the government, are likely to lead to short wars and concessions. Conflicts where rebels seem weak can become prolonged if rebels can operate in the periphery so as to defy a government victory yet are not strong enough to extract concessions. Conflicts should be shorter when potential insurgents can rely on alternative political means to violence. We examine these hypotheses in a dyadic analysis of civil war duration and outcomes, using new data on nonstate actors and conflict attributes, finding support for many of our conjectures.
Civil wars vary greatly in their duration. This book argues that conflicts are longer when they involve more actors who can block agreement (veto players) and identifies specific problems that arise ...in multi-party bargaining. Quantitative analysis of over 200 civil wars since World War II reveals that conflicts with more of these actors last much longer than those with fewer. Detailed comparison of negotiations in Rwanda and Burundi demonstrates that multi-party negotiations present additional barriers to peace not found in two party conflicts. In addition, conflicts with more veto players produce more casualties, are more likely to involve genocide and are followed by shorter periods of peace. Because they present many barriers to peace, the international community has a poor track record of resolving multi-party conflicts. David Cunningham shows that resolution is possible in these wars if peace processes are designed to address the barriers that emerge in multi-party conflicts.
Veto Players and Civil War Duration Cunningham, David E.
American journal of political science,
10/2006, Letnik:
50, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Civil wars show a remarkable variation in how long they last. Some end within days; others continue for decades. What explains the extreme intractability of some wars while others are resolved ...quickly? This article argues that conflicts with multiple actors who must approve a settlement (veto players) are longer because there are fewer acceptable agreements, information asymmetries are more acute, and shifting alliances and incentives to hold out make negotiation more difficult. This veto player approach to explaining variation in civil war duration is tested using a new dataset containing monthly data on all parties to each civil war begun since World War II. The statistical analysis shows a strong correlation between the number of veto players and the duration of civil war.
What explains the effect of external intervention on the duration of civil war? The literature on intervention has made some progress in addressing this question, but it has been hindered by an ...assumption that states intervene in civil wars either to help one side win or to facilitate negotiations. Often, however, external states become involved in civil war to pursue an agenda which is separate from the goals of the internal combatants. When states intervene in this fashion, they make wars more difficult to resolve for two reasons. First, doing so introduces another actor that must approve any settlement to end the war. Second, external states generally have less incentive to negotiate than internal actors because they bear lower costs of fighting and they can anticipate gaining less benefit from negotiation than domestic insurgents. Through Cox regressions using data on the goals of all interventions in civil wars since World War II, this article shows that when states intervene with an independent agenda, they make wars substantially longer. The effect of independent interventions is much larger than that of external interventions generally, suggesting that the established finding that external interventions prolong civil war is driven by a subset of cases where states have intervened in conflicts to pursue independent goals.
Layered asymmetrically clipped optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (ACO-OFDM) with high spectral efficiency is proposed in this paper for optical wireless transmission employing ...intensity modulation with direct detection. In contrast to the conventional ACO-OFDM, which only utilizes odd subcarriers for modulation, leading to an obvious spectral efficiency loss, in layered ACO-OFDM, the subcarriers are divided into different layers and modulated by different kinds of ACO-OFDM, which are combined for simultaneous transmission. In this way, more subcarriers are used for data transmission and the spectral efficiency is improved. An iterative receiver is also proposed for layered ACO-OFDM, where the negative clipping distortion of each layer is subtracted once it is detected so that the signals from different layers can be recovered. Theoretical analysis shows that the proposed scheme can improve the spectral efficiency by up to 2 times compared with conventional ACO-OFDM approaches with the same modulation order. Meanwhile, simulation results confirm a considerable signal-to-noise ratio gain over ACO-OFDM at the same spectral efficiency.
Civil wars occur in some countries at some times and not in other countries at other times. This article examines how the potential for large–scale external intervention can prevent civil wars. The ...author argues that intervention by external states in civil war can be so overwhelming that it reduces one side's probability of victory to essentially zero. When dissidents expect this type of intervention on the side of government, they anticipate no chance of achieving success through violence and do not initiate civil wars. When governments anticipate this type of intervention on their behalf, they feel protected from internal threat and are less constrained in their dealings with their populations. This repression increases grievances, leading dissidents to engage in strategies of dissent other than civil war. The author tests three implications of this argument—that states in more hierarchical relationships will experience civil war at lower rates, be more repressive, and experience other forms of dissent at higher rates—and finds strong support for it.
The objective of this study was to develop a thiolysis HPLC method to quantify total procyanidins, the ratio of A-type linkages, and A-type procyanidin equivalents in cranberry products. Cysteamine ...was utilized as a low-odor substitute of toluene-α-thiol for thiolysis depolymerization. A reaction temperature of 70 °C and reaction time of 20 min, in 0.3 M of HCl, were determined to be optimum depolymerization conditions. Thiolytic products of cranberry procyanidins were separated by RP-HPLC and identified using high-resolution mass spectrometry. Standards curves of good linearity were obtained on thiolyzed procyanidin dimer A2 and B2 external standards. The detection and quantification limits, recovery, and precision of this method were validated. The new method was applied to quantitate total procyanidins, average degree of polymerization, ratio of A-type linkages, and A-type procyanidin equivalents in cranberry products. Results showed that the method was suitable for quantitative and qualitative analysis of procyanidins in cranberry products.
Stimulating the brain to drive its adaptive plastic potential is promising to accelerate rehabilitative outcomes in stroke. The ipsilesional primary motor cortex (M1) is invariably facilitated. ...However, evidence supporting its efficacy is divided, indicating that we may have overgeneralized its potential. Since the M1 and its corticospinal output are frequently damaged in patients with serious lesions and impairments, ipsilesional premotor areas (PMAs) could be useful alternates instead. We base our premise on their higher probability of survival, greater descending projections, and adaptive potential, which is causal for recovery across the seriously impaired. Using a conceptual model, we describe how chronically stimulating PMAs would strongly affect key mechanisms of stroke motor recovery, such as facilitating the plasticity of alternate descending output, restoring interhemispheric balance, and establishing widespread connectivity. Although at this time it is difficult to predict whether PMAs would be “better,” it is important to at least investigate whether they are reasonable substitutes for the M1. Even if the stimulation of the M1 may benefit those with maximum recovery potential, while that of PMAs may only help the more disadvantaged, it may still be reasonable to achieve some recovery across the majority rather than stimulate a single locus fated to be inconsistently effective across all.
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