In Violent Victors, Sarah Zukerman Daly poses a question crucial to understanding what happens as countries emerge from civil war: Why does the winning side, whose hands are often stained with the blood of wartime atrocities, so often win the first postwar election? Daly’s answer is at once surprising and intuitive: beleaguered citizens, having endured…
Tag: El Salvador
Article Review 69 on “Influencing Clients in Counterinsurgency: U.S. Involvement in El Salvador’s Civil War, 1979-1992.”
El Salvador’s civil war claimed 75,000 lives, lasted 12 years, and devastated the country in ways felt to this day. Even so, U.S. counterinsurgency scholars often point to El Salvador as a success story and source of lessons for wars to come. Through military and economic aid, and the deployment of 55 advisers to assist…
Roundtable 8-8 on Rivalry and Alliance Politics in Cold War Latin America
Transitions from rivalry to alliance within bilateral relationships have received considerable attention from historians of U.S. foreign relations. Or, more accurately, some alliances have received considerable attention; it remains unusual for works on inter-American relations to be cast principally as examinations of alliance politics. There are at least two interrelated reasons. First, the vast…
Roundtable 7-16 on Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse
Understanding the nature of insurgencies has long been an important objective for political scientists, historians, and policymakers. In Networks of Rebellion, Paul Staniland argues that scholars have paid insufficient attention to the different organizational structures of insurgent groups. In his view, understanding organizational structure is crucial because “states and their foes spend far more time…