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Costly Calculations
Gartner and Segura consider the costs of war – both human and political – by examining the consequences of foreign combat, on domestic politics. The personal costs of war – the military war dead and injured – are the most salient measure of war costs generally and the primary instrument through which war affects domestic politics. The authors posit a general framework for understanding war initiation, war policy and war termination in democratic polities, and the role that citizens and their deaths through conflict play in those policy choices. Employing a variety of empirical methods, they examine multiple wars from the last 100 years, conducting analyses of tens of thousands of individuals across a wide variety of historical and hypothetical conditions, whilst also addressing policy implications. This study will be of interest to students and scholars in American foreign policy, international politics, public opinion, national security, American politics, communication studies, and military history.
Strategic Assessment in War
How do military organizations assess strategic policy in war? In this book Scott Gartner develops a theory to explain how military and government leaders evaluate wartime performance, how much they change strategies in response to this evaluation, and why they are frequently at odds when discussing the success or failure of strategic performance. Blending history, decision theory, and mathematical modeling, Gartner argues that military personnel do reevaluate their strategies and that they measure the performance of a strategy through quantitative, "dominant" indicators. But different actors within a government use different indicators of success: some will see the strategy as succeeding whe...
International Conflict Mediation
This book examines how new empirical approaches to mediation can shed fresh light on the effectiveness of different patterns of conflict management, and offers guidelines on the process of international mediation. International conflict mediation has become one of, if not the most prominent and important conflict resolution methods of the early 21st century. This book argues that traditional approaches to mediation have been inadequate, and that in order to really understand how the process of international mediation works, studies need to operate within an explicit theoretical framework, adopt systematic empirical approaches and use a diversity of methods to identify critical interactions, contexts and relationships. This volume captures recent important changes in the field of international conflict mediation, and includes essays by leading scholars on a variety of critical aspects of conflict management, using state of the art analytical tools and up to date data. This book will of great interest to scholars of peace and conflict studies, methods in social science, and of International Relations in general.
Identity in the Shadow of a Giant
Co-authored by four high-profile International Relations scholars, this book investigates the implications of the global ascent of China on cross-Strait relations and the identity of Taiwan as a democratic state. Examining an array of factors that affect identity formation, the authors consider the influence of the rapid military and economic rise of China on Taiwan's identity. Their assessment offers valuable insights into which policies have the best chance of resulting in peaceful relations and prosperity across the Taiwan Strait and builds a new theory of identity at elite and mass levels. It also possesses implications for the United States-led world order and today's most critical great power competition.
Assessing War
Assessing War spans two centuries of US military history to examine the challenge of measuring progress in wartime. Expert contributors examine wartime assessment in both theory and practice, and through alternative dimensions of assessment such as justice and proportionality, the war of ideas, and economics. --Robert H. Scales, MG (USA, Ret.) "Parameters"
Afghan Endgames
The United States and its allies have been fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan for a decade in a war that either side could still win. While a gradual drawdown has begun, significant numbers of US combat troops will remain in Afghanistan until at least 2014, perhaps longer, depending on the situation on the ground and the outcome of the US presidential election in 2012. Given the realities of the Taliban’s persistence and the desire of US policymakers—and the public—to find a way out, what can and should be the goals of the US and its allies in Afghanistan? Afghan Endgames brings together some of the finest minds in the fields of history, strategy, anthropology, ethics, an...
The Mediation Dilemma
Mediation has become a common technique for terminating violent conflicts both within and between states; while mediation has a strong record in reducing hostilities, it is not without its own problems. In The Mediation Dilemma, Kyle Beardsley highlights its long-term limitations. The result of this oft-superficial approach to peacemaking, immediate and reassuring as it may be, is often a fragile peace. With the intervention of a third-party mediator, warring parties may formally agree to concessions that are insupportable in the long term and soon enough find themselves at odds again. Beardsley examines his argument empirically using two data sets and traces it through several historical ca...
Cultural Movements and Collective Memory
This book uses political process theory to examine three cultural movements around Christopher Columbus. The author examines the religious, ethnic and anti-colonial movements most successful at rewriting national origin myth, demonstrating the political process model while telling the story of how a powerless public mobilized to rewrite its past.
Military Aspects of the Vietnam Conflict
The Vietnam War was, in the words of a preeminent scholar of the conflict (George C. Herring), "America's longest war." The Indochina conflict spanned the first generation of the larger Cold War and lasts to this day in American memory and cultural representation. Although the war remains a sensitive subject for many, a consensus exists that would echo the words of former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in his memoir, In Retrospect, "We were wrong, we were terribly wrong." The six volumes in this series pull together the best article literature on the History of American Involvement in Vietnam. The scholars writing in the first volume explore the roots of U.S. intervention, which fol...
Peacebuilding in the Asia-Pacific
This book explores theories of conflict and peacebuilding and applies them to case studies from the Asia Pacific region, seeking to shift attention to the inherency of conflict, the constant danger of re-emergence, and the need to establish mechanisms to resolve it. The authors argue that the central focus of peacebuilding should not be state-building per se, but rather the creation of effective mechanisms for peaceful resolution of both past and newly emerging conflicts. To do so, it is important to consider the entire process of creating peace, to contemplate the linkages between conflict, resolution, and post-conflict peacebuilding, rather than focus only on the period of institution-building.
