This volume of the Official History of Australian Peacekeeping, Humanitarian and Post-Cold War Operations is the first comprehensive study of Australia's role in the peacekeeping and peace ...enforcement operations that developed at the end of the Cold War. It recounts vital missions including Namibia (1989–90), Iran (1988–90) and Pakistan/Afghanistan (1989–93), and focuses primarily on Australia's reaction to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, including its maritime interception operations, and its controversial participation in the 1991 Gulf War. With exclusive access to Australian Government records and through extensive interviews, David Horner explains the high-level political background to these activities and analyses the conduct of the missions. He brings to life the little-known, yet remarkable stories of many individuals who took part. This is an authoritative and compelling history of how members of the Australian Defence Force engaged with the world at a crucial time in international affairs.
When President George W. Bush launched an invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, he did so without the explicit approval of the Security Council. His father's administration, by contrast, carefully ...funneled statecraft through the United Nations and achieved Council authorization for the U.S.-led Gulf War in 1991. The history of American policy toward Iraq displays considerable variation in the extent to which policies were conducted through the UN and other international organizations.
InChannels of Power, Alexander Thompson surveys U.S. policy toward Iraq, starting with the Gulf War, continuing through the interwar years of sanctions and coercive disarmament, and concluding with the 2003 invasion and its long aftermath. He offers a framework for understanding why powerful states often work through international organizations when conducting coercive policies-and why they sometimes choose instead to work alone or with ad hoc coalitions. The conventional wisdom holds that because having legitimacy for their actions is important for normative reasons, states seek multilateral approval.
Channels of Poweroffers a rationalist alternative to these standard legitimation arguments, one based on the notion of strategic information transmission: When state actions are endorsed by an independent organization, this sends politically crucial information to the world community, both leaders and their publics, and results in greater international support.
We study the effect of providing relative performance feedback information on performance, when individuals are rewarded according to their absolute performance. A natural experiment that took place ...in a high school offers an unusual opportunity to test this effect in a real-effort setting. For one year only, students received information that allowed them to know whether they were performing above (below) the class average as well as the distance from this average. We exploit a rich panel dataset and find that the provision of this information led to an increase of 5% in students' grades. Moreover, the effect was significant for the whole distribution. However, once the information was removed, the effect disappeared. To rule out the concern that the effect may be artificially driven by teachers within the school, we verify our results using national level exams (externally graded) for the same students, and the effect remains.
This fast-paced and compelling read closes a significant gap in the historiography of the late Cold War U.S. Army and is crucial for understanding the current situation in the Middle East. From the ...author's introduction: "My purpose is a narrative history of the 1st Infantry Division from 1970 through the Operation Desert Storm celebration held 4th of July 1991. This story is an account of the revolutionary changes in the late Cold War. The Army that overran Saddam Hussein's Legions in four days was the product of important changes stimulated both by social changes and institutional reform. The 1st Infantry Division reflected benefits of those changes, despite its low priority for troops and material. The Division was not an elite formation, but rather excelled in the context of the Army as an institution."This book begins with a preface by Gordon R. Sullivan, General, USA, Retired. In twelve chapters, author Gregory Fontenot explains the history of the 1st infantry Division from 1970 to 1991. In doing so, his fast-paced narrative includes elements to expand the knowledge of non-military readers. These elements include a glossary, a key to abbreviations, maps, nearly two dozen photographs, and thorough bibliography. The First infantry Division and the U.S. Army Transformed: Road to Victory in Desert Storm is published with support from the First Division Museum at Cantigny.
Many saw the United States' decisive victory in Desert Storm (1991) as not only vindication of American defense policy since Vietnam but also confirmation of a revolution in military affairs (RMA). ...Just as information-age technologies were revolutionizing civilian life, the Gulf War appeared to reflect similarly profound changes in warfare. A debate has raged ever since about a contemporary RMA and its implications for American defense policy. Addressing these issues, The Iraq Wars and America's Military Revolution is a comprehensive study of the Iraq Wars in the context of the RMA debate. Focusing on the creation of a reconnaissance-strike complex and conceptions of parallel or nonlinear warfare, Keith L. Shimko finds a persuasive case for a contemporary RMA while recognizing its limitations as well as promise.
This book provides a comprehensive analysis and review of the major events and the leading actors of the Gulf War. Copies of key documents and essential factual information build up a picture of the ...realities of war in the Middle East but the material is set in a strong theoretical framework. This allows the author to see the conflict within the context of the international system and to relate it to the changes of the post-cold-war world.
Matthews looks at the shifts in international order which dictated the nature of the international response to the war, but also at the new conditions created by the war itself. What scope is there for Arab socialism after the fall of European socialism? Has the conflict made Israel stronger or weaker? Can the UN be entrusted with the post of global peace-keeper?
Introduction: The Middle East and the Study of International Relations 1. The Middle East in Historical Context 2. Crisis: The Provocation and the Protagonists 3. The United Nations and the Gulf Conflict 4. The Diplomacy of Crisis 5. The Gulf Conflict and International Law 6. The Laws of War and the Gulf Conflict 7. Morality and the Gulf Conflict 8. The Economnic Dimension of the Gulf Conflict 9. War, Strategy and the Gulf Conflict 10. The Aftermath Appendix 1. Gazetteer Appendix 2. Chronology Appendix 3. Maps Appendix 4. Documents Appendix 5. Statistics
There is growing interest in entrepreneurs who have been involved in more than one venture, yet to date there has been relatively little theoretical development and systematic empirical examination ...of the topic. In particular, there has been little attention to the potential heterogeneity of habitual entrepreneurship. This study aims to contribute to this emerging area in two ways. First, it outlines a conceptual typology of habitual entrepreneurs who have founded, purchased, or inherited businesses. Second, the empirical part of the study focuses on owner-managers, providing an exploratory analysis of the characteristics and effects of independent business ownership by novice, portfolio, and serial founders. Novice founders are those that have no prior entrepreneurial experience as either a founder, an inheritor, or a purchaser of a business. Portfolio founders retain their original business and inherit, establish, and/or purchase another business. Serial founders are those who sell their original business but at a later date inherit, establish, and/or purchase another business.
The study derives propositions suggesting differences among the three types of founders. At the individual founder level of analysis, similarities as well as differences in the personal background, work experiences, reasons leading to the start-up of businesses, and personal attitudes to entrepreneurship of these three types of entrepreneurs are explored. At the organizational level of analysis, finance, employment and performance differences among the businesses owned by the three types of entrepreneurs are presented.
The issues are examined using a sample of entrepreneurs who were the principal owner-managers of independent businesses in Great Britain. The sample included 389 novice founders (62.6%), 75 portfolio founders (12.1%), and 157 serial founders (25.3%). No statistically significant differences were found among the three groups of entrepreneurs with regard to the main industrial activity, geographical location, and the age of their businesses. Univariate and multivariate tests were used to examine potential differences between the groups.
The results of the study show significant differences between portfolio and serial founders with regard to their parental background, work experience, and their age when they started their first business. Differences were also found with respect to reasons leading to start-up, personal attitudes to entrepreneurship, and sources of funds used during the launch period of the surveyed business. These findings suggest that habitual entrepreneurs cannot be treated as a homogeneous group. The analysis, however, failed to find any significant differences between the performance of the surveyed firms owned by habitual founders and novice founders and between the two types of habitual founders.
The findings of the study indicate for researchers that there is a need to carefully define the unit of analysis in any examination of entrepreneurs. In particular, there is a need to take note of the heterogeneity of types of entrepreneur and to consider the entrepreneur as the appropriate unit of analysis rather than simply the firm. Although this study focused on habitual founders of businesses, the theoretical section of the study also identified other types of habitual entrepreneurs, such as serial corporate entrepreneurs and serial management buy-out and buy-in cases. These other types of habitual entrepreneurs would appear to warrant further analysis.
The findings of this study have a number of implications for practitioners, especially venture capitalists. The absence of significant performance differences between novice and habitual entrepreneurs, which is consistent with the results from other studies, emphasizes the need for venture capitalists screening potential investees not to rely solely on previous experience.
The study also has implications for policy-makers, especially with respect to decisions concerning the allocation of resources to assist nascent entrepreneurs, novice entrepreneurs, and habitual entrepreneurs. The similarities in business performance among novice, serial, and portfolio entrepreneurs suggests that policy-makers need to be careful in targeting scarce resources. Most notably, targeting resources to encourage talented nascent entrepreneurs to become novice entrepreneurs may offer returns which are at least as good as targeting resources to more experienced entrepreneurs.
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