Samuel Moyn raises many questions in his new, provocative book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War. The four reviews, by Anne Kornhauser, Jana K. Lipman, Tejasvi Nagaraja, and Scott D. Sagan, engage deeply, appreciatively, and critically with Moyn’s work. For Nagaraja the book’s key question is, “how the post-9/11 Forever War became so durable.” Moyn asserts at the outset, “Endless war has become part of the way Americans live now” (4).
Tag: war
Roundtable 12-13 on Peacekeeping in the Midst of War
Peacekeeping was born in 1948, in the midst of the American civil rights and anti-colonial movements. The basic thrust of the idea was to resolve violent conflict without resorting to violence. In that sense, peacekeeping is unlike other forms of military intervention because of its foundational principles: consent, impartiality, and the use of force in self-defense (and later in defense of the mandate). These guiding principles continue to anchor peacekeeping today, even if some of the mechanisms and goals have changed over time.
Review Essay 52 on Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in The Modern Age
These days, international relations (IR) and the study of war need more books that are big in ambition, asking important questions and providing sweeping answers. Unfortunately, the professional incentives in political science these days tend to steer most scholars away from writing big books. It is hard to imagine returning to the heyday of big IR books from 1976 to 1981, a period that saw the publication of an extraordinary series of path-breaking works, including Robert Jervis’ Perception and Misperception in International Politics, Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society, George Quester’s Offense and Defense in the International System, Richard Ned Lebow’s Between Peace and War, Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s The War Trap, A. F. K. Organski’s and Jacek Kugler’s The War Ledger, Robert O. Keohane’s and Joseph Nye’s Power and Interdependence, Stephen Krasner’s Defending the National Interest, and Robert Gilpin’s War and Change in World Politics, to name a few.[1]
Article Review 138 on “The Sturdy Child vs. the Sword of Damocles: Nuclear Weapons and the Expected Cost of War.”
With the advent of nuclear weapons came the question of how their very existence changed the way we conduct and think about warfare. Nearly seventy five years after their first (and, to date, only) use at the end of World War II, the question remains far from resolved, as nuclear ‘optimists’ and ‘pessimists’ continue to debate what Andrew H. Kydd presents as a seemingly simple question: “Is the world better off with nuclear weapons or without?” (645). Kydd’s goal in this article is not to definitively adjudicate the question and come down conclusively on either side, but rather to add the conceptual element of ‘expected costs’ to the debate. In doing so, he introduces a useful meeting point for the two camps.
Forum on Contagion and War: Lessons from the First World War
John Vasquez’s book adds to the enormous mass of writings on the outbreak and spread of the First World War, with the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War having stimulated a further raft of historical scholarship.[1] Vasquez makes a fresh contribution to the subject, but investigates it anew using the tools of political science, and asks a very different question: how do wars—in general—spread? Using the First World War as an exemplary case study, he looks individually at each pair of countries that declared war on one another, not only during the July Crisis but also in the second and third waves of countries that entered the war in 1915-1916 and 1917-1918. Vasquez draws a sharp distinction between the outbreak and the spread of war, with his work focussing only on the latter, and he treats the First World War as beginning with the outbreak of a local war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia that subsequently spread across the globe.
Article Review 126 on “The Demographic Transition Theory of War: Why Young Societies Are Conflict Prone and Old Societies Are the Most Peaceful.”
In “The Demographic Transition Theory of War,” Deborah Jordan Brooks, Stephen Brooks, Brian Greenhill, and Mark Haas set out to show that the likelihood of experiencing the onset of interstate conflict shifts dramatically downward as states pass through a demographic transition. Demonstrating this trend statistically is no easy task. Interstate conflicts are rare events, which typically involve a confusing multi-state mix of actors. Yet, Brooks and her colleagues, who make some innovative methodological choices, succeed in convincingly demonstrating that this expected downward trend can be observed in at least four standard demographic measures—median age, the youth-bulge ratio, total fertility rate, and life expectancy at birth. Perhaps most interesting, for their set of interstate conflict data (1960 to 2001) the authors find that the peak probability of onset for interstate conflict is not at the earliest extremes of these variables.
Review Essay 36 on Tokens of Power: Rethinking War
The fog of war plays a prominent role in Carl von Clausewitz’s reflections on armed struggle. In Ann Hironaka’s rethinking of war, that fog becomes all consuming, obscuring the information needed to understand and prepare for battle. Victory in war is unpredictable and tantamount to random in clashes between competitors with roughly comparable power (41). Power being hard to measure, strategists can rarely know how costly a war will be. Predictions of casualties in the 1991 Gulf War, for example, were too low by an order of magnitude (10). Strategists commonly miscalculate the best strategy in a given context, for example, seeing the offense as having the advantage on the eve of World War I while expecting the defense to dominate in World War II. With profound uncertainty encumbering military analysis, defining the national security interest of the state becomes arbitrary, Hironaka argues.
Roundtable on War and Democratic Constraint: How the Public Influences Foreign Policy
Occasionally, the long timelines of academia have an upside. Matthew Baum and Philip Potter’s War and Democratic Constraint was published in 2015, and these reviews were set in motion prior to Election Day. But President Donald Trump’s surprise victory has, among other things, refocused attention on the nature—and fragility—of democratic institutions. Although Baum and Potter’s book had both scholarly and policy relevance before 8 November 2016, it has taken on new significance and urgency in the election’s aftermath.
Roundtable 9-16 on Coercion, Survival, and War: Why Weak States Resist the United States
A U.S. Air Force A-10A Warthog in flight during a NATO Operation Allied Force (Kosovo) combat mission, Apr. 22, 1999.
Philip Haun’s Coercion, Survival and War: Why Weak States Resist the United States is a much-needed book. After over a decade where the struggle against terrorism dominated policy, conflicts among states—such as the tension between China and Japan over disputed islands or European and U.S. efforts to push back against Russia’s attempts to expand its sphere of influence—are now at the front and center of policymakers’ concerns and may prove the most important security issues for the Trump administration.
Haun’s work presents a general theory of coercive failure, arguing that too often coercers insist on too much—in particular demands for regime change and surrendering territory. Such demands are…
Policy Series: Will Trumpism increase the Danger of War in the International System?: IR Theory and the Illiberal Turn in World Politics
This short piece focuses on mapping and evaluating some of the expectations of International Relations (IR) theory with regard to the potential effects of Trumpism and the illiberal turn in world politics on war and peace.[1] Obviously, there is a high degree of uncertainty here, but that does not mean that such an intellectual exercise cannot be helpful in highlighting some of the potential consequences of the major changes taking place on the important subject of war and peace.[2] The mere fact of rising uncertainty in international politics is, by itself, going to have some significant effects, which we should try to explore.
