Four generic motives have historically led states to initiate war: fear, interest, standing, and revenge. Using an original data set, Richard Ned Lebow examines the distribution of wars across three ...and a half centuries and argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, only a minority of these were motivated by security or material interest. Instead, the majority are the result of a quest for standing, and for revenge - an attempt to get even with states who had previously made successful territorial grabs. Lebow maintains that today none of these motives are effectively served by war - it is increasingly counterproductive - and that there is growing recognition of this political reality. His analysis allows for more fine-grained and persuasive forecasts about the future of war as well as highlighting areas of uncertainty.
Body odor disgust sensitivity Zakrzewska, Marta; Liuzza, Marco Tullio; Olofsson, Jonas K
PloS one,
04/2023, Volume:
18, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Odors are important disease cues, and disgust sensitivity to body odors reflects individual differences in disease avoidance. The body odor disgust sensitivity (BODS) scale provides a rapid and valid ...assessment of individual differences. Nevertheless, little is known about how individual differences in BODS might correlate with overall odor perception or how it is related to other differences in emotional reactivity (e.g., affect intensity). We investigated how BODS relates to perceptual ratings of pleasant and unpleasant odors. We aggregated data from 4 experiments (total N = 190) that were conducted in our laboratory, and where valence and intensity ratings were collected. Unpleasant odors were body-like (e.g., sweat-like valeric acid), which may provide disease cues. The pleasant odors were, in contrast, often found in soap and cleaning products (e.g., lilac, lemon). Across experiments, we show that individuals with higher BODS levels perceived smells as more highly valenced overall: unpleasant smells were rated as more unpleasant, and pleasant smells were rated as more pleasant. These results suggest that body odor disgust sensitivity is associated with a broader pattern of affect intensity which causes stronger emotional responses to both negative and positive odors. In contrast, BODS levels were not associated with odor intensity perception. Furthermore, disgust sensitivity to odors coming from external sources (e.g., someone else's sweat) was the best predictor of odor valence ratings. The effects were modest in size. The results validate the BODS scale as it is explicitly associated with experimental ratings of odor valence.
Bush's Wars H. Anderson, Terry
2011, 2011-05-14
eBook
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush told advisor Karl Rove, "I am here for a reason, and this is how we're going to be judged." Anderson provides this ...judgment in this sweeping, authoritative account of Bush's War on Terror and his twin interventions. Carefully researched and briskly narrated, Bush's Wars provides the single-volume balanced history that we have waited for. This new paperback edition takes the story through the first Obama term, covering our exit from Iraq and the ongoing drawdown in Afghanistan.
Why does peace fail? More precisely, why do some countries that show every sign of having successfully emerged from civil war fall once again into armed conflict? What explains why peace "sticks" ...after some wars but not others? In this illuminating study, Charles T. Call examines the factors behind fifteen cases of civil war recurrence in Africa, Asia, the Caucasus, and Latin America. He argues that widely touted explanations of civil war-such as poverty, conflict over natural resources, and weak states-are far less important than political exclusion. Call's study shows that inclusion of former opponents in postwar governance plays a decisive role in sustained peace.Why Peace Failsultimately suggests that the international community should resist the temptation to prematurely withdraw resources and peacekeepers after a transition from war. Instead, international actors must remain fully engaged with postwar elected governments, ensuring that they make room for former enemies.
"The wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in neighboring Croatia and Kosovo grabbed the attention of the western world not only because of their ferocity and their geographic location, but also because of ...their timing. This violence erupted at the exact moment when the cold war confrontation was drawing to a close, when westerners were claiming their liberal values as triumphant, in a country that had only a few years earlier been seen as very well placed to join the west. In trying to account for this outburst, most western journalists, academics, and policymakers have resorted to the language of the premodern: tribalism, ethnic hatreds, cultural inadequacy, irrationality; in short, the Balkans as the antithesis of the modern west. Yet one of the most striking aspects of the wars in Yugoslavia is the extent to which the images purveyed in the western press and in much of the academic literature are so at odds with evidence from on the ground."-fromThe Myth of Ethnic War
V. P. Gagnon Jr. believes that the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were reactionary moves designed to thwart populations that were threatening the existing structures of political and economic power. He begins with facts at odds with the essentialist view of ethnic identity, such as high intermarriage rates and the very high percentage of draft-resisters. These statistics do not comport comfortably with the notion that these wars were the result of ancient blood hatreds or of nationalist leaders using ethnicity to mobilize people into conflict.
Yugoslavia in the late 1980s was, in Gagnon's view, on the verge of large-scale sociopolitical and economic change. He shows that political and economic elites in Belgrade and Zagreb first created and then manipulated violent conflict along ethnic lines as a way to short-circuit the dynamics of political change. This strategy of violence was thus a means for these threatened elites to demobilize the population. Gagnon's noteworthy and rather controversial argument provides us with a substantially new way of understanding the politics of ethnicity.
One of the most important questions of human existence is what drives nations to war-especially massive, system-threatening war. Much military history focuses on the who, when, and where of war. In ...this riveting book, Dale C. Copeland brings attention to bear on why governments make decisions that lead to, sustain, and intensify conflicts.
Copeland presents detailed historical narratives of several twentieth-century cases, including World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. He highlights instigating factors that transcend individual personalities, styles of government, geography, and historical context to reveal remarkable consistency across several major wars usually considered dissimilar. The result is a series of challenges to established interpretive positions and provocative new readings of the causes of conflict.
Classical realists and neorealists claim that dominant powers initiate war. Hegemonic stability realists believe that wars are most often started by rising states. Copeland offers an approach stronger in explanatory power and predictive capacity than these three brands of realism: he examines not only the power resources but the shifting power differentials of states. He specifies more precisely the conditions under which state decline leads to conflict, drawing empirical support from the critical cases of the twentieth century as well as major wars spanning from ancient Greece to the Napoleonic Wars.
Why do states persist in using force to enhance their deterrent posture, even though it is not clear that it is effective? This book develops an innovative framework to answer this question, viewing ...deterrence as an idea. This allows the author to explain how countries institutionalize deterrence strategy, and how this internalization affects policy. He argues that the US and Israel have both internalized deterrence ideas and become attached to these practices. For them, deterrence is not just a means to advance 'physical' security, but it constitutes their very selves as deterring actors. As a result, being unable to deter becomes a threat to their identity, evoking strong emotional responses. In recognizing these dynamics, the book provides a fresh perspective on the US war in Iraq (2003) and the Israeli war in Lebanon (2006), both of which can be seen as attempts to repair each country's shaken sense of self.
Background
Prevention of cognitive impairment and dementia is an important public health goal. Epidemiological evidence shows a relationship between cognitive impairment and Type 2 diabetes mellitus. ...The risk of dementia increases with duration of disease. This updated systematic review investigated the effect on cognitive function of the type of treatment and level of metabolic control in people with Type 2 diabetes.
Objectives
To assess the effects of different strategies for managing Type 2 diabetes mellitus on cognitive function and the incidence of dementia.
Search methods
We searched ALOIS (the Specialized Register of the Cochrane Dementia and Cognitive Improvement Group (CDCIG)), the Cochrane Library, MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO, CINAHL and LILACS on 15 October 2016. ALOIS contains records from all major health care databases, (CENTRAL, MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO, CINAHL, LILACS), as well as from many trials' registers and grey literature sources.
Selection criteria
We included randomised controlled trials (RCTs) which compared two or more different treatments for Type 2 diabetes mellitus and in which cognitive function was measured at baseline and after treatment.
Data collection and analysis
Two review authors independently extracted data and assessed the quality of the included RCTs. We pooled data for comparable trials and estimated the effects of treatment by using risk ratios (RRs) and mean differences (MDs), according to the nature of the outcome. We assessed the quality of the evidence using GRADE methods.
Main results
We identified seven eligible studies but only four provided data we could include in efficacy analyses. Two of these studies compared intensive versus standard glycaemic control and two compared different pharmacological treatments. All studies were at unclear risk of bias in at least two domains and one large study was at high risk of performance and detection bias.
(a) Two studies with 13,934 participants at high cardiovascular risk provided efficacy data on intensive versus standard glycaemic control. A third study with 1791 participants provided additional data on hypoglycaemic episodes and mortality. There is probably no difference between treatment groups in the number of participants who decline by at least 3 points on the Mini–Mental State Examination (MMSE) over five years (RR 0.98, 95% CI 0.88 to 1.08; 1 study; n = 11,140; moderate‐quality evidence); and there may also be little or no difference in the incidence of dementia (RR 1.27, 95% CI 0.87 to 1.85; 1 study; n = 11,140; low‐quality evidence). From another study, there was probably little or no difference in MMSE score after 40 months (MD −0.01, 95% CI −0.18 to 0.16; 1 study; n = 2794; moderate quality evidence). Participants exposed to the intensive glycaemic control strategy probably experience more episodes of severe hypoglycaemia than those who have standard treatment (RR 2.18, 95% CI 1.52 to 3.14; 2 studies; n = 12,827; moderate‐quality evidence). The evidence from these trials suggests that the intensity of glycaemic control may have little or no effect on all‐cause mortality (RR 0.99, 95% CI 0.87 to 1.13; 3 studies; n = 15,888; low‐quality evidence).
(b) One study with 156 participants compared glibenclamide (glyburide) with repaglinide. There may be a small advantage of glibenclamide on global cognitive function measured with the MMSE after 12 months (MD −0.90, 95% CI −1.68 to −0.12; low‐quality evidence). No data were reported on the incidence of dementia, hypoglycaemic events or all‐cause mortality.
(c) One study with 145 participants compared rosiglitazone plus metformin to glibenclamide (glyburide) plus metformin over 24 weeks. It reported only on cognitive subdomains and not on global cognitive function, incidence of MCI or dementia, hypoglycaemic events or all causes of mortality.
Authors' conclusions
We found no good evidence that any specific treatment or treatment strategy for Type 2 diabetes can prevent or delay cognitive impairment. The best available evidence related to the comparison of intensive with standard glycaemic control strategies. Here there was moderate‐quality evidence that the strategies do not differ in their effect on global cognitive functioning over 40 to 60 months.
Does growing economic interdependence among great powers increase or decrease the chance of conflict and war? Liberals argue that the benefits of trade give states an incentive to stay peaceful. ...Realists contend that trade compels states to struggle for vital raw materials and markets. Moving beyond the stale liberal-realist debate,Economic Interdependence and Warlays out a dynamic theory of expectations that shows under what specific conditions interstate commerce will reduce or heighten the risk of conflict between nations.
Taking a broad look at cases spanning two centuries, from the Napoleonic and Crimean wars to the more recent Cold War crises, Dale Copeland demonstrates that when leaders have positive expectations of the future trade environment, they want to remain at peace in order to secure the economic benefits that enhance long-term power. When, however, these expectations turn negative, leaders are likely to fear a loss of access to raw materials and markets, giving them more incentive to initiate crises to protect their commercial interests. The theory of trade expectations holds important implications for the understanding of Sino-American relations since 1985 and for the direction these relations will likely take over the next two decades.
Economic Interdependence and Waroffers sweeping new insights into historical and contemporary global politics and the actual nature of democratic versus economic peace.
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