In Governing for Revolution, Megan A. Stewart examines variation in rebel governance, asking why some rebel movements undertake expansive and costly governance initiatives during war, while others refrain from doing so until the conflicts end. According to Stewart, governance can be both extensive and intensive. Intensive governance refers to intrusive projects that have the potential…
Tag: Lebanon
Response to Essay 20 on Reconceptualizing Deterrence: Nudging toward Rationality in Middle Eastern Rivalries
I want to thank H-Diplo for publishing this response, and James A. Russell for taking the time to read and review my book. I also want to thank Robert Jervis for the additional comments on Russell’s review. Because the review did not fully address the book’s main arguments and findings, thereby missing the main points…
Review Essay 20 on Reconceptualizing Deterrence: Nudging toward Rationality in Middle Eastern Rivalries
In 1959 Bernard Brodie’s book Strategy in the Missile Age[1] augured in an interesting but relatively short-lived debate over the impact of nuclear weapons on the prospect of war between the United States and the Soviet Union. It appeared amidst a spasm of scholarship on nuclear strategy, deterrence, escalation ladders, limited war and coercive bargaining…
Article Review 23 on “Israel’s War in Gaza: A Paradigm of Effective Military Learning and Adaptation.” International Security 37:2 (Fall 2012), and on “Just War Moral Philosophy and the 2008-09 Israeli Campaign in Gaza.”
Benjamin Lambeth and Jerome Slater share a common interest in the military meaning of Arab-Israeli confrontations of the last decade, but they come at the battles very differently. Whereas Lambeth is interested in analyzing the Israel Defense Forces’ effectiveness and learning curve, Slater is focused upon the morality of Israel’s actions, calling Operation Cast Lead…
Roundtable 4-5 on Good Fences, Bad Neighbors: Border Fixity and International Conflict
Boaz Atzili’s Good Fences, Bad Neighbors: Border Fixity and International Conflict explores the impact of the norm of border fixity that has arisen in world politics since 1945. He questions the view that a norm of border fixity reliably promotes peace; instead, he argues, the effect of the norm depends on conditions, and under today’s…
Review Essay 10 on Cutting a Fuse, not the Fuse!
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…
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,…
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…
