Democracies and Small Wars

Democracies and Small Wars
Author: Efraim Inbar
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780714655345

By their nature, democracies clearly have greater constraints than autocratic regimes on their freedom of action as they have to meet constitutional, legal and moral criteria in their use of force. This collection analyses a number of case studies showing how democracies have won small wars.

How Democracies Lose Small Wars

How Democracies Lose Small Wars
Author: Gil Merom
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2003-08-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521008778

1. Introduction 2. Military superiority and victory in small wars: historical observations 3. The structural original of defiance: the middle-class, the marketplace of ideas, and the normative gap 4. The structural origins of tenacity: national alignment and compartmentalization 5. The French war in Algeria: a strategic, political, and economic overview 6. French instrumental dependence and its consequences 7. The development of a normative difference in France and its consequences 8. The French struggle to contain the growth of the normative gap and the rise of the 'democratic agenda' 9. Political relevance and its consequences in France 10. The Israeli war in Lebanon: a strategic, political, and economic overview 11. Israeli instrumental dependence and its consequences 12. The development of a normative difference in Israel and its consequences 13. The Israeli struggle to contain the growth of the normative gap and the rise of the 'democratic agenda' 14. Political relevance and its consequences in Israel.

Small Wars, Big Data

Small Wars, Big Data
Author: Eli Berman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2018-06-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 140089011X

How a new understanding of warfare can help the military fight today’s conflicts more effectively The way wars are fought has changed starkly over the past sixty years. International military campaigns used to play out between large armies at central fronts. Today's conflicts find major powers facing rebel insurgencies that deploy elusive methods, from improvised explosives to terrorist attacks. Small Wars, Big Data presents a transformative understanding of these contemporary confrontations and how they should be fought. The authors show that a revolution in the study of conflict--enabled by vast data, rich qualitative evidence, and modern methods—yields new insights into terrorism, civil wars, and foreign interventions. Modern warfare is not about struggles over territory but over people; civilians—and the information they might choose to provide—can turn the tide at critical junctures. The authors draw practical lessons from the past two decades of conflict in locations ranging from Latin America and the Middle East to Central and Southeast Asia. Building an information-centric understanding of insurgencies, the authors examine the relationships between rebels, the government, and civilians. This approach serves as a springboard for exploring other aspects of modern conflict, including the suppression of rebel activity, the role of mobile communications networks, the links between aid and violence, and why conventional military methods might provide short-term success but undermine lasting peace. Ultimately the authors show how the stronger side can almost always win the villages, but why that does not guarantee winning the war. Small Wars, Big Data provides groundbreaking perspectives for how small wars can be better strategized and favorably won to the benefit of the local population.

Never at War

Never at War
Author: Spencer R. Weart
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 436
Release: 1998-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780300082982

This lively survey of the history of conflict between democracies reveals a remarkable--and tremendously important--finding: fully democratic nations have never made war on other democracies. Furthermore, historian Spencer R. Weart concludes in this thought-provoking book, they probably never will. Building his argument on some forty case studies ranging through history from ancient Athens to Renaissance Italy to modern America, the author analyzes for the first time every instance in which democracies or regimes like democracies have confronted each other with military force. Weart establishes a consistent set of definitions of democracy and other key terms, then draws on an array of international sources to demonstrate the absence of war among states of a particular democratic type. His survey also reveals the new and unexpected finding of a still broader zone of peace among oligarchic republics, even though there are more of such minority-controlled governments than democracies in history. In addition, Weart discovers that peaceful leagues and confederations--the converse of war--endure only when member states are democracies or oligarchies. With the help of related findings in political science, anthropology, and social psychology, the author explores how the political culture of democratic leaders prevents them from warring against others who are recognized as fellow democrats and how certain beliefs and behaviors lead to peace or war. Weart identifies danger points for democracies, and he offers crucial, practical information to help safeguard peace in the future.

Regime Type and the Persistence of Costly Small Wars

Regime Type and the Persistence of Costly Small Wars
Author: Bradley Norman Nelson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2008
Genre: Democracy
ISBN:

Abstract: This dissertation attempts to answer the following questions: Why do powerful democracies repeatedly fail to cut their losses in costly small wars? And why have democracies exhibited such behavior more often than nondemocracies? Thus, this dissertation links regime type with the tendency of powerful states to persist in costly small wars. I argue that a two-step model, linking the incentives of political coalitions, existing institutional constraints, and war policy, explains the variation in behavior between democracies and nondemocracies in small wars. Within the model, there are five variables - three types of coalition incentives (the type and probability of domestic punishment, elite time horizons, and the role of war propaganda) and two domestic institutional constraints (the number of veto players and the pace of policy change). I hypothesize that the first three variables can push democratic political coalitions toward a dominant incentive to continue their investment in costly small wars. And the two institutional constraints at times act as safety locks on the foreign policy process, making it doubly difficult for democracies to cut their losses. The empirical section of this dissertation consists of four case studies: French-Indochina War, Iraqi Revolt of 1920, Soviet-Afghan War, and Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979. Two cases examine powerful states persisting in a costly, protracted small war, and two cases investigate powerful states cutting their losses in asymmetrical conflicts. The cases are used to determine whether my model of domestic politics accounts for the variation in state behavior in small wars. As such, I process trace the events and processes that contributed to various outcomes in each case. The four case analyses provide considerable support for the two-step model. I consider the model as "strongly passing" empirical tests in three of the cases (Indochina War, Soviet-Afghan War, and Sino-Vietnamese War), and "weakly passing" the remaining case (Iraqi Revolt of 1920). My research offers sixteen timely, pertinent implications for academic scholarship and real world foreign policymaking. These implications directly target the two-step model, the three alternative explanations of this study, as well as several ancillary yet important insights into international relations.

The Savage Wars Of Peace

The Savage Wars Of Peace
Author: Max Boot
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2014-03-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0465038662

"Anyone who wants to understand why America has permanently entered a new era in international relations must read [this book] . . . Vividly written and thoroughly researched." -- Los Angeles Times America's "small wars," "imperial war," or, as the Pentagon now terms them, "low-intensity conflicts," have played an essential but little-appreciated role in its growth as a world power. Beginning with Jefferson's expedition against the Barbary pirates, Max Boot tells the exciting stories of our sometimes minor but often bloody landings in Samoa, the Philippines, China, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Mexico, Russia, and elsewhere. Along the way he sketches colorful portraits of little-known military heroes such as Stephen Decatur, "Fighting Fred" Funston, and Smedly Butler. This revised and updated edition of Boot's compellingly readable history of the forgotten wars that helped promote America's rise in the lst two centuries includes a wealth of new material, including a chapter on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a new afterword on the lessons of the post-9/11 world.

Democratic Militarism

Democratic Militarism
Author: Jonathan D. Caverley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2014-05-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1139917307

Why are democracies pursuing more military conflicts, but achieving worse results? Democratic Militarism shows that a combination of economic inequality and military technical change enables an average voter to pay very little of the costs of large militaries and armed conflict, in terms of both death and taxes. Jonathan Caverley provides an original statistical analysis of public opinion and international aggression, combined with historical evidence from the late Victorian British Empire, the US Vietnam War effort, and Israel's Second Lebanon War. This book undermines conventional wisdom regarding democracy's exceptional foreign policy characteristics, and challenges elite-centered explanations for poor foreign policy. This accessible and wide ranging book offers a new account of democratic warfare, and will help readers to understand the implications of the revolution in military affairs.

Democracy and Political Ignorance

Democracy and Political Ignorance
Author: Ilya Somin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2013-10-02
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0804789312

One of the biggest problems with modern democracy is that most of the public is usually ignorant of politics and government. Often, many people understand that their votes are unlikely to change the outcome of an election and don't see the point in learning much about politics. This may be rational, but it creates a nation of people with little political knowledge and little ability to objectively evaluate what they do know. In Democracy and Political Ignorance, Ilya Somin mines the depths of ignorance in America and reveals the extent to which it is a major problem for democracy. Somin weighs various options for solving this problem, arguing that political ignorance is best mitigated and its effects lessened by decentralizing and limiting government. Somin provocatively argues that people make better decisions when they choose what to purchase in the market or which state or local government to live under, than when they vote at the ballot box, because they have stronger incentives to acquire relevant information and to use it wisely.