We argue that new international borders are rarely new. We propose that when states choose new borders they use previous administrative frontiers to solve a difficult short-term bargaining problem ...and a long-term coordination problem. With a unique new set of data collected specifically for this project, we systematically examine the new international borders of the twentieth century resulting from secession, partition, and the use of force. New international borders, we find, are drawn not according to principles of “nationalism” or defensible borders, but rather according to previous administrative frontiers. How borders are drawn has important consequences for international stability: borders drawn along previously existing internal or external administrative frontiers experience fewer future territorial disputes and have a much lower risk of militarized confrontation if a dispute emerges.
Why not kill them all? Chirot, Daniel; Mccauley, Clark
2006., 20100701, 2010, 2003, 2010-07-01, 20060101
eBook
Genocide, mass murder, massacres. The words themselves are chilling, evoking images of the slaughter of countless innocents. What dark impulses lurk in our minds that even today can justify the ...eradication of thousands and even millions of unarmed human beings caught in the crossfire of political, cultural, or ethnic hostilities? This question lies at the heart of Why Not Kill Them All? Cowritten by historical sociologist Daniel Chirot and psychologist Clark McCauley, the book goes beyond exploring the motives that have provided the psychological underpinnings for genocidal killings. It offers a historical and comparative context that adds up to a causal taxonomy of genocidal events. Rather than suggesting that such horrors are the product of abnormal or criminal minds, the authors emphasize the normality of these horrors: killing by category has occurred on every continent and in every century. But genocide is much less common than the imbalance of power that makes it possible. Throughout history human societies have developed techniques aimed at limiting intergroup violence. Incorporating ethnographic, historical, and current political evidence, this book examines the mechanisms of constraint that human societies have employed to temper partisan passions and reduce carnage.
On 17 August 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender that also brought an end to the Second World War in Asia, Indonesia declared its independence. The declaration was not recognized by the ...Netherlands, which resorted to force in its attempt to take control of the inevitable process of decolonization. This led to four years of difficult negotiations and bitter warfare. In 2005, the Dutch government declared that the Netherlands should never have waged the war. The government’s 1969 position on the violence used by the Dutch armed forces during the war remained unchanged, however: although there had been ‘excesses’, on the whole the armed forces had behaved ‘correctly’. As the indications of Dutch extreme violence mounted, this official position proved increasingly difficult to maintain. In 2016, the Dutch government therefore decided to fund a broad study on the dynamics of the violence. The most important conclusions of that research programme are summarized in this book. The authors show that the Dutch armed forces used extreme violence on a structural basis, and that this was concealed both at the time and for many years after the war by the Dutch government and by society more broadly. All of this – like the entire colonial history – is at odds with the rose-tinted self-image of the Netherlands.
Despite the frequent use of economic and military-specific sanctions against countries affected by civil conflicts, little is known about the possible impact that these coercive tools have on ...conflict dynamics. This article examines how threats and imposition of international sanctions affect the intensity of civil conflict violence. We formulate and test two competing views on the possible effect of economic and military-specific sanctions on conflict dynamics by combining data on fatalities in battle-related violence in all internal armed conflicts in Africa from 1989 to 2005 with data on economic sanctions and arms embargoes. The results indicate that threats of economic sanction and arms embargo are likely to increase the intensity of conflict violence. Similarly, imposed economic sanctions are likely to contribute to the escalation of conflict violence. Imposed arms embargoes, on the other hand, are likely to reduce conflict violence. We conclude that international sanctions appear to be counterproductive policy tools in mitigating the human cost of civil conflicts unless they are in the form of imposed arms embargoes attempting to limit the military capacity of the warring parties.
We examine the effect of nuclear weapons on interstate conflict. Using more appropriate methodologies than have previously been used, we find that dyads in which both states possess nuclear weapons ...are not significantly less likely to fight wars, nor are they significantly more or less belligerent at low levels of conflict. This stands in contrast to previous work, which suggests nuclear dyads are some 2.7 million times less likely to fight wars. We additionally find that dyads in which one state possesses nuclear weapons are more prone to low-level conflict (but not more prone to war). This appears to be because nuclear-armed states expand their interests after nuclear acquisition rather than because nuclear weapons provide a shield behind which states can aggress against more powerful conventional-armed states. This calls into question conventional wisdom on the impact of nuclear weapons and has policy implications for the impact of nuclear proliferation.
This article contributes to our understanding of transboundary environmental management regimes through the application of an analytical framework that facilitates an exploration of the co-existence ...of conflict and cooperation. Rather than framing conflict and cooperation as mutually exclusive states at opposite ends of a spectrum, we seek to understand the ways in which cooperation can exist at the same time as conflict. We apply this framework to a study of conservation management in a transboundary area at the intersection of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. We identify two actual and one hypothetical phase of conflict—cooperation relations, in a landscape notorious for some of the worst violence of the last two decades. We map the evolution of phases of transboundary protected area management against the evolving security context, and we find that this approach has greater explanatory power than previous approaches that polarize conflict and cooperation. In particular, it helps us to understand the drivers of environmental cooperation, including the evolving characteristics of that cooperation. This new way of understanding the relationship between environmental management and security also enables us to reconsider the potential for environmental management to be instrumental in working towards interstate security objectives, for example through peace parks. We don't find that the 'low politics' of environmental management should be seen as a predictable and manageable determinant of international relations. But an understanding of the coexistence of conflict and cooperation does also point to a more complex, non-linear relationship between low and high politics.
The authors argue that theories regarding the relationship between trade and conflict could benefit greatly from accounting for the networked structure of international trade. Indirect trade ...relations reduce the probability of conflict by creating (1) opportunity costs of conflict beyond those reflected by direct trade ties and (2) negative externalities for the potential combatants' trading partners, giving them an incentive to prevent the conflict. Trade flows create groups of states with relatively dense trade ties, which we call trading communities. Within these groups, the interruptions to trade caused by conflict create relatively large costs. As a result, joint members of trading communities are less likely to go to war; however little they directly trade with each other. The authors systematically measure and define trading communities across various levels of aggregation using the network analytic tool of modularity maximization. The authors find significant support for their hypothesis, indicating that interdependence theory can be extended to extra-dyadic relations.
In 2004, there were 30 active armed conflicts, up by one from 2003. Despite this slight increase, the number of armed conflicts remains lower than at any time since the early 1970s. While seven of ...the conflicts from 2003 were no longer active, one entirely new conflict broke out and seven conflicts restarted, three with action taken by new rebel groups and four by previously recorded actors. A total of 228 armed conflicts have been recorded after World War II and 118 after the end of the Cold War. The vast majority of them have been fought within states. However, a little over one-fifth of the internal conflicts are internationalized in the sense that outside states contribute troops to the conflict. Less overt support, involving, for example, financial and logistic assistance, is found much more frequently. This type of support was present in nearly three-quarters of the armed conflicts after the end of the Cold War. Both governments and rebels receive support from outside states, usually neighboring states. Outside support for governments fighting rebel movements is almost always provided by other governments, not by other rebel movements.
Jews and Arabs in Israel Encountering Their Identities reveals the powerful potential of intergroup dialogues to transform both identities and mutually negating relations between Israeli Jews and ...Palestinian Arabs.
In The Israeli Radical Left, Fiona Wright traces the dramatic as well as the mundane paths taken by radical Jewish Israeli leftwing activists, whose critique of the Israeli state has left them ...uneasily navigating an increasingly polarized public atmosphere. This activism is manifested in direct action solidarity movements, the critical stances of some Israeli human rights and humanitarian NGOs, and less well-known initiatives that promote social justice within Jewish Israel as a means of undermining the overwhelming support for militarism and nationalism that characterizes Israeli domestic politics. In chronicling these attempts at solidarity with those most injured by Israeli policy, Wright reveals dissent to be a fraught negotiation of activists' own citizenship in which they feel simultaneously repulsed and responsible.Based on eighteen months of fieldwork, The Israeli Radical Left provides a nuanced account of various kinds of Jewish Israeli antioccupation and antiracist activism as both spaces of subversion and articulations of complicity. Wright does not level complicity as an accusation, but rather recasts the concept as an analysis of the impurity of ethical and political relations and the often uncomfortable ways in which this makes itself felt during moments of attempted solidarity. She imparts how activists persistently underline their own feelings of complicity and the impossibility of reconciling their principles with the realities of their everyday lives, despite the fact that the activism in which they engage specifically aims to challenge Jewish Israeli citizens' participation in state violence. The first full ethnographic account of the Israeli radical left, Wright's book explores the ethics and politics of Jewish Israeli activists who challenge the violence perpetrated by their state and in their name.
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