Robert Pape and James Feldman in Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It build on Pape’s earlier work, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.[1] This volume is designed to further develop the earlier argument in Dying to Win that the occurrence of suicide terrorism is…
Tag: Israel
Roundtable 3-6 on “The CIA and U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1947: Reforms, Reflections and Reappraisals”
The special issue of Intelligence and National Security, Volume 26, April-June 2011 continues the process of bringing intelligence in from the cold. It is to be hoped that the reviews here contribute to the parallel process of familiarizing diplomatic historians with what is known about intelligence and bringing in two fields closer together. We are…
Roundtable 2-12 on “Democracy and Victory”
In the following exchange Dan Reiter defends his argument that democratic states win most of the wars that they fight primarily because they choose which wars to engage in more carefully than authoritarian states do.[1] This is called the “selection effects” explanation because democracies are selecting which wars to fight and which to avoid. Here,…
Roundtable 2-8 on How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns
A little more than a decade ago, the world’s leading academic experts on terrorism could be gathered in a not very large conference room to discuss the state of the field. As a relatively junior researcher at the United States Institute of Peace at the time, I was in such a room several times. The…
Essay 2 on “A Closer Look at Case Studies on Democracy, Selection Effects, and Victory”
Are democracies more likely to win the wars they fight? This question has been of interest to historians and philosophers since Thucydides. During the Enlightenment, the question was highly relevant to the great issues of the day, as thinkers such as Thomas Paine wondered how emerging republics like the United States and France would fare…