Princeton Studies in International History and Politics
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The Clash of Ideas in World Politics
Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510-2010
by John M. Owen
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"Winner of the 2011 Lepgold Prize, Mortara Center for International Studies, Georgetown University" John M. Owen IV is associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia.
Some blame the violence and unrest in the Muslim world on Islam itself, arguing that the religion and its history is inherently bloody. Others blame the United States, arguing that American attempts to spread democracy by force have destabilized the region, and that these efforts are somehow radical or unique. Challenging these views, The Clash of Ideas in World Politics reveals how the Muslim world is in the throes of an ideological struggle that extends far beyond the Middle East, and how struggles like it have been a recurring feature of international relations since the dawn of the modern European state.
John Owen examines more than two hundred cases of forcible regime promotion over the past five centuries, offering the first systematic study of this common state practice. He looks at conflicts between Catholicism and Protestantism between 1520 and the 1680s; republicanism and monarchy between 1770 and 1850; and communism, fascism, and liberal democracy from 1917 until the late 1980s. He shows how regime promotion can follow regime unrest in the eventual target state or a war involving a great power, and how this can provoke elites across states to polarize according to ideology. Owen traces how conflicts arise and ultimately fade as one ideology wins favor with more elites in more countries, and he demonstrates how the struggle between secularism and Islamism in Muslim countries today reflects broader transnational trends in world history. "The historical narratives Owen employs to test this theory are nuanced, illuminating, and a joy to read."---Peter Liberman, Foreign Affairs "Owen provides the most compelling explanatory framework to date for examining forcible regime promotions, supported by a convincing historical narrative that sets the bar high for future works on the subject. More importantly, Owen's book is a welcome contribution providing a timely toolbox for both academics and policy analysts to examine the ongoing events in the Middle East and beyond."---Luca Tardelli, International Affairs "Owen . . . makes use of formidable analytical skills to reveal patterns in 209 instances internationally and demonstrate the use of regime promotion as a strategic weapon. . . . Recommended."---Ellen J. Jenkins, Canadian Journal of History "[T]he depth of learning that informs the historical aim of Owen's text is proof of the validity of historical work, regardless of the fact that it does not and cannot enable us to make precise predictions."---Jeff Noonan, European Legacy "This book is a major contribution to the literature on hierarchy in international relations. It empirically demonstrates more convincingly than any other study to date that forcible regime change is a normal tool of statecraft. Owen's focus on the importance of transnational ideological polarization as the primary cause of such activity is an explanation that materialists cannot ignore."-Stephen D. Krasner, Stanford University "This book is a major contribution to the history and theory of international relations. We were already in debt to John Owen for his excellent, nuanced analysis of the notion that democracies do not fight each other. This volume is far more ambitious and proves that-as in world politics itself-ideas and historical understanding are more important than accumulations of numbers."-Stanley Hoffmann, Harvard University "John Owen has produced another important book, this one about using force to change regimes in other countries. On a topic soaked with harsh rhetoric and strong emotions, Owen offers historical perspective and serious analysis. His data is striking. It shows that forcible regime changes come in waves, clustered in certain periods, followed by long lulls. Owen helps us understand the logic of this pattern, especially the
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Social States
China in International Institutions, 1980-2000
by Alastair Iain Johnston
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
Alastair Iain Johnston is the Governor James Noe and Linda Noe Laine Professor of China in World Affairs at Harvard University.
"Constructive engagement" became a catchphrase under the Clinton administration for America's reinvigorated efforts to pull China firmly into the international community as a responsible player, one that abides by widely accepted norms. Skeptics questioned the effectiveness of this policy and those that followed. But how is such socialization supposed to work in the first place? This has never been all that clear, whether practiced by the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), Japan, or the United States.
Social States is the first book to systematically test the effects of socialization in international relations--to help explain why players on the world stage may be moved to cooperate when doing so is not in their material power interests. Alastair Iain Johnston carries out his groundbreaking theoretical task through a richly detailed look at China's participation in international security institutions during two crucial decades of the "rise of China," from 1980 to 2000. Drawing on sociology and social psychology, this book examines three microprocesses of socialization--mimicking, social influence, and persuasion--as they have played out in the attitudes of Chinese diplomats active in the Conference on Disarmament, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban, the Convention on Conventional Weapons, and the ASEAN Regional Forum. Among the key conclusions: Chinese officials in the post-Mao era adopted more cooperative and more self-constraining commitments to arms control and disarmament treaties, thanks to their increasing social interactions in international security institutions. "What is the process by which norms in the international system change the behavior of states? Johnston wants to identify the working parts of the causal mechanism. But rather than emphasizing pressure from other states or changing strategic interests to explain decisions to join security regimes, Johnston focuses on the social learning that takes place when policymakers interact with representatives of other states."---Andrew J. Nathan, Foreign Affairs "Johnston offers his arguments in a very cautious way, with meticulous care given to theory and methodology, thereby setting a standard that is rarely found in the current body of literature on the subject. . . . Johnston has certainly published an excellent book, that shows how cutting-edge research can be conducted by exploring in great depth an inter-disciplinary area to help shed new light on Chinese foreign policy. The book's narrow focus on security institutions makes it well-defined; we may hope that Johnston will find it worthwhile to go beyond this in future work."---Gerald Chan, The China Journal "This book is most significant for theoretical, empirical, and political reasons. Theoretically, it explores in detail micromechanisms of socialization, moving way beyond the traditional rationalist-constructivist divide. Empirically, the book demonstrates that even China changes through socialization in international institutions. The political conclusions are obvious: Keep socializing China rather than balancing!"-Thomas Risse, Freie Universität Berlin "This eagerly awaited book offers the most compelling analysis for China's 'peaceful rise' that I know of. Iain Johnston displays a complete mastery of international relations theory, a profound knowledge of Chinese foreign policy and East Asian regionalism, and impressive control over modern social science methods. For many years to come this will be the landmark study of one of the most important developments in contemporary world politics."-Peter J. Katzenstein, Cornell University "Iain Johnston's Social States is a must-read for all students of international relations theory, international institutions, and international security. With his characteristic hardheaded and systematically minded approach to
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Regional Orders at Century's Dawn
Global and Domestic Influences on Grand Strategy
by Etel Solingen
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"Etel Solingen - Winner of the 2018 William and Katherine Estes Award, National Academy of Sciences" Etel Solingen is Distinguished Professor and Thomas T. and Elizabeth C. Tierney Chair in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences 2018 William and Katherine Estes Award.
Etel Solingen provides a comprehensive explanation of foreign policy based on how states throughout the world have confronted the rapid emergence of a global economy and international institutions. A major advance in international relations theory, Regional Orders at Century's Dawn skillfully uses a key issue--internationalization--to clarify other recent debates, from the notion of a democratic peace to the relevance of security dilemmas, nationalism, and the impact of international institutions. The author discusses in rich detail the Middle East, Latin America's Southern Cone, and the Korean peninsula, and builds on examples drawn from almost every other region of the world.
As Solingen demonstrates, economic liberalization--with its dramatic political and economic consequences--invariably attracts supporters and detractors, who join in coalitions to advance their agendas. Each coalition's agenda, or "grand strategy," has consequences at all levels: domestic, regional, and international. At home, coalitions struggle to define the internal allocation and management of resources, and to undermine their rivals. Throughout their regional neighborhoods, coalitions opposing internationalization often compete for dominance, sometimes militarily. Coalitions favoring internationalization, instead, often cooperate. At the global level, each coalition finds support for its "grand strategies" from different international institutions and from competing global economic trends. Solingen's concept of "grand strategy" proposes more than a theory of foreign policy and explains the role of nationalism and ethno-religious revivalism in the politics of liberalization. "A penetrating and timely contribution to the literature on international and regional conflict." "[This book] bridges the divide between international political economy and security studies. . . . A new explanation for regional conflict and cooperation. . . . One of Solingen's main contributions is to offer a causal mechanism that can account for peace among democratic and nondemocratic dyads."---Miriam Fendius Elman, Harvard University Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, International Studies Review "A sophisticated theoretical interpretation of internationalism at the end of the century."---Anthony Smith, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, Contemporary Southeast Asia "A refreshing challenge to some conventional wisdoms."---Helge Hveem, University of Oslo, Australian Journal of Political Science "A bold and innovative attempt to suggest a grand theory of foreign policy and international relations."---Arie M. Kacowicz, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Political Science Quarterly
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George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947-1950
by Wilson D. Miscamble, C.S.C.
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"Finalist for the 1993 Hoover Presidential Library Association Book Award" Wilson D. Miscamble, C.S.C., is Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame.
When George C. Marshall became Secretary of State in January of 1947, he faced not only a staggering array of serious foreign policy questions but also a State Department rendered ineffective by neglect, maladministration, and low morale. Soon after his arrival Marshall asked George F. Kennan to head a new component in the department's structure--the Policy Planning Staff. Here Wilson Miscamble scrutinizes Kennan's subsequent influence over foreign policymaking during the crucial years from 1947 to 1950. "A good analytical examination of American foreign policy as seen through the lens of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff. . . . As such it embraces much more than the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The author insists that there was no grand design to American policy in these years, but one is impressed by the pervasive and lucid intellect of Ambassador Kennan."---William G. Hyland, Foreign Affairs "This book is the most insightful treatment of George Kennan that has yet been published and the best work I know on the making of U.S. foreign policy during this period. The work is an astonishing scholarly accomplishment. Miscamble offers fresh interpretations and a new sense of the context in which policy was made and of the complex influences on the policymakers."-Richard H. Ullman, Princeton University
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Legitimacy and Power Politics
The American and French Revolutions in International Political Culture
by Mlada Bukovansky
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
Mlada Bukovansky is Assistant Professor of Government at Smith College.
This book examines the causes and consequences of a major transformation in both domestic and international politics: the shift from dynastically legitimated monarchical sovereignty to popularly legitimated national sovereignty. It analyzes the impact of Enlightenment discourse on politics in eighteenth-century Europe and the United States, showing how that discourse facilitated new authority struggles in Old Regime Europe, shaped the American and French Revolutions, and influenced the relationships between the revolutionary regimes and the international system.
The interaction between traditional and democratic ideas of legitimacy transformed the international system by the early nineteenth century, when people began to take for granted the desirability of equality, individual rights, and restraint of power. Using an interpretive, historically sensitive approach to international relations, the author considers the complex interplay between elite discourses about political legitimacy and strategic power struggles within and among states. She shows how culture, power, and interests interacted to produce a crucial yet poorly understood case of international change.
The book not only shows the limits of liberal and realist theories of international relations, but also demonstrates how aspects of these theories can be integrated with insights derived from a constructivist perspective that takes culture and legitimacy seriously. The author finds that cultural contests over the terms of political legitimacy constitute one of the central mechanisms by which the character of sovereignty is transformed in the international system--a conclusion as true today as it was in the eighteenth century. "Bukovansky convincingly argues that ideas matter in international politics." "Bukovansky's volume is a most interesting analysis of the topic. . . . [I]t is a valuable addition to the bookshelves of those interested in the dynamics of politics (and who isn't?)."---Lora Sigler, European Legacy "Mlada Bukovansky has written a powerful study, arguing a bold and compelling theory with clarity and confidence."-Joyce Appleby, University of California, Los Angeles "Legitimacy and Power Politics makes an important and original set of arguments that speak directly to some of the most central debates in international relations theory."-Martha Finnemore, George Washington University
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America's Mission
The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy
by Tony Smith
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
Tony Smith is the Cornelia M. Jackson Professor of Political Science at Tufts University. His recent work includes The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton).
America's Mission argues that the global strength and prestige of democracy today are due in large part to America's impact on international affairs. Tony Smith documents the extraordinary history of how American foreign policy has been used to try to promote democracy worldwide, an effort that enjoyed its greatest triumphs in the occupations of Japan and Germany but suffered huge setbacks in Latin America, Vietnam, and elsewhere. With new chapters and a new introduction and epilogue, this expanded edition also traces U.S. attempts to spread democracy more recently, under presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, and assesses America's role in the Arab Spring. "America's Mission is a book with a mission. It's aim . . . is nothing less than to overthrow the hitherto dominant theory dealing with American foreign affairs and to put in its place a different one."---Theodore Draper, New York Review of Books "America's Mission provides a comprehensive historical review of the record of American liberal internationalism. Tony Smith argues persuasively that liberal internationalism is not a cultural quirk of unsophisticated Americans. Rather, it has built on powerful global historical trends. The liberal internationalist streak in American foreign policy has, in turn, been responsible for shaping a liberal world order conducive to American security and economic interests."---Francis Fukuyama, New Republic "[Smith's] account of the 20th century is just about as close to unputdownable as it gets in the genre of political history, and ends up advocating what seems to be an appropriate level of optimism for what remains, after all, a terrifying and chaotic world." "This work, formidable in scope and scholarship, is a rousing defense of liberal Wilsonian internationalism. . . . [Smith's] historical account [of attempts to implant democracy] is accompanied by a sophisticated analysis of the perspectives on democratization of Marxists, comparativists, and realists, who hold respectively, says the author, that the United States will not, cannot, and should not promote democracy worldwide."---David C. Hendrickson, Foreign Affairs "Smith elegantly ties explanation of the past to prescription for the future. No other contemporary political scientist . . . has connected those two dimensions to this subject so well."---Mark P. Lagon, Perspectives on Political Science "This contentious study of US foreign policy is sure to generate new debates about the ideals and realities that inspire and legitimize US foreign policy." "A historically sweeping, theoretically ambitious study of American attempts at promoting liberal democracy abroad, this is the most subtle and thorough examination of a "mission" that has had more than its share of successes, halts, detours, and deviations. No student of America in this world will be able to ignore it: there is simply no comparable volume."-Stanley Hoffmann, Chairman, Center for European Studies, Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France "No one concerned with America's role in the world can afford to ignore the powerful argument and impressive scholarship of this landmark study."-Ronald Steel, University of Southern California, School of International Relations "Breathtaking in its coverage. . . . The author combines historical narrative with political analysis in dazzling fashion, particularly on Woodrow Wilson, whose pragmatic idealism is the leitmotif of this book."-Arthur S. Link, Princeton University
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The Cold War and After
History, Theory, and the Logic of International Politics
by Marc Trachtenberg
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
Marc Trachtenberg is professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. His books include A Constructed Peace and The Craft of International History (both Princeton).
A new way of looking at international relations from a leading expert in the field
What makes for war or for a stable international system? Are there general principles that should govern foreign policy? In The Cold War and After, Marc Trachtenberg, a leading historian of international relations, explores how historical work can throw light on these questions. The essays in this book deal with specific problems-with such matters as nuclear strategy and U.S.-European relations. But Trachtenberg's main goal is to show how in practice a certain type of scholarly work can be done. He demonstrates how, in studying international politics, the conceptual and empirical sides of the analysis can be made to connect with each other, and how historical, theoretical, and even policy issues can be tied together in an intellectually respectable way.
These essays address a wide variety of topics, from theoretical and policy issues, such as the question of preventive war and the problem of international order, to more historical subjects-for example, American policy on Eastern Europe in 1945 and Franco-American relations during the Nixon-Pompidou period. But in each case the aim is to show how a theoretical perspective can be brought to bear on the analysis of historical issues, and how historical analysis can shed light on basic conceptual problems. "[A] stimulating reconsideration of some of the central and already much-studied issues of the Cold War. . . . Trachtenberg argues his case thoughtfully and interestingly. Contentious in parts, stimulating throughout, this is a book for historians and international relations scholars, especially those interested in each other's endeavours, and for a wider academic readership, too."---Roger Morgan, Times Higher Education "Trachtenberg provides a fresh analysis of the United States and Eastern Europe and the question of Soviet motivations and intentions in 1945. It is familiar territory to diplomatic historians and yet the insights and the repositioning that are made possible through the methodology are fascinating."---David Ryan, International Affairs "The Cold War and After . . . will be a particularly valuable asset for (post)graduate students, although established IR scholars will also benefit. For those occupying the broad center of international studies, this book is a master class in historical and qualitative methods."---Peter Harris, Political Studies Review "Trachtenberg's often provocative conclusions make The Cold War and After . . . an important book. Any scholar interested in the latest approach to the history of the Cold War would do well to read it."---Russel Lemmons, Historian "Marc Trachtenberg is one of the best international historians in the land. His new book is filled with important insights and interesting stories. But the most important virtue of The Cold War and After is that it shows clearly that international history and international relations theory are inextricably linked and scholars cannot engage in one of those enterprises without paying serious attention to the other."-John Mearsheimer, University of Chicago "Marc Trachtenberg is unsurpassed in his ability to combine history and political science, and by bringing together a set of wide-ranging and incisive essays, he has produced a volume that belongs on the shelves of all serious scholars working in the field. The deep research, probing analysis, and distinctive voice make this book a pleasure to read."-Robert Jervis, Columbia University "This is an outstanding book, engaging and stimulating from beginning to end. Trachtenberg is one of the rare analysts of international relations with a rich sense of history, and he is one of those rare historians who can look at public policy without harsh partisan blinders.
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Why Wilson Matters
The Origin of American Liberal Internationalism and Its Crisis Today
by Tony Smith
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
Tony Smith is the Cornelia M. Jackson Professor of Political Science at Tufts University. His many books include America's Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy and The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-First Century (both Princeton).
How Woodrow Wilson's vision of making the world safe for democracy has been betrayed-and how America can fulfill it again
The liberal internationalist tradition is credited with America's greatest triumphs as a world power-and also its biggest failures. Beginning in the 1940s, imbued with the spirit of Woodrow Wilson's efforts at the League of Nations to "make the world safe for democracy," the United States steered a course in world affairs that would eventually win the Cold War. Yet in the 1990s, Wilsonianism turned imperialist, contributing directly to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the continued failures of American foreign policy.
Why Wilson Matters explains how the liberal internationalist community can regain a sense of identity and purpose following the betrayal of Wilson's vision by the brash "neo-Wilsonianism" being pursued today. Drawing on Wilson's original writings and speeches, Tony Smith traces how his thinking about America's role in the world evolved in the years leading up to and during his presidency, and how the Wilsonian tradition went on to influence American foreign policy in the decades that followed-for good and for ill. He traces the tradition's evolution from its "classic" era with Wilson, to its "hegemonic" stage during the Cold War, to its "imperialist" phase today. Smith calls for an end to reckless forms of U.S. foreign intervention, and a return to the prudence and "eternal vigilance" of Wilson's own time.
Why Wilson Matters renews hope that the United States might again become effectively liberal by returning to the sense of realism that Wilson espoused, one where the promotion of democracy around the world is balanced by the understanding that such efforts are not likely to come quickly and without costs. "A painstaking, take-no-prisoners attack on those who believe that America's historical experience can be duplicated everywhere. . . . This makes for powerful reading."---Robert Kaplan, Wall Street Journal "A valiant effort to assert that Woodrow Wilson's view of how America should relate to the world has relevance today. . . . Smith performs a service to readers looking to place current domestic political developments in historical context." "[Smith] wants to reclaim Wilson's historical memory to bolster the very idea of liberal internationalism, which he correctly considers under assault. For Smith, the problem is not that the United States stands for liberal values and seeks to promote democracy abroad; for too many, doing so has become synonymous with military force and overthrowing governments. The association of Wilson's precepts with the recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya has caused many to question the wisdom of a vigorous American role in the world. The result, Smith argues, is that 'neo-Wilsonianism sabotaged the very tradition from which it had emerged.'"---Derek Chollet, The National Interest "Even a review as generous in length as H-Diplo allows cannot do justice to Smith's intellectual achievement in his reconsideration of Wilson. . . . The point is to evaluate the major actors, of whom this man stands paramount, for who they were and what they thought they were doing. As a scholar and our only professional academic to become president, Wilson would have wanted nothing less. Tony Smith's book takes us a long way down the path to a true understanding of this man and these events."---John Milton Cooper, Jr., H-Diplo Roundtable Review "A significant and highly original contribution to the scholarship on Wilson and Wilsonianism. The book manages to offer new insights to our understanding of Wilson as well an original critique of cont
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The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe
Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change
by Daniel H. Nexon
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"Winner of the 2010 International Security Studies Section Book Award, International Studies Association" Daniel H. Nexon is assistant professor of government and foreign service at Georgetown University.
Scholars have long argued over whether the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended more than a century of religious conflict arising from the Protestant Reformations, inaugurated the modern sovereign-state system. But they largely ignore a more fundamental question: why did the emergence of new forms of religious heterodoxy during the Reformations spark such violent upheaval and nearly topple the old political order? In this book, Daniel Nexon demonstrates that the answer lies in understanding how the mobilization of transnational religious movements intersects with--and can destabilize--imperial forms of rule.
Taking a fresh look at the pivotal events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--including the Schmalkaldic War, the Dutch Revolt, and the Thirty Years' War--Nexon argues that early modern "composite" political communities had more in common with empires than with modern states, and introduces a theory of imperial dynamics that explains how religious movements altered Europe's balance of power. He shows how the Reformations gave rise to crosscutting religious networks that undermined the ability of early modern European rulers to divide and contain local resistance to their authority. In doing so, the Reformations produced a series of crises in the European order and crippled the Habsburg bid for hegemony.
Nexon's account of these processes provides a theoretical and analytic framework that not only challenges the way international relations scholars think about state formation and international change, but enables us to better understand global politics today. "Scholars often debate the future of modern system of nation-states, but rarely do they study its origins. This groundbreaking book provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious and geopolitical conflicts of the seventeenth century, culminating in the emergence of the European state system." "As a historian of early modern France it is refreshing to venture into a scholarly domain that comfortably pursues large-scale political analysis. It is equally refreshing to find someone trained in international relations who takes religion seriously as an independent, and powerful, political dynamic. Daniel Nexon's ambitious reexamination of early modern state formations does just that. . . . [T]his is a highly satisfying and stimulating rethinking of the political significance of the Reformation."---Megan Armstrong, Renaissance Quarterly "Daniel H. Nexon analyzes this relationship between religion and violence from the perspective of modern political science. His arguments are clearly stated and thought-provoking. . . . Nexon's analysis displays a sure sense of what made early modern Europe distinctive and gives due regard to contingency as well as structural factors. More importantly, his theoretical framework offers an interesting way to integrate religious and secular factors in an analysis of international change and to explore this in comparative perspective."---Peter H. Wilson, Journal of Early Modern History "A stimulating, dense, and highly readable book."---Stephen Deets, Nationalities Papers "[C]hallenging ideas appear throughout this valuable and impressive work, which will surely spark a great deal of discussion among scholars of early modern politics and international relations."---Tryntje Helfferich, Journal of Interdisciplinary History "Such an astute account of the dynamics of continuity and change in global politics will be invaluable both to students and scholars of the theory and history of international relations. . . . Nexon's outstanding volume would be of relevance to anyone interested in understanding the European origins of the idea and practices of sovereign territorial statehood. He has also produced the kind of book
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How Enemies Become Friends
The Sources of Stable Peace
by Charles A. Kupchan
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"Finalist for the 2011 Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize" "Honorable Mention for the 2011 Arthur Ross Book Award, Council on Foreign Relations" Charles A. Kupchan is professor of international affairs at Georgetown University and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served on the National Security Council during the Clinton presidency and is the author of The End of the American Era (Knopf).
How nations move from war to peace
Is the world destined to suffer endless cycles of conflict and war? Can rival nations become partners and establish a lasting and stable peace? How Enemies Become Friends provides a bold and innovative account of how nations escape geopolitical competition and replace hostility with friendship. Through compelling analysis and rich historical examples that span the globe and range from the thirteenth century through the present, foreign policy expert Charles Kupchan explores how adversaries can transform enmity into amity-and he exposes prevalent myths about the causes of peace.
Kupchan contends that diplomatic engagement with rivals, far from being appeasement, is critical to rapprochement between adversaries. Diplomacy, not economic interdependence, is the currency of peace; concessions and strategic accommodation promote the mutual trust needed to build an international society. The nature of regimes matters much less than commonly thought: countries, including the United States, should deal with other states based on their foreign policy behavior rather than on whether they are democracies. Kupchan demonstrates that similar social orders and similar ethnicities, races, or religions help nations achieve stable peace. He considers many historical successes and failures, including the onset of friendship between the United States and Great Britain in the early twentieth century, the Concert of Europe, which preserved peace after 1815 but collapsed following revolutions in 1848, and the remarkably close partnership of the Soviet Union and China in the 1950s, which descended into open rivalry by the 1960s.
In a world where conflict among nations seems inescapable, How Enemies Become Friends offers critical insights for building lasting peace. "Kupchan's magisterial accomplishment, drawing on an extraordinary range of theories and cases, is to provide an overarching account of when and why countries in conflict move toward stable peace. . . .This book will be read by scholars and policy thinkers for a very long time."---G. John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs "Kupchan has a lucid style and writes with authority and wisdom. In the course of his argument, he knocks firmly on the head a number of dangerously misleading nostrums."---G. R. Berridge, Hague Journal of Diplomacy "[Kupchan] is one of those rare Americans with a genuinely global view of international relations. . . . By the time he reaches the end of his brilliant analysis, Kupchan has shown that diplomacy and wilful compromise are the real foundations of peace."---Gilles Andreani, Survival "This wide-ranging comparative historical study seeks to discover why and how some adversaries not only achieved friendship but created zones of durable peace." "How Enemies Become Friends is an ambitious book, which, through a combination of theoretical understanding and in-depth case studies, delivers a powerful argument that champions Obama's policy of engagement with Iran and China. Such an important topic demands vigorous analysis, which Kupchan is well qualified to deliver. . . . This book is entitled to serious consideration by those in the field of international relations."---Grace Nicholls, Majalla "[A] learned, lucid, fascinating account."---Robert Cornwall, Christian Century "How Enemies Become Friends is a highly important contribution to the debate in the United States on how to manage U.S. foreign and security policy in a world of considerably reduced U.S. power. Above all, Kupchan provides the historical and theore
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Cultural Realism
Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History
by Alastair Iain Johnston
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
Alastair Iain Johnston is Assistant Professor of Government and teaches Chinese foreign policy and international relations at Harvard University.
Cultural Realism is an in-depth study of premodern Chinese strategic thought that has important implications for contemporary international relations theory. In applying a Western theoretical debate to China, Iain Johnston advances rigorous procedures for testing for the existence and influence of "strategic culture."
Johnston sets out to answer two empirical questions. Is there a substantively consistent and temporally persistent Chinese strategic culture? If so, to what extent has it influenced China's approaches to security? The focus of his study is the Ming dynasty's grand strategy against the Mongols (1368-1644). First Johnston examines ancient military texts as sources of Chinese strategic culture, using cognitive mapping, symbolic analysis and congruence tests to determine whether there is a consistent grand strategic preference ranking across texts that constitutes a single strategic culture. Then he applies similar techniques to determine the effect of the strategic culture on the strategic preferences of the Ming decision makers. Finally, he assesses the effect of these preferences on Ming policies towards the Mongol "threat."
The findings of this book challenge dominant interpretations of traditional Chinese strategic thought. They suggest also that the roots of realpolitik are ideational and not predominantly structural. The results lead to the surprising conclusion that there may be, in fact, fewer cross-national differences in strategic culture than proponents of the "strategic culture" approach think. "If Johnston's analysis of China's strategic culture is correct--and I believe that it is--generational change will not guarantee a kinder, gentler China."---Warren I. Cohen, The Atlantic Monthly "[Cultural Realism] contends that the Chinese are no less concerned with the use of military power than any other civilization--a point that scholars have traditionally disputed because, as Johnston demonstrates, they misread the Chinese classics."---Roderick MacFarquhar, Lingua Franca "Johnston is correct that many actual Chinese uses of force look far more like 'realism' than many Sinologists have realized. His stress on the 'realist' thread in the classics is likewise very illuminating."---Arthur Waldron, The New Republic "The beauty of this book is the clarity and precision of the argument.... We need the intellectual challenge of such social science research on ancient and imperial China."---Joseph W. Eshrick, Journal of Asian Studies
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Secret Wars
Covert Conflict in International Politics
by Austin Carson
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"Winner of the Lepgold Prize, Mortara Center for International Studies, Georgetown University" "Honorable Mention for the Best Book Award, Conflict Processes Section, American Political Science Association" Austin Carson is assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago.
Secret Wars is the first book to systematically analyze the ways powerful states covertly participate in foreign wars, showing a recurring pattern of such behavior stretching from World War I to U.S.-occupied Iraq. Investigating what governments keep secret during wars and why, Austin Carson argues that leaders maintain the secrecy of state involvement as a response to the persistent concern of limiting war. Keeping interventions "backstage" helps control escalation dynamics, insulating leaders from domestic pressures while communicating their interest in keeping a war contained.
Carson shows that covert interventions can help control escalation, but they are almost always detected by other major powers. However, the shared value of limiting war can lead adversaries to keep secret the interventions they detect, as when American leaders concealed clashes with Soviet pilots during the Korean War. Escalation concerns can also cause leaders to ignore covert interventions that have become an open secret. From Nazi Germany's role in the Spanish Civil War to American covert operations during the Vietnam War, Carson presents new insights about some of the most influential conflicts of the twentieth century.
Parting the curtain on the secret side of modern war, Secret Wars provides important lessons about how rival state powers collude and compete, and the ways in which they avoid outright military confrontations. "[An] intriguing analysis."---Lawrence D. Freedman, Foreign Affairs "[An] excellent new book. . . . Throughout, Carson's archival research is impressive."---Sam Winter-Levy, Lawfare "This is a very interesting and thought-provoking analysis of covert conflict in international politics." "[A]n outstanding book, one likely to produce a vibrant research program in the years to come."---Stacie Goddard, H-Diplo "Carson is to be congratulated for a scholarly study with broad appeal that presents a new perspective on international politics that overturns many commonly held assumptions. - Matthew Hughes, Journal of Interdisciplinary History " "Why do states intervene overtly in some military conflicts but covertly in others? This innovative and compelling study, one of the best available on covert intervention, argues that states intervene secretly to avoid potentially dangerous escalation. In a fascinating twist, adversaries that discover covert interventions sometimes play along, keeping them secret to avoid pressures for counterintervention. Carson brilliantly illuminates this hidden side of war."-Alexander B. Downes, George Washington University "This is the first thorough exploration of the role of secrecy in war-not to keep things from the adversary, but to control the pressures for escalation and to collude with the adversary in order to keep a war limited. With important arguments and case studies, this excellent book offers new information and interpretations of facts. It will have a major impact."-Robert Jervis, Columbia University "This book persuasively argues that both covert action in limited war, and observers' collusion in keeping those actions secret, are driven by fear of escalation and the desire to keep war limited. Secret Wars substantiates these claims well, drawing on carefully researched and strong case studies covering key participants in a series of important wars that featured covert action."-Ronald Krebs, University of Minnesota "Secret Wars brings a common but hidden form of conflict into the light. States love secrecy, but this book shows that adversaries often collude with each other to keep war in the shadows and off the escalation ladder. Carson has produced an exceptiona
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The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War
by David G. Herrmann
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"Winner of the 1996 Paul Birdsall Prize, American Historical Association" David G. Herrmann is Assistant Professor of History at Tulane University.
David Herrmann's work is the most complete study to date of how land-based military power influenced international affairs during the series of diplomatic crises that led up to the First World War. Instead of emphasizing the naval arms race, which has been extensively studied before, Herrmann draws on documentary research in military and state archives in Germany, France, Austria, England, and Italy to show the previously unexplored effects of changes in the strength of the European armies during this period. Herrmann's work provides not only a contribution to debates about the causes of the war but also an account of how the European armies adopted the new weaponry of the twentieth century in the decade before 1914, including quick-firing artillery, machine guns, motor transport, and aircraft.
In a narrative account that runs from the beginning of a series of international crises in 1904 until the outbreak of the war, Herrmann points to changes in the balance of military power to explain why the war began in 1914, instead of at some other time. Russia was incapable of waging a European war in the aftermath of its defeat at the hands of Japan in 1904-5, but in 1912, when Russia appeared to be regaining its capacity to fight, an unprecedented land-armaments race began. Consequently, when the July crisis of 1914 developed, the atmosphere of military competition made war a far more likely outcome than it would have been a decade earlier. "Herrmann argues that the dynamic element which upset the European balance was the change in statesmen's perceptions of the military strengths and weaknesses of their neighbors between 1904 and 1914....A good book [that] draws on evidence from French, German, Austrian, Italian, and British archives."---David French, The Times Literary Supplement "A valuable and long-overdue book. . . . It offers a far more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of military organizations as they faced the calamity of the First World War. A first-rate piece of work."---Eliot A. Cohen, Foreign Affairs
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A Constructed Peace
The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963
by Marc Trachtenberg
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"Winner of the 2000 Paul Birdsall Prize, American Historical Association" "Winner of the 2000 George Louis Beer Prize, American Historical Association" Marc Trachtenberg is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of History and Strategy (Princeton) and Reparation in World Politics: France and European Economic Diplomacy, 1916-1923.
People still think of the Cold War as a simple two-sided conflict, a kind of gigantic arm wrestle on a global scale," writes Marc Trachtenberg, "but this view fails to grasp the essence of what was really going on." America and Russia were both willing to live with the status quo in Europe. What then could have generated the kind of conflict that might have led to a nuclear holocaust? This is the great puzzle of the Cold War, and in this book, the product of nearly twenty years of work, Trachtenberg tries to solve it.
The answer, he says, has to do with the German question, especially with the German nuclear question. These issues lay at the heart of the Cold War, and a relatively stable peace took shape only when they were resolved. The book develops this argument by telling a story--a complex story involving many issues of detail, but focusing always on the central question of how a stable international system came into being during the Cold War period. A Constructed Peace will be of interest not just to students of the Cold War, but to people concerned with the problem of war and peace, and in particular with the question of how a stable international order can be constructed, even in our own day. "An authoritative history of the German Question during the first half of the Cold War. . . . [T]he work's originality, and the way its recaptures how issues were linked in the minds of policymakers, makes it the leading general history of the early Cold War in Europe." "An exhaustive, well-written study of statecraft at the highest levels." "A powerful, original, and engaging work. Marc Trachtenberg has woven together an enormous array of evidence and information, much of it only recently available to researchers, into a compelling interpretation of an extremely important historical period. Trachtenberg's book is broad as well as deep, and its implications for our understanding of the dynamics of the Cold War extend well beyond the period it examines."-Aaron L. Friedberg, Princeton University "Marc Trachtenberg's grasp of the finer points of Western internal debates on nuclear weapons and strategy is impressive. His book is an extraordinary piece of research and analysis that may very well set the standard in the field of Cold War studies for years to come."-William Stueck, University of Georgia
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Divided Armies
Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War
by Jason Lyall
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"Winner of the Lepgold Prize, Mortara Center for International Studies, Georgetown University" "Winner of the Peter Katzenstein Book Prize, Cornell University Department of Government" "2019 War on the Rocks Holiday Reading List" "One of Foreign Affairs' Best Books of 2020" "Winner of the Best Book Award, Conflict Processes Section of the American Political Science Association" "Winner of the Edgar S. Furniss Book Award, Mershon Center for International Security Studies" Jason Lyall is the James Wright Associate Professor in Transnational Studies and associate professor of government at Dartmouth College, where he also directs the Political Violence FieldLab.
How do armies fight and what makes them victorious on the modern battlefield? In Divided Armies, Jason Lyall challenges long-standing answers to this classic question by linking the fate of armies to their levels of inequality. Introducing the concept of military inequality, Lyall demonstrates how a state's prewar choices about the citizenship status of ethnic groups within its population determine subsequent battlefield performance. Treating certain ethnic groups as second-class citizens, either by subjecting them to state-sanctioned discrimination or, worse, violence, undermines interethnic trust, fuels grievances, and leads victimized soldiers to subvert military authorities once war begins. The higher an army's inequality, Lyall finds, the greater its rates of desertion, side-switching, casualties, and use of coercion to force soldiers to fight.
In a sweeping historical investigation, Lyall draws on Project Mars, a new dataset of 250 conventional wars fought since 1800, to test this argument. Project Mars breaks with prior efforts by including overlooked non-Western wars while cataloguing new patterns of inequality and wartime conduct across hundreds of belligerents. Combining historical comparisons and statistical analysis, Lyall also marshals evidence from nine wars, ranging from the Eastern Fronts of World Wars I and II to less familiar wars in Africa and Central Asia, to illustrate inequality's effects.
Sounding the alarm on the dangers of inequality for battlefield performance, Divided Armies offers important lessons about warfare over the past two centuries-and for wars still to come. "A welcome mingling of the traditions of quantitative and qualitative political science. He sets a rigorous and imaginative methodological standard that others will struggle to match."---Lawrence D. Freedman, Foreign Affairs "An inviting and challenging read, one that necessitates and rewards thoughtful investment."---Dr. Larry D. Miller, National Defense University Press "An extraordinary achievement, providing new ideas about the non-material determinants of battlefield performance, and presenting compelling quantitative and qualitative evidence. It will no doubt shape research agendas on war for many years to come." "The book provides the theoretical basis for an intuitively grasped characteristic of armed forces around the world today and through history. Its argument should inform future policymaking, as well serve as a basis to re-examine past wars."---Axel Dessein, Wavell Room "A major contribution to any literature that seeks to understand military design or behavior. . . . [Lyall's] valuable empirical work and data collection - and clear methodology - will provide numerous avenues for further research to anyone with an interest in civil-military relations and conflict.-Max Margulies, Political Science Quarterly" "Lyall's important work arrays data from 250 wars since 1800 to prove systematically what Washington, Grant, and Eisenhower described: that the political compact between a country and its fighting forces is a major determinant in warfare. This beautifully written book brilliantly blends quantitative and qualitative methods to show that what states choose to do about status and belonging-about political identity-before wars decisively affects thei
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Useful Adversaries
Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict, 1947-1958
by Thomas J. Christensen
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
Thomas J. Christensen is currently Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University. He formerly held an SSRC/MacArthur Foundation fellowship in international peace and security and was an Olin National Security Fellow at Harvard University.
This book provides a new analysis of why relations between the United States and the Chinese Communists were so hostile in the first decade of the Cold War. Employing extensive documentation, it offers a fresh approach to long-debated questions such as why Truman refused to recognize the Chinese Communists, why the United States aided Chiang Kai-shek's KMT on Taiwan, why the Korean War escalated into a Sino-American conflict, and why Mao shelled islands in the Taiwan Straits in 1958, thus sparking a major crisis with the United States.
Christensen first develops a novel two-level approach that explains why leaders manipulate low-level conflicts to mobilize popular support for expensive, long-term security strategies. By linking "grand strategy," domestic politics, and the manipulation of ideology and conflict, Christensen provides a nuanced and sophisticated link between domestic politics and foreign policy. He then applies the approach to Truman's policy toward the Chinese Communists in 1947-50 and to Mao's initiation of the 1958 Taiwan Straits Crisis. In these cases the extension of short-term conflict was useful in gaining popular support for the overall grand strategy that each leader was promoting domestically: Truman's limited-containment strategy toward the USSR and Mao's self-strengthening programs during the Great Leap Forward. Christensen also explores how such low-level conflicts can escalate, as they did in Korea, despite leaders' desire to avoid actual warfare. "[Christensen] makes a convincing and original argument that political leaders, in order to secure public support for their fundamental grand strategy, may have to adopt a more hostile foreign policy than they would prefer . . . This volume is indispensable for anyone interested in Sino-American relations."
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Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns
State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe
by Janice E. Thomson
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
Janice E. Thomson is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington.
The contemporary organization of global violence is neither timeless nor natural, argues Janice Thomson. It is distinctively modern. In this book she examines how the present arrangement of the world into violence-monopolizing sovereign states evolved over the six preceding centuries. "All may . . . welcome [Thomson] as a fellow-grappler with that protean problem that confronts historians and . . . social scientists alike: the shortcomings of international society [today], and the degree to which those shortcomings are attributable to the idea that 'sovereign states' have of themselves, and the self-interested ways they tend to behave within it."---Geoffrey Best, Times Literary Supplement "Thomson's book is well worth reading. It is historically rich and theoretically erudite."---Michael C. Desch, Mershon International Studies Review "Janice E. Thomson's title may mislead. She is a political scientist, [but] ... there is much in Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns for historians too; for the many with an interest in state-formation and the not-so-many interested in the development of the interstate-system or, as some of us prefer to call it, international society. The common factor in the discussion of the two processes is the question of the legitimate uses of armed force." "Strike[s] at the heart of [the] assumption that a monopoly on violence is the hallmark of the state, ... [Thomson] is correct when she advises us that `state' and `sovereignty' are more mutable concepts than we might acknowledge or even admit. [A] major contribution to our understanding of international affairs and to the history of state-building."-Francis X. Hartigan, Terrorism and Political Violence
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We All Lost the Cold War
by Richard Ned Lebow
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1994" Richard Ned Lebow is Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. Janice Gross Stein is Harrison Professor of Conflict Management and Negotiation at the University of Toronto.
Drawing on recently declassified documents and extensive interviews with Soviet and American policy-makers, among them several important figures speaking for public record for the first time, Ned Lebow and Janice Stein cast new light on the effect of nuclear threats in two of the tensest moments of the Cold War: the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the confrontations arising out of the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. They conclude that the strategy of deterrence prolonged rather than ended the conflict between the superpowers. "The orthodoxy . . . is that deterrence worked and the arms race defeated the Soviet Union. Hitherto there has been little dissent from those positions, apart from those 'revisionist' historians who merely turned the whole orthodoxy on its head. . . . Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein are not revisionists in that sense. They are far too sensible for emotional nonsense of that kind. Yet their work is quite as unorthodox, probably as shocking to the closed corporation of Cold War 'scholars' but much more surprising than that of the Chomskyans."---Godfrey Hodgson, The Independent (London) "They've got it just right. It is a dangerous conclusion that the West won the Cold War. The argument that one side won the Cold War is mistaken. We all lost the Cold War, particularly the USA and the USSR. We all won by ending it. That is the scientific conclusion."-Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev
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Who Adjusts?
Domestic Sources of Foreign Economic Policy During the Interwar Years
by Beth A. Simmons
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"Winner of the 1995 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award" Beth A. Simmons is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
In this work Beth Simmons presents a fresh view of why governments decided to abide by or defect from the gold standard during the 1920s and 1930s. Previous studies of the spread of the Great Depression have emphasized "tit-for-tat" currency and tariff manipulation and a subsequent cycle of destructive competition. Simmons, on the other hand, analyzes the influence of domestic politics on national responses to the international economy. In so doing, she powerfully confirms that different political regimes choose different economic adjustment strategies. "One of the best books I have read in years. . . . Simmons develops a novel, domestic explanation for the policy failures of the interwar period . . . [and] untangles the complicated web of the interwar international political economy. The book not only sets a new standard of research excellence, but it is required reading for all international political economists, as well as many comparativists and historians. . . . Who Adjusts? will certainly become a classic analysis of interwar economic policy."---David A. Lake, American Political Science Review "[Simmons's] arguments and results hold considerable interest for economists and historians as well as political scientists."---Kenneth Mouré, American Historical Review "This ambitious study makes an important contribution to systemic theories of international economics cooperation. . . . Simmons's bold and lucid analysis is stimulating."---Patricia Clavin, Economic History Review
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Cooperation Among Democracies
The European Influence on u.s. Foreign Policy
by Thomas Risse-Kappen
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
Thomas Risse-Kappen is Professor of International Relations at the University of Konstanz, Germany, and International Relations Chair at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He is the editor of Bringing Transnational Relations Back In.
In exploring the special nature of alliances among democracies, Thomas Risse-Kappen argues that the West European and Canadian allies exerted greater influence on American foreign policy during the Cold War than most analysts assume. In so doing, he challenges traditional alliance theories that emphasize strategic interactions and power-based bargaining processes. For a better understanding of the transatlantic relationship, the author proposes that we instead turn to liberal theories of international affairs. Accordingly, liberal democracies are likely to form the "pacific federations" described by Immanuel Kant or "pluralistic security communities" as Karl W. Deutsch suggested.
Through detailed case studies, Risse-Kappen shows that the Europeans affected security decisions concerning vital U.S. interest during the 1950-1953 Korean war, the 1958-1963 test ban negotiations, and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis--all during a span of time in which the U.S. enjoyed undisputed economic and military supremacy in the alliance. He situates these case studies within a theoretical framework demonstrating that the European influence on decision-making processes in Washington worked through three mechanisms: norms prescribing timely consultations among the allies, use of domestic pressures for leverage in transatlantic interactions, and transnational and transgovernmental coalitions among societal and bureaucratic actors. The book's findings have important repercussions for the post-Cold War era in that they suggest the transatlantic security community is likely to survive the end of the Soviet threat. "A serious contribution. . . . The author demonstrates that the analysis of norms points to an improved understanding of international relations. . . . Excellent documentation." "A sophisticated study of the Western alliance that emphasizes European influence on US decision-making. . . .[T]his book will be useful to historians as well as to political scientists interested in alliance and international relations theory. . . . A book that is outstanding in a crowded field. The careful research and thoughtful argument in Cooperation among Democracies make it one of the very best studies of the Western alliance."---Frank Costigliola, The International History Review
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War and Punishment
The Causes of War Termination and the First World War
by H. E. Goemans
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
H. E. Goemans is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University.
What makes wars drag on and why do they end when they do? Here H. E. Goemans brings theoretical rigor and empirical depth to a long-standing question of securities studies. He explores how various government leaders assess the cost of war in terms of domestic politics and their own postwar fates. Goemans first develops the argument that two sides will wage war until both gain sufficient knowledge of the other's strengths and weaknesses so as to agree on the probable outcome of continued war. Yet the incentives that motivate leaders to then terminate war, Goemans maintains, can vary greatly depending on the type of government they represent. The author looks at democracies, dictatorships, and mixed regimes and compares the willingness among leaders to back out of wars or risk the costs of continued warfare.
Democracies, according to Goemans, will prefer to withdraw quickly from a war they are not winning in order to appease the populace. Autocracies will do likewise so as not to be overthrown by their internal enemies. Mixed regimes, which are made up of several competing groups and which exclude a substantial proportion of the people from access to power, will likely see little risk in continuing a losing war in the hope of turning the tide. Goemans explores the conditions and the reasoning behind this "gamble for resurrection" as well as other strategies, using rational choice theory, statistical analysis, and detailed case studies of Germany, Britain, France, and Russia during World War I. In so doing, he offers a new perspective of the Great War that integrates domestic politics, international politics, and battlefield developments. "Goemans makes a significant addition to our understanding of war termination. In addition, the book is so well written that it is a valuable source for readers at all levels." "One can disagree with particular interpretations of Goemans, or even question his overall thesis, but it is a thesis that must be taken seriously. Goemans is to be congratulated for producing a book of value to scholars and to policy-makers, given the obvious implications of his findings for strategy."---Richard Ned Lebow, International History Review "The greatest strength of this book is that it is eminently thought-provoking, and that is praise not lightly given."---Ralph Ashby, The Historian "War and Punishmentis a refreshing combination of rigorous reasoning and elegant historical analysis on one of the most important, and least understood, aspects of war: what causes wars to end. Anyone interested in the interplay between leadership, domestic politics, and international conflict must read this book. It is a superb and enlightening analysis."-Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University "A fresh and thought-provoking analysis of why the First World War lasted so long and of what caused it to end. Goemans bridges the gap between international history and security studies, offering challenging conclusions for experts in both disciplines. His book deserves a wide readership."-David Stevenson, Professor of International History, London School of Economics and Political Science "This may very well be the best book written in the last twenty years by a political scientist on war termination, war aims, and World War I. Goemans presents a formidable challenge to the way that we think about the prosecution of war, war duration, and the links between these and regime type. Not only does the book contain tremendously valuable theoretical insights, but it also provides compelling empirical evidence."-Allan C. Stam, Yale University
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The Sovereign State and Its Competitors
An Analysis of Systems Change
by Hendrik Spruyt
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"Winner of the 1996 J. David Greenstone Book Prize, American Political Science Association" Hendrik Spruyt is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University.
The present international system, composed for the most part of sovereign, territorial states, is often viewed as the inevitable outcome of historical development. Hendrik Spruyt argues that there was nothing inevitable about the rise of the state system, however. Examining the competing institutions that arose during the decline of feudalism--among them urban leagues, independent communes, city states, and sovereign monarchies--Spruyt disposes of the familiar claim that the superior size and war-making ability of the sovereign nation-state made it the natural successor to the feudal system.
The author argues that feudalism did not give way to any single successor institution in simple linear fashion. Instead, individuals created a variety of institutional forms, such as the sovereign, territorial state in France, the Hanseatic League, and the Italian city-states, in reaction to a dramatic change in the medieval economic environment. Only in a subsequent selective phase of institutional evolution did sovereign, territorial authority prove to have significant institutional advantages over its rivals. Sovereign authority proved to be more successful in organizing domestic society and structuring external affairs. Spruyt's interdisciplinary approach not only has important implications for change in the state system in our time, but also presents a novel analysis of the general dynamics of institutional change. "Hendrik Spruyt's book provides new and interesting analytical framework for examining--from an international perspective--the emergence of new international political systems....The book advances a bold and intriguing hypothesis....[It is] a powerful and provocative essay; the examination of its details will probably provide much work in years to come. Any economic historian who considers the state system as fundamental to European growth should read this work."---Avner Greif, Journal of Economic History "This intriguing book argues that nation-states and territorially sovereign powers were not the only possible form of organization, and that the end of the Middle Ages saw the flowering of a variety of alternatives." "Spruyt ... shows that sovereign states of Europe emerged from the decline of feudalism as urban units gained freedom and formed leagues.... He also puts into perspective the European Union that today's nation-states are attempting to put together.... A significant contribution to political science and to European history." "Spruyt takes on a theme that is ... of central import to political science.... A convincing demonstration that there was nothing inevitable about the triumph of the [present] form of the state."-John A. Hall, McGill University
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Unanswered Threats
Political Constraints on the Balance of Power
by Randall L. Schweller
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
Randall L. Schweller is Associate Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University. Schweller's research focuses on theories of world politics, international security, and strategic studies. He is the author of Deadly Imbalances: Tripolarity and Hitler's Strategy of World Conquest, as well as many articles in journals such as World Politics, International Studies Quarterly, International Security, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Review of International Studies, and Security Studies. He is currently a member of the editorial board of the journal International Security (Belfer Center of Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University). In 1993, he received a John M. Olin Post-Doctoral Fellowship in National Security at the Center for International Affairs, Harvard University.
Why have states throughout history regularly underestimated dangers to their survival? Why have some states been able to mobilize their material resources effectively to balance against threats, while others have not been able to do so? The phenomenon of "underbalancing" is a common but woefully underexamined behavior in international politics. Underbalancing occurs when states fail to recognize dangerous threats, choose not to react to them, or respond in paltry and imprudent ways. It is a response that directly contradicts the core prediction of structural realism's balance-of-power theory--that states motivated to survive as autonomous entities are coherent actors that, when confronted by dangerous threats, act to restore the disrupted balance by creating alliances or increasing their military capabilities, or, in some cases, a combination of both.
Consistent with the new wave of neoclassical realist research, Unanswered Threats offers a theory of underbalancing based on four domestic-level variables--elite consensus, elite cohesion, social cohesion, and regime/government vulnerability--that channel, mediate, and redirect policy responses to external pressures and incentives. The theory yields five causal schemes for underbalancing behavior, which are tested against the cases of interwar Britain and France, France from 1877 to 1913, and the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) that pitted tiny Paraguay against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay.
Randall Schweller concludes that those most likely to underbalance are incoherent, fragmented states whose elites are constrained by political considerations. "In this groundbreaking book, Schweller observes that history is in fact full of what he calls 'underbalancing'--the failure of states to form alliances or build arms in the face of threatening accumulations of power."---G. John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs "The book focuses largely on 'underbalancing', or on why certain types of states fail to employ balance-of-power strategies. The answer is domestic politics. . . . The book is a clear blend of realism and idealism. . . . A superb book worthy of a wide readership."---Charles F. Doran, International History Review "Unanswered Threats is a most valuable addition to the field. . . . [Schweller] makes a giant leap forward by pairing variables that are reductive and idiosyncratic with well-constructed and empirically testable hypotheses of his own."---Ariel Ilan Roth, International Studies Review "[An] insightful and elegantly written book. . . . [Unanswered Threats] is a formidable first cut on the salient topic of underbalancing."---Evan Resnick, Perspectives on Politics "In the net, two interesting conclusions can be drawn from Schweller's excellent work. The first is that domestic uncertainties can doom the presumed outcomes of realism--in either hyper-aggression or hypo-assertion. The second is that if democratic states can control the logroll, they frequently behave distinctly and differently from other states. They can develop fellow feeling toward other nations that rises above mere short-term
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Strategic Instincts
The Adaptive Advantages of Cognitive Biases in International Politics
by Dominic D. P. Johnson
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
Dominic D. P. Johnson is the Alistair Buchan Professor of International Relations at St Antony's College, University of Oxford. He is the author of God Is Watching You and Overconfidence and War and the coauthor of Failing to Win.
"A very timely book."-Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America
How cognitive biases can guide good decision making in politics and international relations
A widespread assumption in political science and international relations is that cognitive biases-quirks of the brain we all share as human beings-are detrimental and responsible for policy failures, disasters, and wars. In Strategic Instincts, Dominic Johnson challenges this assumption, explaining that these nonrational behaviors can actually support favorable results in international politics and contribute to political and strategic success. By studying past examples, he considers the ways that cognitive biases act as "strategic instincts," lending a competitive edge in policy decisions, especially under conditions of unpredictability and imperfect information.
Drawing from evolutionary theory and behavioral sciences, Johnson looks at three influential cognitive biases-overconfidence, the fundamental attribution error, and in-group/out-group bias. He then examines the advantageous as well as the detrimental effects of these biases through historical case studies of the American Revolution, the Munich Crisis, and the Pacific campaign in World War II. He acknowledges the dark side of biases-when confidence becomes hubris, when attribution errors become paranoia, and when group bias becomes prejudice. Ultimately, Johnson makes a case for a more nuanced understanding of the causes and consequences of cognitive biases and argues that in the complex world of international relations, strategic instincts can, in the right context, guide better performance.
Strategic Instincts shows how an evolutionary perspective can offer the crucial next step in bringing psychological insights to bear on foundational questions in international politics. "Rich. . . . Full of insights." "Remarkable in its scope and fascinating to read. I hope it's widely read by politicians, military experts, and diplomats because it offers a variety of consequential actionable insights."---Daniel T. Blumstein, Journal of Bioeconomics "Johnson's work furthers our understanding of how adaptive traits of human psychology that evolved over the millenniums yield competitive advantages in modern times."---Ziyuan Wang, China International Strategy Review "Dominic Johnson has written a very timely book. Relying on psychology and evolutionary biology, he draws a far more realistic picture of human decision making than rational choice theory allows. It is high time that adaptive intuition take its rightful place alongside logic and calculation."-Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America "A thoughtful, almost forensic, examination of significant historical examples demonstrating an idea that became clear to us in the Irish Peace Process-those who operate contrary to the laws of rational, responsible behavior often succeed better than those who do. This is evolutionary research at its challenging best, with profound implications for international relations."-John Alderdice, Member of the House of Lords "This excellent book argues that common psychological biases, generally decried as responsible for errors and misfortune, are evolutionarily derived and, on balance, advantageous. Strategic Instincts is original and important."-Robert Jervis, Columbia University
"Strategic Instincts is a fascinating application of evolutionary psychology to international relations. By emphasizing the often beneficial consequences of cognitive biases that have evolved over human history, Dominic Johnson provides an intriguing and provocative new perspective on international security. Anyone with good strategic instincts will want to read this book."-Jack S. Levy, Rutgers Unive
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Human Rights for Pragmatists
Social Power in Modern Times
by Jack Snyder
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"Bronze Winner in Political and Social Sciences, ForeWord Reviews' INDIES Book of the Year Awards" "A Foreign Affairs Best of Books" Jack Snyder is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations at Columbia University. His many books include From Voting to Violence, Myths of Empire, and Human Rights Futures.
An innovative framework for advancing human rights
Human rights are among our most pressing issues today, yet rights promoters have reached an impasse in their effort to achieve rights for all. Human Rights for Pragmatists explains why: activists prioritize universal legal and moral norms, backed by the public shaming of violators, but in fact rights prevail only when they serve the interests of powerful local constituencies. Jack Snyder demonstrates that where local power and politics lead, rights follow. He presents an innovative roadmap for addressing a broad agenda of human rights concerns: impunity for atrocities, dilemmas of free speech in the age of social media, entrenched abuses of women's rights, and more.
Exploring the historical development of human rights around the globe, Snyder shows that liberal rights–based states have experienced a competitive edge over authoritarian regimes in the modern era. He focuses on the role of power, the interests of individuals and the groups they form, and the dynamics of bargaining and coalitions among those groups. The path to human rights entails transitioning from a social order grounded in patronage and favoritism to one dedicated to equal treatment under impersonal rules. Rights flourish when they benefit dominant local actors with the clout to persuade ambivalent peers. Activists, policymakers, and others attempting to advance rights should embrace a tailored strategy, one that acknowledges local power structures and cultural practices.
Constructively turning the mainstream framework of human rights advocacy on its head, Human Rights for Pragmatists offers tangible steps that all advocates can take to move the rights project forward.
"In this excellent study of human rights activism, Snyder emerges as a practical-minded champion of liberalism, urging human rights advocates to concentrate on popular appeals and democratic politics. Displaying an impressive mastery of more than two centuries of world politics, Human Rights for Pragmatists is smart, provocative, and powerful. This is a fresh and challenging contribution to some of the biggest debates about democracy's fate in an era of rising populist authoritarianism."-Gary Bass, author of The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide
"Human Rights for Pragmatists is an important political primer for any advocate of the movement. This must-read comes at a critical juncture to remind us why victories for rights are not only matters of principle, but also of power and self-interest."-Emilie Hafner-Burton, author of Making Human Rights a Reality
"Jack Snyder aims to be pragmatic, building a bridge between power and law. Through Human Rights for Pragmatists, he connects scholars from different disciplines and opens a debate that should be extended."-Luis Moreno Ocampo, former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court
"For too long, we have lacked a serious historical sociology of human rights, one that locates the development and political purchase of such rights in the history of modernity and the evolution of the modern state. Human Rights for Pragmatists fills this gap, transforming our understanding of when struggles for rights succeed and how their victories are preserved. Concerned that dominant approaches to human rights promotion have lost sight of the social foundations of political success, Snyder emphasizes the critical importance of prevailing modes of social organization, rights supporting social coalitions, effective and durable implementing institutions, and locally resonant ideologies. Building on this theoretically a
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The Geopolitics of Shaming
When Human Rights Pressure Works-and When It Backfires
by Rochelle Terman
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
A bold new perspective on the strategic logic of international human rights enforcement
When a government violates the rights of its citizens, the international community can respond by exerting moral pressure and urging reform. Yet many of the most egregious violations appear to go unpunished. In many cases, shaming not only fails to induce compliance but also incites a backlash, provoking resistance and worsening human rights practices. The Geopolitics of Shaming presents a new theory on the strategic logic of international human rights enforcement, revealing why and how states punish violations in other countries, when shaming leads to an improvement in human rights conditions, and when it backfires.
Drawing on a wide range of evidence-from large-scale cross-national data to original survey experiments and detailed case studies-Rochelle Terman shows how human rights shaming is a deeply political process, one that operates in and through strategic relationships. Arguing that preexisting geopolitical relationships condition both the causes and consequences of shaming in world politics, she shows how adversaries are quick to condemn human rights abuses but often provoke a counterproductive response, while friends and allies are the most effective shamers but can be reluctant to impose meaningful sanctions.
Upending conventional wisdom on the role of norms in world affairs, The Geopolitics of Shaming demonstrates that politicization is integral to-not a corruption of-the success of the global human rights project. Rochelle Terman is assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago. "Placing human rights shaming in strategic context allows Terman to explore, not just happy stories of compliance, but also logics of backlash, resistance, and hypocrisy in human rights promotion. This smart and provocative marriage of geopolitics with norm promotion has broad implications beyond human rights."-Martha Finnemore, George Washington University
"Why do governments shame certain states about human rights violations but ignore other abusers? When does shaming work? Rochelle Terman's relational approach reveals the possibilities but also the significant geopolitical limits of this widely revered tactic. Her nuanced book makes a significant contribution to a realistic account of human rights."-Clifford Bob, Duquesne University and author of Rights as Weapons: Instruments of Conflict, Tools of Power
"This insightful book addresses the important and timely debate about whether shaming strategies are effective in bringing about changes in human rights practices. Terman makes the crucial point that, in order to better understand the politics of shaming, we need to think about the relationship between who is doing the shaming and who is being shamed."-Brian Greenhill, author of Transmitting Rights: International Organizations and the Diffusion of Human Rights Practices
"Rochelle Terman exposes the risks and opportunities of shaming as a means of enforcing international human rights. She provides convincing evidence that shaming's consequences depend on relationships. Friends may feel peer pressure to respond while adversaries are likely as not to lash back. Terman's book should be read by anyone who cares about the future of human rights."-Beth A. Simmons, author of Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics
"The Geopolitics of Shaming is one of the must-read books of this year. Rochelle Terman greatly advances our understanding of a fundamental but woefully understudied dynamic of international politics: shaming. Terman compellingly argues that shaming is best thought of relationally, as a strategic interaction between actors. International relations scholars of any background will find something worthwhile here."-Ayşe Zarakol, University of Cambridge "Winner of the Best Book Award, International Collaboration Section of the Am
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States and Power in Africa
Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control
by Jeffrey Herbst
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"Co-Winner of the 2001 Gregory Luebbert Best Book Award, Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association" Jeffrey Herbst is president of Colgate University.
Theories of international relations, assumed to be universally applicable, have failed to explain the creation of states in Africa. There, the interaction of power and space is dramatically different from what occurred in Europe. In States and Power in Africa, Jeffrey Herbst places the African state-building process in a truly comparative perspective. Herbst's bold contention-that the conditions now facing African state-builders existed long before European penetration of the continent-is sure to provoke controversy, for it runs counter to the prevailing assumption that colonialism changed everything.
This revised edition includes a new preface in which the author links the enormous changes that have taken place in Africa over the past fifteen years to long-term state consolidation. The final chapter on policy prescriptions has also been revised to reflect the evolution of African and international responses to state failure. "This ambitious and original book turns a comparative historical lens on state-building in Africa. . . . A brave effort to rethink some outdated approaches to fundamental problems." "An original and intriguing book, which I read with the greatest interest. Herbst's argument is provocative and lucidly presented. This book will be read and debated not only by Africanists but also by others in the political science community. It is the most important and successful contribution to the literature on African politics since Jackson and Rosberg's Personal Rule in Black Africa."-Robert H. Bates, Harvard University, author of Open-Economy Politics: The Political Economy of the World Coffee Trade "Herbst's arguments will excite controversy among students of African history and politics, who have built up an extensive story about European transformations of African politics. His analysis raises doubts about how deeply those transformations went; rather, he maintains that durable conditions of topography and social structure have long constrained African state formation. Herbst offers an integrated account of state formation, transformation, and deformation in sub-Saharan Africa."-Charles Tilly, Columbia University, author of Durable Inquality
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1989
The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe
by Mary Elise Sarotte
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"A Financial Times Book of the Year" "Winner of the 2010 Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize Award, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations" "Co-Winner of the 2010 Marshall Shulman Book Prize, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies" "Winner of the 2009 DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies, awarded by the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies" "One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2010" Mary Elise Sarotte is Visiting Professor of Government and History at Harvard University and Dean's Professor of History at the University of Southern California. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall.
How the political events of 1989 shaped Europe after the Cold War
1989 explores the momentous events following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the effects they have had on our world ever since. Based on documents, interviews, and television broadcasts from Washington, London, Paris, Bonn, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, and a dozen other locations, 1989 describes how Germany unified, NATO expansion began, and Russia got left on the periphery of the new Europe.
This updated edition contains a new afterword with the most recent evidence on the 1990 origins of NATO's post-Cold War expansion. "Sarotte's focus is on Germany. . . . [She] describes a host of competing conceptions of post-cold-war Europe that flourished, mutated and perished in the maelstrom of events that led up to German unity. . . . Two decades later . . . [t]here are still nuclear missiles aimed across the continent. It's hard to imagine that it could have been otherwise--but, Sarotte shows us, it could have been."---Paul Hockenos, New York Times Book Review "A great virtue of Mary Elise Sarotte's 1989 is that she makes the problem of hindsight bias explicit, and systematically explores the roads not taken."---Timothy Garton Ash, New York Review of Books "Much the most exciting of these books is Mary Elise Sarotte's 1989. In contrast to the other authors, Sarotte treats the uprisings and collapses of that year as a prelude to the biggest change of all: 'the struggle to create post-Cold War Europe', as her subtitle puts it. . . . Sarottte [is] a lucid and compelling writer."---Neal Ascherson, London Review of Books "The author embeds her interpretation in a sharp-eyed, fluent narrative of 1989-1990 that sees the realpolitik behind the stirring upheavals. . . . [S]he offers a smart and canny analysis of the birth of our not-so-new world order." "Mary Elise Sarotte's 1989 . . . shows why this post-Cold War world, and not a different one, came out of the dramatic events of 1989, and why the result was bound to pit the U.S. against Russia again in the twenty-first century."---George Packer, NewYorker.com "A hugely impressive study that looks beyond 1989 to the many-faceted battle to shape the new Europe." "Sarotte's book is compact and highly interpretive. Yet Sarotte has thoroughly mastered the original source material in all the key countries. She distills it with great skill, constantly enlivening her account with a sensibility for what these changes meant in life and culture. Hers is now the best one-volume work on Germany's unification available. It contains the clearest understanding to date of the extraordinary juggling performance of Kohl."---Philip D. Zelikow, Foreign Affairs "[A] scrupulous account of the high politics and diplomacy of 1989. With remarkable diligence, [Sarotte] has interviewed almost all the surviving participants, and quarried government archives and other libraries for documents that illustrate the decision-making (and lack of it) that year. The result is a tale of hypocrisy and indecision in high places." "The tragic hero of 1989, for Sarotte, is Gorbachev. He was, and is still seen by many Russians as a King Lear figure: a man prepared to give away what he should have retained to a west be
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Driving the Soviets up the Wall
Soviet-East German Relations, 1953-1961
by Hope M. Harrison
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"Winner of the 2004 Marshall Shulman Book Prize, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies" Hope M. Harrison is Director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies in the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University. She is also Associate Professor of History and International Affairs at the Elliott School. She served as Director for European and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council from 2000 to 2001.
The Berlin Wall was the symbol of the Cold War. For the first time, this path-breaking book tells the behind-the-scenes story of the communists' decision to build the Wall in 1961. Hope Harrison's use of archival sources from the former East German and Soviet regimes is unrivalled, and from these sources she builds a highly original and provocative argument: the East Germans pushed the reluctant Soviets into building the Berlin Wall.
This fascinating work portrays the different approaches favored by the East Germans and the Soviets to stop the exodus of refugees to West Germany. In the wake of Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviets refused the East German request to close their border to West Berlin. The Kremlin rulers told the hard-line East German leaders to solve their refugee problem not by closing the border, but by alleviating their domestic and foreign problems. The book describes how, over the next seven years, the East German regime managed to resist Soviet pressures for liberalization and instead pressured the Soviets into allowing them to build the Berlin Wall. Driving the Soviets Up the Wall forces us to view this critical juncture in the Cold War in a different light. Harrison's work makes us rethink the nature of relations between countries of the Soviet bloc even at the height of the Cold War, while also contributing to ongoing debates over the capacity of weaker states to influence their stronger allies. "Harrison has turned over every archival rock in reconstructing the tense relationship between the Soviet Union and Walter Ulbricht's East Germany, from Stalin's death until the construction of the Berlin Wall.. . . Harrison is not alone in teaching us that third parties played a significant role in shaping the Cold War, but hers is a particularly striking example." "A smoothly written, clearly organized, and massively documented account . . . [which] deserves to be read by every serious student of post-war Europe."---W.J. Lavery, History: Reviews of New Books "This aptly entitled book makes an outstanding contribution to what has become known as 'the new Cold War history.' Lucidly written and fascinating to read, it demonstrates how, under a unique set of circumstances, a satellite state in the depths of existential crisis could manipulate a superpower."---Peter Grieder, Central European History "Harrison has written a thoughtful, fluent, and meticulously researched study of Soviet-East German relations between 1953 and 1961. Driving the Soviets Up the Wall is a fine example of the new scholarship on the cold war that has emerged since 1991 and a rewarding read for anybody interested in finding out exactly how and why the Berlin Wall came to be built."---Alan McDougall, Journal of Modern History "Hope Harrison's book is a truly distinguished example of new Cold War scholarship. As an account of Soviet-East German relations from 1953 to 1961, it is likely to be definitive. As a case study of how a small power can manipulate a super-power, it is sure to become a classic. As both multi-archival history and international relations theory, therefore, Driving the Soviets up the Wall is a remarkable accomplishment indeed."-John Lewis Gaddis, Yale University "Hope Harrison has written a lucid, penetrating, and deeply knowledgeable study on the relationship between the Kremlin and its most important satellite."-Strobe Talbott, Brookings Institution "This book is likely to become the definitive study on the Berlin Wall's construction
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From Wealth to Power
The Unusual Origins of America's World Role
by Fareed Zakaria
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
Fareed Zakaria is Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs, a contributing editor to Newsweek, and has been Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. He is a contributor to various publications, including the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, International Security, and Slate and is coeditor of The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World.
What turns rich nations into great powers? How do wealthy countries begin extending their influence abroad? These questions are vital to understanding one of the most important sources of instability in international politics: the emergence of a new power. In From Wealth to Power, Fareed Zakaria seeks to answer these questions by examining the most puzzling case of a rising power in modern history--that of the United States.
If rich nations routinely become great powers, Zakaria asks, then how do we explain the strange inactivity of the United States in the late nineteenth century? By 1885, the U.S. was the richest country in the world. And yet, by all military, political, and diplomatic measures, it was a minor power. To explain this discrepancy, Zakaria considers a wide variety of cases between 1865 and 1908 when the U.S. considered expanding its influence in such diverse places as Canada, the Dominican Republic, and Iceland. Consistent with the realist theory of international relations, he argues that the President and his administration tried to increase the country's political influence abroad when they saw an increase in the nation's relative economic power. But they frequently had to curtail their plans for expansion, he shows, because they lacked a strong central government that could harness that economic power for the purposes of foreign policy. America was an unusual power--a strong nation with a weak state. It was not until late in the century, when power shifted from states to the federal government and from the legislative to the executive branch, that leaders in Washington could mobilize the nation's resources for international influence.
Zakaria's exploration of this tension between national power and state structure will change how we view the emergence of new powers and deepen our understanding of America's exceptional history. "[From Wealth to Power's] tightly argued thesis addresses a question sure to be revisited.... Its conclusions are both provocative and full of implications for the world today."---Walter A. McDougall, The New York Times Book Review "Mr. Zakaria persuasively illustrates [his] argument by examining America's emergence as a great power.... [His] account of turn-of-the-century American diplomacy is concise and insightful."---Aaron L. Friedberg, The Wall Street Journal "A significant contribution to the study of international relations." "Beautifully conceived; dazzlingly executed: Zakaria's theoretical penetration is matched by his mastery of the process of America's coming of age as a great power. The book casts a bright light on the past and the future-and the future of international politics."-Kenneth N. Waltz, Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University "The theory of state-centered realism set forth in From Wealth to Power is the most important innovation in foreign policy theory.... This book shows how theory and history can be combined to improve the former and illuminate the latter. It is a superb example of qualitative social science analysis."-Samuel P. Huntington, Director, John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard University
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Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare
The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945
by Tami Davis Biddle
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2002" Tami Davis Biddle is Associate Professor of National Security and Strategy at the United States Army War College. She teaches military and diplomatic history, national security policy, and grand strategy. Her research focuses on the evolution of military ideas, and their implementation as strategies for national defense and methods of warfighting.
A major revision of our understanding of long-range bombing, this book examines how Anglo-American ideas about "strategic" bombing were formed and implemented. It argues that ideas about bombing civilian targets rested on--and gained validity from--widespread but substantially erroneous assumptions about the nature of modern industrial societies and their vulnerability to aerial bombardment. These assumptions were derived from the social and political context of the day and were maintained largely through cognitive error and bias. Tami Davis Biddle explains how air theorists, and those influenced by them, came to believe that strategic bombing would be an especially effective coercive tool and how they responded when their assumptions were challenged.
Biddle analyzes how a particular interpretation of the World War I experience, together with airmen's organizational interests, shaped interwar debates about strategic bombing and preserved conceptions of its potentially revolutionary character. This flawed interpretation as well as a failure to anticipate implementation problems were revealed as World War II commenced. By then, the British and Americans had invested heavily in strategic bombing. They saw little choice but to try to solve the problems in real time and make long-range bombing as effective as possible.
Combining narrative with analysis, this book presents the first-ever comparative history of British and American strategic bombing from its origins through 1945. In examining the ideas and rhetoric on which strategic bombing depended, it offers critical insights into the validity and robustness of those ideas--not only as they applied to World War II but as they apply to contemporary warfare. "Well written, full of nuance and detail, and solidly researched. Biddle has done a thorough job of cutting through the thicket of contradictions and fantasies that surround the strategic bombing debate from 1914 to 1945."---Dominick A. Pisano, Military History "There are books about military ideas and books about military practice. This work by a talented young historian integrates the two forms. In addition to a deft pen and an eye for wry anecdote, Biddle possesses an instinct for the ways in which ideas about new forms of warfare germinate, spread, and are adopted in the absence of good data. The importance of this book therefore not only stems from what it tells the reader about how the two great air powers of the first half of the twentieth century thought about this new instrument of war. It also offers cautionary lessons in an age of radical military change. Sleek and dazzling new technology is one thing; sensible doctrine for its use in war is another." "This is one of the most cogent, in-depth analyses of an important international historical controversy. Biddle's insight into the persistence of cognitive structures and processes serves as a model for future historical inquiry." "Tami Davis Biddle . . . has set air power into its widest historical contexts yet and, while many of her arguments are not entirely new, has advanced the field considerably with a well-researched and carefully thought-out book."---Michael S. Neiberg, American Historical Review "An extremely well-crafted history. . . . [It] can now be recommended as the best treatment of its subject matter in a single volume."---John Gooch, International History Review "By synthesizing so many complex issues, Biddle offers a landmark piece of scholarship that should appeal to both experts and history enthusiasts through its balance, lucidity, and
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Nuclear Logics
Contrasting Paths in East Asia and the Middle East
by Etel Solingen
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"Winner of the 2008 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, American Political Science Association" "Etel Solingen - Winner of the 2018 William and Katherine Estes Award, National Academy of Sciences" "Co-Winner of the 2008 Robert Jervis and Paul Schroeder Award for the Best Book on International History and Politics, International History and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association" Etel Solingen is Distinguished Professor and Thomas T. and Elizabeth C. Tierney Chair in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences 2018 William and Katherine Estes Award.
Nuclear Logics examines why some states seek nuclear weapons while others renounce them. Looking closely at nine cases in East Asia and the Middle East, Etel Solingen finds two distinct regional patterns. In East Asia, the norm since the late 1960s has been to forswear nuclear weapons, and North Korea, which makes no secret of its nuclear ambitions, is the anomaly. In the Middle East the opposite is the case, with Iran, Iraq, Israel, and Libya suspected of pursuing nuclear-weapons capabilities, with Egypt as the anomaly in recent decades.
Identifying the domestic conditions underlying these divergent paths, Solingen argues that there are clear differences between states whose leaders advocate integration in the global economy and those that reject it. Among the former are countries like South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, whose leaders have had stronger incentives to avoid the political, economic, and other costs of acquiring nuclear weapons. The latter, as in most cases in the Middle East, have had stronger incentives to exploit nuclear weapons as tools in nationalist platforms geared to helping their leaders survive in power. Solingen complements her bold argument with other logics explaining nuclear behavior, including security dilemmas, international norms and institutions, and the role of democracy and authoritarianism. Her account charts the most important frontier in understanding nuclear proliferation: grasping the relationship between internal and external political survival. Nuclear Logics is a pioneering book that is certain to provide an invaluable resource for researchers, teachers, and practitioners while reframing the policy debate surrounding nonproliferation. "Nuclear Logics is a ground-breaking work demonstrating how theory-oriented studies in political science should be conducted. Nuclear Logics is an admirable undertaking which makes an indispensable contribution to IR theory development."---Shih-Yu Chou, Political Studies Review "The most comprehensive, theoretical, and systematic challenge [to system-level imperatives] in years. . . . This is an impressive work . . . of primary value to experts and graduate students." "Solingen's argument is cogent and well researched . . . convincing and intuitive . . . demolishes the structural realist account. . . . It deserves a wide readership." "A serious, scholarly piece of work . . . reinvigorating the already rich theoretical debate on this issue. . . . Her methodological tools could prove useful in determining which Middle Eastern countries are more likely to go nuclear in reaction to Iran's programme." "Proliferation theory steps outside the ivory tower in Etel Solingen's recent book, Nuclear Logics." "The cutting edge of nonproliferation research . . . should be of great interest to both policy practitioners and scholars. [This book] display(s) a combination of theoretical sophistication, methodological rigor, focused comparative analysis involving original field research, and attention to hypothesis testing rarely found in the nonproliferation literature." "Nuclear Logics is a timely study with important theoretical and practical implications. At the theoretical level, it encourages us to set aside monocausal explanations in favour of a more sophisticated but still transportable approach. At the practical level, the
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Under the Nuclear Shadow
China's Information-age Weapons In International Security
by Fiona S. Cunningham
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
How and why China has pursued information-age weapons to gain leverage against its adversaries
How can states use military force to achieve their political aims without triggering a catastrophic nuclear war? Among the states facing this dilemma of fighting limited wars, only China has given information-age weapons such a prominent role. While other countries have preferred the traditional options of threatening to use nuclear weapons or fielding capabilities for decisive conventional military victories, China has instead chosen to rely on offensive cyber operations, counterspace capabilities, and precision conventional missiles to coerce its adversaries. In Under the Nuclear Shadow, Fiona Cunningham examines this distinctive aspect of China's post–Cold War deterrence strategy, developing an original theory of "strategic substitution." When crises with the United States highlighted the inadequacy of China's existing military capabilities, Cunningham argues, China pursued information-age weapons that promised to rapidly provide credible leverage against adversaries.
Drawing on hundreds of original Chinese-language sources and interviews with security experts in China, Cunningham provides a rare and candid glimpse from Beijing into the information-age technologies that are reshaping how states gain leverage in the twenty-first century. She offers unprecedented insights into the trajectory of China's military modernization, as she details the strengths and weaknesses of China's strategic substitution approach. Under the Nuclear Shadow also looks ahead at the uncertain future of China's strategic substitution approach and briefly explores too how other states might seize upon the promise of emerging technologies to address weaknesses in their own military strategies. Fiona S. Cunningham is assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. "Using often hard-to-find PRC texts, and interviews with credible PRC interlocutors, Cunningham delivers a granular understanding of the evolution of China's missile, information, and counter-space forces. She makes a sophisticated case that a local war problem, Taiwan, rather than a coherent grand strategy for global hegemony, may be driving this modernization."-Alastair Iain Johnston, Harvard University
"This is an important book. Cunningham presents a powerful theory with major implications for China's military posture and U.S.-China competition. Her careful and painstaking qualitative work paints a vivid and compelling portrait of Chinese strategic thinking."-Joshua Rovner, American University
"Drawing on a stunning array of new sources, Fiona Cunningham offers deep insight into China's military modernization and nuclear strategy. Her brilliant, fascinating book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand emerging technologies, the U.S.-China relationship, and the future of war."-Caitlin Talmadge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"This book accomplishes a magisterial set of tasks. The book addresses key strategic aspects of China's military modernization in a systematic fashion. The empirical sections are thoroughly researched and incorporate a breathtaking number of superb sources. Given the increasingly closed nature of China, this material will not be surpassed for a long while. There is no comparable book."-Christopher Twomey, Naval Postgraduate School "[An] excellent book. . . . Highly recommended."
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A World Safe for Commerce
American Foreign Policy From The Revolution To The Rise Of China
by Dale C. Copeland
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
An Economist Biggest Book of the Year
How commerce determines whether America preserves the peace or goes to war
When the Cold War ended, many believed that expanding trade would usher in an era of peace. Yet today the United States finds itself confronting not just Russia in Europe but China in the Indo-Pacific, Africa, and Latin America. Shedding new light on how trade both reduces and increases the risks of international crisis, A World Safe for Commerce traces how, since the nation's founding, the United States has consistently moved from peace to conflict when the commerce needed for national security is under threat.
Dale Copeland shows how commerce pushes the United States and its rivals to expand their spheres of influence for access to goods even as they worry about provoking a breakdown in trade relations that could spiral into military conflict. Taking readers from the wars with Britain in 1776 and 1812 to World War II and the Cold War, he describes how America's leaders have grappled with this inherent tension, and why they have shifted, sometimes dramatically, from peaceful, mutually beneficial policies to coercion and force in order to increase control over vital trade and prevent economic decline.
A World Safe for Commerce reveals how trade competition could lead the United States and China into full-scale confrontation. But it also offers hope that both sides can work to improve their overall trade expectations and foster the confidence needed for long-term peace and stability. Dale C. Copeland is professor of international relations at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Economic Interdependence and War (Princeton) and The Origins of Major War. "A World Safe for Commerce is international relations scholarship at its best. It combines offensive and defensive realist theories to provide a sweeping and compelling reinterpretation of US foreign economic and military policy. Copeland's magisterial treatment will be essential reading for scholars of IR theory, US foreign policy, and international political economy."-Michael Mastanduno, Dartmouth College
"A World Safe for Commerce is a stunning achievement. It is the first book to provide a single, comprehensive argument to explain the continuities and changes in American foreign policy over the past two and a half centuries. The implications of the argument for US-China relations and the future peace are profound."-Strobe Talbott, former US deputy secretary of state
"With a sweeping analysis of American foreign policy, Copeland develops a theory of dynamic realism that reveals how economic interdependence shapes grand strategy. Along the way, this provocative book also provides a compelling narrative that connects to current challenges for managing contemporary US-China relations."-Christina L. Davis, author of Discriminatory Clubs
"Copeland's dynamic theory of commerce and power politics is a major contribution to international relations theory, and the basis for bold, original, and meticulously researched interpretations of key episodes of American foreign policy. A World Safe for Commerce is a pathbreaking achievement that will help define scholarly debates for years to come."-Jack S. Levy, Rutgers University
"At a time when America is once again battling great power rivals for control over geopolitical spheres of influence, Dale Copeland's innovative study shows that the expected impact of trade on military security has always been a key motive for American global expansion."-Jack Snyder, author of Human Rights for Pragmatists
"A World Safe for Commerce builds on Copeland's earlier award-winning work blending geopolitics and international commerce in ways that provide a valuable theoretical framework along with keen insights focusing particularly on the United States. The book is both rich in history and bears on critical contemporary global power dynamics."-Bruce W.
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Aftershocks
Great Powers and Domestic Reforms in the Twentieth Century
by Seva Gunitsky
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"One of Foreign Affairs Best of Books 2017 – Political and Legal / Globalization" Seva Gunitsky is assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto.
Over the past century, democracy spread around the world in turbulent bursts of change, sweeping across national borders in dramatic cascades of revolution and reform. Aftershocks offers a new global-oriented explanation for this wavelike spread and retreat-not only of democracy but also of its twentieth-century rivals, fascism and communism.
Seva Gunitsky argues that waves of regime change are driven by the aftermath of cataclysmic disruptions to the international system. These hegemonic shocks, marked by the sudden rise and fall of great powers, have been essential and often-neglected drivers of domestic transformations. Though rare and fleeting, they not only repeatedly alter the global hierarchy of powerful states but also create unique and powerful opportunities for sweeping national reforms-by triggering military impositions, swiftly changing the incentives of domestic actors, or transforming the basis of political legitimacy itself. As a result, the evolution of modern regimes cannot be fully understood without examining the consequences of clashes between great powers, which repeatedly-and often unsuccessfully-sought to cajole, inspire, and intimidate other states into joining their camps. "Highly recommended. . . . The conclusion is especially strong and provocative, speculating that though democracy has advantages that prevent crises from becoming so severe they threaten stability, autocratic capitalism may be a viable alternative if democracy fails to provide security and prosperity for its people." "In this landmark study, Gunitsky . . . illuminates the deep connections between global shfits in power and waves of domestic regime change. . . . No book has made a stronger case that the fate of democracy is tied to the rise and fall of great powers and the leadership of liberal hegemonic states." "An important, well-argued and well-written contribution to the literature on the international dimension of change in political regimes across different countries."---Nicholas Bouchet, International Affairs "Aftershocks is a tour de force, traveling across the twentieth century, simultaneously providing a parsimonious theoretical map of the entire century's experience with democratic breakthroughs and breakdowns, while also remaining immersed in rich historical detail. . . . Gunitsky has given us a powerful lens to understand not only the past but the present as well."---Daniel Ziblatt, Perspectives on Politics "Ambitious and lucid, Aftershocks offers an alternative way to view twentieth-century global history, and is a book that belongs in the company of works by Gilpin and Ikenberry. In our own time of global power shifts, Gunitsky's fundamental claim-that hegemonic transitions explain the spread and contraction of democracy across entire regions-is vitally important and impossible to ignore."-John M. Owen IV, University of Virginia "By delving into how international dynamics shape the spread of democracy and autocracy over time, Gunitsky presents a much-needed theoretical and empirical synthesis for anyone interested in international relations and domestic politics. As the world faces changing global powers and declining support for democracy, Gunitsky's book is essential reading with significant practical implications."-Susan D. Hyde, University of California, Berkeley "Aftershocks examines the role of international factors in shaping the rise and fall of regime types. Contending that a regime cannot be understood in purely domestic terms, Gunitsky explores the nature of global influences and how they work. This book has a big historical sweep and is filled with well-chosen examples."-Peter Gourevitch, University of California, San Diego "Aftershocks makes a strong and creative theoretical argument while providing a wide variety
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Roosevelt and the Munich Crisis
A Study of Political Decision-Making
by Barbara Reardon Farnham
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
Barbara Rearden Farnham is Senior Associate at the Institute of War and Peace Studies.
Franklin Roosevelt's intentions during the three years between Munich and Pearl Harbor have been a source of controversy among historians for decades. Barbara Farnham offers both a theory of how the domestic political context affects foreign policy decisions in general and a fresh interpretation of FDR's post-Munich policies based on the insights that the theory provides. Between 1936 and 1938, Roosevelt searched for ways to influence the deteriorating international situation. When Hitler's behavior during the Munich crisis showed him to be incorrigibly aggressive, FDR settled on aiding the democracies, a course to which he adhered until America's entry into the war. This policy attracted him because it allowed him to deal with a serious problem: the conflict between the need to stop Hitler and the domestic imperative to avoid any risk of American involvement in a war.
Because existing theoretical approaches to value conflict ignore the influence of political factors on decision-making, they offer little help in explaining Roosevelt's behavior. As an alternative, this book develops a political approach to decision-making which focuses on the impact that awareness of the imperatives of the political context can have on decision-making processes and, through them, policy outcomes. It suggests that in the face of a clash of central values decision-makers who are aware of the demands of the political context are likely to be reluctant to make trade-offs, seeking instead a solution that gives some measure of satisfaction to all the values implicated in the decision. "A valiant and admirable effort to bring together international-relations theory and historical evidence (however anecdotal). . . . No book better re-creates Roosevelt's awareness of the aviation age; it belongs on the scholar's shelf."---Warren F. Kimball, The Times Literary Supplement "Farnham argues with great clarity and commendable force that the Munich crisis played a decisive role in determining for Roosevelt that German aims in Europe . . . posed a direct threat to long-term US security." "Using her theory of political decision making, Farnham effectively weaves together the diverse and contradictory aspects of Roosevelt's policy into a coherent description of a president intent on acting to address American security needs but responsive to domestic political restraints. . . . She makes a strong case, worthy of consideration."---T. Michael Ruddy, History "It is refreshing to see a work that takes a different point of view and argues it vigorously, backed with ample evidence. . . . [An] interesting and worthy read."---Mark J. Rozell, APSA Journal "In this fine book, Barbara Farnham describes and explains Franklin D. Roosevelt's policies and actions toward the Munich crisis of 1938, its background, and its aftermath. She advances a clear thesis that she develops consistently throughout the book. She is perceptive, fair, and balanced in her analyses."---Wayne S. Cole, Diplomatic History "[An] impressive scholarly achievement . . .The book is very readable."---Stephen G. Walker, American Political Science Review "Solving the FDR enigma is not easy. Farnham's theory, bringing an essentially political dimension to the problem of choice, provides historians with a more rigorous and intellectually viable approach to the problem of decoding FDR."-Waldo Heinrichs, San Diego State University "This work provides a subtle reading of FDR's actions and motivations. The result is a fascinating, original, and highly readable book."-Fred I. Greenstein, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University
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Violent Victors
Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections
by Sarah Zukerman Daly
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"Winner of the Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award, Political Organizations and Parties section of the American Political Science Association" "Shortlisted for the Gregory Luebbert Best Book Prize, Comparative Politics section of the American Political Science Association" Sarah Zukerman Daly is associate professor of political science at Columbia University. She is the author of Organized Violence after Civil War: The Geography of Recruitment in Latin America.
Why populations brutalized in war elect their tormentors
One of the great puzzles of electoral politics is how parties that commit mass atrocities in war often win the support of victimized populations to establish the postwar political order. Violent Victors traces how parties derived from violent, wartime belligerents successfully campaign as the best providers of future societal peace, attracting votes not just from their core supporters but oftentimes also from the very people they targeted in war.
Drawing on more than two years of groundbreaking fieldwork, Sarah Daly combines case studies of victim voters in Latin America with experimental survey evidence and new data on postwar elections around the world. She argues that, contrary to oft-cited fears, postconflict elections do not necessarily give rise to renewed instability or political violence. Daly demonstrates how war-scarred citizens reward belligerent parties for promising peace and security instead of blaming them for war. Yet, in so casting their ballots, voters sacrifice justice, liberal democracy, and social welfare.
Proposing actionable interventions that can help to moderate these trade-offs, Violent Victors links war outcomes with democratic outcomes to shed essential new light on political life after war and offers global perspectives on important questions about electoral behavior in the wake of mass violence. "Violent Victors is a rich, rigorous and comprehensive book that delves into the complex and nuanced relationship between wartime violence and postwar electoral politics, transitional justice and governance."---Laia Balcells, International Affairs "Articulates a fascinating and novel puzzle. . . . [and provides] a thorough consideration of alternative explanations."---Michael K. Miller, Perspectives on Politics "A must-read."---Mauricio Rivera, Journal of Peace Research "[A] penetrating study of founding elections in postwar societies. . . . [Violent Victors] is required reading for anyone interested in peacebuilding, justice, democracy, and governance after civil war."---Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez, Peace & Change "This is an impressive book in its breadth and comprehensive approach to the question of why violent political parties receive significant support in postwar elections, even when they have committed abuses against the citizenry."-Susan D. Hyde, author of The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma: Why Election Observation Became an International Norm "A tour de force. Drawing on an original and counterintuitive theoretical argument and superb research methods, Daly addresses the puzzle of how political parties that commit mass atrocities in civil war win free and fair postwar elections. Violent Victors is an outstanding book."-Scott Mainwaring, coauthor of Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall
"In elections after civil wars, why do many voters support parties that engaged in mass violence against civilians? Sarah Zukerman Daly provides a surprising and compelling answer: the most ruthless fighters in war are perceived to be the political leaders most willing and able to keep the peace afterward. This is an important book."-Scott D. Sagan, Stanford University "In this masterful book, Daly reveals why citizens vote for political parties known to have committed atrocities in war. It is not due to fear, coercion, ideology, or ignorance. Instead, it is the result of a desperate desire for stability and security. Highly recommende
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Technology and the Rise of Great Powers
How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition
by Jeffrey Ding
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
A novel theory of how technological revolutions affect the rise and fall of great powers
When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the moment of innovation-the eureka moment that sparks astonishing technological feats. In this book, Jeffrey Ding offers a different explanation of how technological revolutions affect competition among great powers. Rather than focusing on which state first introduced major innovations, he investigates why some states were more successful than others at adapting and embracing new technologies at scale. Drawing on historical case studies of past industrial revolutions as well as statistical analysis, Ding develops a theory that emphasizes institutional adaptations oriented around diffusing technological advances throughout the entire economy.
Examining Britain's rise to preeminence in the First Industrial Revolution, America and Germany's overtaking of Britain in the Second Industrial Revolution, and Japan's challenge to America's technological dominance in the Third Industrial Revolution (also known as the "information revolution"), Ding illuminates the pathway by which these technological revolutions influenced the global distribution of power and explores the generalizability of his theory beyond the given set of great powers. His findings bear directly on current concerns about how emerging technologies such as AI could influence the US-China power balance. Jeffrey Ding is assistant professor of political science at George Washington University. He also holds research affiliations with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Elliott School of International Affairs, and the Centre for the Governance of AI. "A rich and essential contribution that transcends any one intellectual field. To say Technology and the Rise of Great Powers is timely is an understatement, given both the intensifying economic and security competition between the United States and China as well as the very visible advent and apparently rapid spread of AI." -Jonathan D. Caverley, US Naval War College
"Ding's Technology and the Rise of Great Powers provides a powerful new argument about how technology can change world politics. He shows that creating an infrastructure of education and training systems for developing new general-purpose technology skills is critical to global leadership. Power transitions in global politics may depend more on ordinary engineers than on heroic inventors."-Helen Milner, Princeton University
"A well-written, ambitious book. It will certainly have a major impact on the field and will likely kick off an important debate on the role of technology in great power relations."-Abraham Newman, Georgetown University "A Chicago Council on Global Affairs Read of the Year" "One of the best books examining . . . how technology enables national power is from Jeffrey Ding. . . . An important and interesting book." "Brilliant. . . . [Technology and the Rise of Great Powers] is one of the most important books in international relations to be published in years." "[Technology and the Rise of Great Powers's] most significant contribution is its framework for analyzing how technology influences international power dynamics across populations. Instead of focusing on the technological capabilities and resources of companies like OpenAI and DeepSeek, Ding urges social scientists to adopt a long-term historical perspective-one that prioritizes skill in‐frastructure and diffusion over innovation as the primary driver of international power."---Sebastian James Rose, H-Net Reviews
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When the Bombs Stopped
The Legacy Of War In Rural Cambodia
by Erin Lin
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
How undetonated bombs from a war that ended more than fifty years ago still affect Cambodian farmers and their land
Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States dropped 500,000 tons of bombs over Cambodia-more than the combined weight of every man, woman, and child in the country. What began as a secret CIA infiltration of Laos eventually expanded into Cambodia and escalated into a nine-year war over the Ho Chi Minh trail fought primarily with bombs. Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land. In When the Bombs Stopped, Erin Lin investigates the consequences of the US bombing campaign across postconflict Cambodia.
Drawing on interviews, original econometric analysis, and extensive fieldwork, Lin upends the usual scholarly perspective on the war and its aftermath, presenting the viewpoint of those who suffered the bombing rather than those who dropped the bombs. She shows that Cambodian farmers stay at a subsistence level because much of their land is too dangerous to cultivate-and yet, paradoxically, the same bombs that endanger and impoverish farming communities also protect them, deterring predatory elites from grabbing and commodifying their land. Lin argues that the half-century legacy of American bombs has sedimented the war into the layers of contemporary Cambodian society. Policies aimed at developing or modernizing Cambodia, whether economic liberalization or authoritarian consolidation, must be realized in an environment haunted by the violence of the past. As the stories Lin captures show, the bombing served as a critical juncture in these farming villages, marking the place in time where development stopped. Erin Lin is assistant professor of political science at the Ohio State University. "This is a devastating look at the long aftermath of the massive American bombing of Cambodia. Through an impressive mix of ethnographic observation, historical data, and mass-sample surveys, Erin Lin shows the enduring economic consequences of that colossal tonnage of bombs-a vital reminder of what warfare means for its poorest and most vulnerable targets."-Gary Bass, Princeton University, author of The Blood Telegram and Judgment at Tokyo
"An astonishing book. With rigorous research, Lin carefully lays out the effects of fear on economic growth in postwar areas of Cambodia. Lin shows how cluster munitions continue to confound development, despite policy changes, agricultural development, and decades of postwar aid. Her book validates the power of an ethnographic approach to reorient economic analysis, infusing scholarship with the moral necessity of linking military technologies to the lives of the people who experience their violence."-Leah Zani, author of Strike Patterns: Notes from Postwar Laos
"This intimate account of lingering postwar damage in rural Cambodia is, like the lasting social and economic wreckage of American bombing itself, deeply devastating and disturbing. Erin Lin boldly shifts our analytical perspective from the bombers to the bombed." -Dan Slater, coauthor of From Development to Democracy
"In this important, sobering, and very relevant contribution to our understanding of the legacies of war, Erin Lin traces the long-run consequences of the US bombing of Cambodia. Combining ethnographic research with statistical analysis of declassified US military data, she shows how farmers today live with the risks posed by the many unexploded bombs still found in fertile areas. Demining of farmland is often followed by predatory land grabbing, contributing to rural inequality in the long shadow of war."-Elisabeth Jean Wood, Yale University
"With wide-ranging curiosity and scholarship, Erin Lin has investigated the lethal legacy of the hundreds of thousands of US bombs dropped decades ago on Cambodia. In When the Bombs Stopped, she ties the continued hardships and
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The Spectre of War
International Communism and the Origins of World War II
by Jonathan Haslam
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"A Financial Times Best History Book of the Year 2021" "A Telegraph Best Book of the Year 2021" Jonathan Haslam is the George F. Kennan Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is a fellow of the British Academy, a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and professor emeritus of the history of international relations at the University of Cambridge. His books include Near and Distant Neighbors and Russia's Cold War. He divides his time between Princeton, New Jersey and Cambridge, England.
A bold new history showing that the fear of Communism was a major factor in the outbreak of World War II
The Spectre of War looks at a subject we thought we knew-the roots of the Second World War-and upends our assumptions with a masterful new interpretation. Looking beyond traditional explanations based on diplomatic failures or military might, Jonathan Haslam explores the neglected thread connecting them all: the fear of Communism prevalent across continents during the interwar period. Marshalling an array of archival sources, including records from the Communist International, Haslam transforms our understanding of the deep-seated origins of World War II, its conflicts, and its legacy.
Haslam offers a panoramic view of Europe and northeast Asia during the 1920s and 1930s, connecting fascism's emergence with the impact of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. World War I had economically destabilized many nations, and the threat of Communist revolt loomed large in the ensuing social unrest. As Moscow supported Communist efforts in France, Spain, China, and beyond, opponents such as the British feared for the stability of their global empire, and viewed fascism as the only force standing between them and the Communist overthrow of the existing order. The appeasement and political misreading of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy that followed held back the spectre of rebellion-only to usher in the later advent of war.
Illuminating ideological differences in the decades before World War II, and the continuous role of pre- and postwar Communism, The Spectre of War provides unprecedented context for one of the most momentous calamities of the twentieth century. "Books of this quality and significance are rare. Haslam has mined the archives of all the main players to produce an excellent, game-changing thesis that is as convincing as it is original."---Saul David, The Times "It may be a cliché to say this is a book every intelligent person ought to read, but it really is."---Simon Heffer, The Telegraph "Anyone interested in global tensions in the interwar period will learn much from the latest book of Jonathan Haslam. . . . He draws on a lifetime of expertise on the Soviet Union and Russian foreign policy to explain how fear of communism permeated international relations after 1917."---Tony Barber, Financial Times "
Drawing on sources in English, French, Russian, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish from archives across Europe (and beyond), The Spectre of War is full of fascinating stories that offer a unique glimpse into the tormented world on the eve of the Second World War. Elegantly crafted, it offers the reader the knowledge of a scholar who has worked in the field for decades."---David Motadel, Times Literary Supplement "2021's most impressive work of history pulls together hidden threads to show how fear of Bolshevism poisoned international relations between the wars." "
One of the year's most impressive pieces of research."---Simon Heffer, A Telegraph Best New History Book "With his signature iconoclasm, Jonathan Haslam's sweeping reexamination of the international politics of the 1920s and 1930s shows the centrality of the Russian Revolution, ideologies (and leaders' perceptions of others' ideologies), and the interpenetration of states' domestic politics. This period looks different when it is seen, as it needs to be, in terms of the particularities generated by it
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Worse Than a Monolith
Alliance Politics and Problems of Coercive Diplomacy in Asia
by Thomas J. Christensen
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
Thomas J. Christensen is the William P. Boswell Professor of World Politics of Peace and War and Director of the China and the World Program at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is the author of Useful Adversaries (Princeton). From 2006-2008, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.
In brute-force struggles for survival, such as the two World Wars, disorganization and divisions within an enemy alliance are to one's own advantage. However, most international security politics involve coercive diplomacy and negotiations short of all-out war. Worse Than a Monolith demonstrates that when states are engaged in coercive diplomacy--combining threats and assurances to influence the behavior of real or potential adversaries--divisions, rivalries, and lack of coordination within the opposing camp often make it more difficult to prevent the onset of conflict, to prevent existing conflicts from escalating, and to negotiate the end to those conflicts promptly. Focusing on relations between the Communist and anti-Communist alliances in Asia during the Cold War, Thomas Christensen explores how internal divisions and lack of cohesion in the two alliances complicated and undercut coercive diplomacy by sending confusing signals about strength, resolve, and intent. In the case of the Communist camp, internal mistrust and rivalries catalyzed the movement's aggressiveness in ways that we would not have expected from a more cohesive movement under Moscow's clear control.
Reviewing newly available archival material, Christensen examines the instability in relations across the Asian Cold War divide, and sheds new light on the Korean and Vietnam wars.
While recognizing clear differences between the Cold War and post-Cold War environments, he investigates how efforts to adjust burden-sharing roles among the United States and its Asian security partners have complicated U.S.-China security relations since the collapse of the Soviet Union. "I am sure that there will be many who will dispute Christensen's emphasis on alliance politics as the major factor in recent U.S.-Asian diplomatic history. Personally, I find his evidentiary base persuasive and his analysis attractively parsimonious. . . . [A]n intelligent, accessible, and significant work."---James W. White, American Diplomacy "Christensen both writes well and supports his hypothesis well; the material makes for mesmerizing reading."---June Teufel Dreyer, Journal of Military History "The [book] is a sumptuous array of original analysis and rich detail, backed up by judicious use of archival and secondary sources in both Chinese and English. . . . [F]or anyone teaching a college-level course on U.S.-East Asia relations or East Asian politics, the book should be required reading. . . . Christensen's Worse than a Monolith is a major contribution to Cold War studies and U.S.-East Asia relations."---Sung-Yoon Lee, New Global Studies "A great scholarly book is not one that offers ultimate answers to all the questions that it has raised and tried to deal with; it is one that asks meaningful questions and, in coming up with answers to them, serves as a new point of departure for scholarly discussion and intellectual exchange. Christensen's is exactly such a book, and it is in this spirit that I write this review and put forward the above suggestions. This book surely will be read, discussed and, at times, debated by scholars for a long time to come."---Chen Jian, H-Diplo/ISSF Roundtable Reviews "Christensen's volume greatly enriches our understanding of alliance politics and deterrence in Asia during the Cold War. It is thorough in its research, clear in its presentation, rich in its insight, and thought-provoking in its interpretations."---Qiang Zhai, H-Diplo/ISSF Roundtable Reviews "Christensen's book is an important contribution to the burgeoning literature on East Asian security. He provides a counterintuitive theoretical claim tha
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Powerplay
The Origins of the American Alliance System in Asia
by Victor Cha
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
Victor D. Cha holds the D. S. Song–Korea Foundation Chair in Government and is the director of Asian Studies at Georgetown University. He is also senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D. C.
A close look at the evolution of American political alliances in Asia and their future
While the American alliance system in Asia has been fundamental to the region's security and prosperity for seven decades, today it encounters challenges from the growth of China-based regional organizations. How was the American alliance system originally established in Asia, and is it currently under threat? How are competing security designs being influenced by the United States and China? In Powerplay, Victor Cha draws from theories about alliances, unipolarity, and regime complexity to examine the evolution of the U.S. alliance system and the reasons for its continued importance in Asia and the world.
Cha delves into the fears, motivations, and aspirations of the Truman and Eisenhower presidencies as they contemplated alliances with the Republic of China, Republic of Korea, and Japan at the outset of the Cold War. Their choice of a bilateral "hub and spokes" security design for Asia was entirely different from the system created in Europe, but it was essential for its time. Cha argues that the alliance system's innovations in the twenty-first century contribute to its resiliency in the face of China's increasing prominence, and that the task for the world is not to choose between American and Chinese institutions, but to maximize stability and economic progress amid Asia's increasingly complex political landscape.
Exploring U.S. bilateral relations in Asia after World War II, Powerplay takes an original look at how global alliances are achieved and maintained. "Powerplay is an illuminating and important book that should help to guide policy makers as they try to cope with the greatest challenge to the American alliance system in Asia since it was created some seven decades ago: the rise of a power, China, that wants to shake it up."---Richard Bernstein, Wall Street Journal "Cha has embedded a lively narrative of post-World War II diplomatic history inside a thought-provoking analytic framework."---Andrew Nathan, Foreign Affairs "Masterful. . . . Deft and seamless mixture of theory, historical analysis, and policy prescription."---Ben Rimland, Washington Free Beacon "Powerplay demonstrates an incredible depth and breadth of knowledge, solid research, and accessible analysis."---Daniel Runde, Foreign Policy "An important contribution to the literature on alliance politics and regional security in Asia."---Yukari Iwanami, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific "This book is an important contribution to the literature on alliance politics and regional security in Asia."---Yukari Iwanami, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific "Timely. . . . It provides a clear-eyed, historical perspective on the emergence, significance and continued relevance of the alliance structure. Cha persuasively argues that security arrangements in Asia possess both a different structure and rationale for their existence than security arrangements in Europe."---Olivia Enos, The National Interest "Until now, the literature lacked a comprehensive work examining the origins of post-WWII American alliances in Asia. Cha fills this gap. . . . A masterpiece of early Cold War history. . . . Cha successfully persuades readers that the hub and spokes alliance system was not the product of contingencies, but a deliberate choice of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. . . . What makes this book original and worth reading is the integration of these important monographs and primary documents on the different bilateral alliances into one framework, which is the Powerplay strategy."---Giuseppe Spatafora, The International Spectator "Victor Cha presents an exciting and original argument. His analysis is convinci
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Economic Interdependence and War
by Dale C. Copeland
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"Winner of the 2017 ISA Annual Best Book Award, International Studies Association" "One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2015" Dale C. Copeland is an associate professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Origins of Major War.
Does growing economic interdependence among great powers increase or decrease the chance of conflict and war? Liberals argue that the benefits of trade give states an incentive to stay peaceful. Realists contend that trade compels states to struggle for vital raw materials and markets. Moving beyond the stale liberal-realist debate, Economic Interdependence and War lays out a dynamic theory of expectations that shows under what specific conditions interstate commerce will reduce or heighten the risk of conflict between nations.
Taking a broad look at cases spanning two centuries, from the Napoleonic and Crimean wars to the more recent Cold War crises, Dale Copeland demonstrates that when leaders have positive expectations of the future trade environment, they want to remain at peace in order to secure the economic benefits that enhance long-term power. When, however, these expectations turn negative, leaders are likely to fear a loss of access to raw materials and markets, giving them more incentive to initiate crises to protect their commercial interests. The theory of trade expectations holds important implications for the understanding of Sino-American relations since 1985 and for the direction these relations will likely take over the next two decades.
Economic Interdependence and War offers sweeping new insights into historical and contemporary global politics and the actual nature of democratic versus economic peace. "This bold, well-written, and landmark work draws together the fields of international political economy and security studies. It also illuminates modern international history and the future." "[A] landmark book." "[A] stimulating and penetrating book. . . . A landmark contribution to the ongoing debate on the relationship between interdependence and peace."---Jack Snyder, International Security "Exhaustively researched. . . . Copeland is a rarity among contemporary international relations scholars."---Erik Gartzke, Political Science Quarterly "Economic Interdependence and War is international relations on a gigantic scale. Copeland asks big questions, makes big arguments, engages big alternatives, and tests them all on big powers over a big time span. . . . Books like this one are a healthy reminder that there remains trenchant things to say about the big picture. . . . A work of passion, conviction, and erudition."---Joseph Parent, Perspective on Politics "This book provides a novel, nuanced and highly illuminating examination of the relationship between economic interdependence and war. . . . The book's central arguments and findings will also be of clear interest and importance for current and future policy makers as they seek to grapple with the long-term effects of increasing economic interdependence."---Stephen Ellis, Political Studies Review "This landmark book makes bold arguments and parallel big achievements. On theoretical front, the book succeeds in presenting that as an amalgam of liberal and realist approaches, future trade expectation theory has a significant deductive and explanatory power. On empirical front, the book is one of the best case studies that go in depth based on the diplomatic-historical evidence among the existing large-N quantitative empirical studies."---Hakan Mehmetcik, Journal of Global Analysis "Copeland is a refreshing book . . . most of all because it offers a possibility to reconcile and balance the traditional realist and liberal insights at the level of broad intuitions."---Massimo Morelli and Tommaso Sonno, Journal of Economic Literature "Readers seeking an engaging historical examination of war and international relations theory will learn much from Dale Copeland's Economic
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Revolutions in Sovereignty
How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations
by Daniel Philpott
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
Daniel Philpott is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published on such topics as self-determination, sovereignty, and ethics and international relations.
How did the world come to be organized into sovereign states? Daniel Philpott argues that two historical revolutions in ideas are responsible. First, the Protestant Reformation ended medieval Christendom and brought a system of sovereign states in Europe, culminating at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Second, ideas of equality and colonial nationalism brought a sweeping end to colonial empires around 1960, spreading the sovereign states system to the rest of the globe. In both cases, revolutions in ideas about legitimate political authority profoundly altered the "constitution" that establishes basic authority in the international system.
Ideas exercised influence first by shaping popular identities, then by exercising social power upon the elites who could bring about new international constitutions. Swaths of early modern Europeans, for instance, arrived at Protestant beliefs, then fought against the temporal powers of the Church on behalf of the sovereignty of secular princes, who could overthrow the formidable remains of a unified medieval Christendom. In the second revolution, colonial nationalists, domestic opponents of empire, and rival superpowers pressured European cabinets to relinquish their colonies in the name of equality and nationalism, resulting in a global system of sovereign states. Bringing new theoretical and historical depth to the study of international relations, Philpott demonstrates that while shifts in military, economic, and other forms of material power cannot be overlooked, only ideas can explain how the world came to be organized into a system of sovereign states. "This convincing portrait show how power and ideas together shape international relations."---John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs "Revolutions and Sovereignty is a cogently argued and superbly written book in which Daniel Philpott sets forth an original and provocative thesis. Challenging Realist and materialist interpretations of international relations, he makes an impressive case for the central role of ideas, particularly religious ideas, in shaping the nature of revolutions in the international state system beginning with the impact of Protestantism on the Westphalian settlement of 1648. This is a book which undoubtedly will stimulate much debate and which demands and deserves thoughtful attention at a time when that state system is in the midst of yet another revolutionary transformation."-Samuel Huntington, Harvard University "Dan Philpott is a rising star in international relations, and this book demonstrates why. It is rich in historic detail, conceptually rigorous, bold, and written with felicity. The reader puts down Revolutions in Sovereignty with a keener sense of why ideas matter to the world of international politics, an arena often construed as a field of force in which ideas play an inconsequent role."-Jean Bethke Elshtain, University of Chicago, author of Women and War "Revolutions in Sovereignty tells us how ideas have shaped the basic structure of international relations in the modern era. Before sovereign statehood became real, it became an ideal in the minds of the leaders and their followers who then made states sovereign. In explaining how this happened, Daniel Philpott brings original and insightful scholarship to bear on large and important issues."-Michael Doyle, Princeton University, author of Ways of War and Peace
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Strong Borders, Secure Nation
Cooperation and Conflict in China's Territorial Disputes
by M. Taylor Fravel
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
M. Taylor Fravel is associate professor of political science and member of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
As China emerges as an international economic and military power, the world waits to see how the nation will assert itself globally. Yet, as M. Taylor Fravel shows in Strong Borders, Secure Nation, concerns that China might be prone to violent conflict over territory are overstated. The first comprehensive study of China's territorial disputes, Strong Borders, Secure Nation contends that China over the past sixty years has been more likely to compromise in these conflicts with its Asian neighbors and less likely to use force than many scholars or analysts might expect.
By developing theories of cooperation and escalation in territorial disputes, Fravel explains China's willingness to either compromise or use force. When faced with internal threats to regime security, especially ethnic rebellion, China has been willing to offer concessions in exchange for assistance that strengthens the state's control over its territory and people. By contrast, China has used force to halt or reverse decline in its bargaining power in disputes with its militarily most powerful neighbors or in disputes where it has controlled none of the land being contested. Drawing on a rich array of previously unexamined Chinese language sources, Strong Borders, Secure Nation offers a compelling account of China's foreign policy on one of the most volatile issues in international relations. "Fravel's is an elegant argument that works well to explain Chinese behavior and holds promise for application elsewhere."---Andrew J. Nathan, Foreign Affairs "This comprehensive, compelling volume by Fravel seeks to address the overstated concerns that China might be prone to violent conflict over territory."---S.K. Ma, Choice "M. Taylor Fravel . . . provides compelling evidence that in its territorial disputes China has been less prone to violence and more cooperative than realist theory or conventional wisdom about an expansionist state might suggest."---David Rosenberg, China Journal "This is a tour de force work of scholarship that is comprehensive, empirically rich and analytically strong. . . . For anyone who works on contemporary China, this book will be an indispensible reference volume."---Andrew Scobell, Pacific Affairs "The book is not only a necessary work for everyone dealing with Chinese politics, but also it deserves to become a new standard for the study of international politics in general."---Bart Dessein, International History Review "[T]his book is an unqualified welcome addition to the still comparatively sparse academic literature on China's territorial disputes and security perceptions."---Chien-Peng Chung, Contemporary Southeast Asia "Fravel offers an important interpretation of China's behaviour, based on what it has actually done in the last six decades. . . . The book will help many trying to decide whether China will be a disruptive or a positive international force in the years to come."---Kerry Brown, Asian Affairs "This book makes a refreshing change, both for its theoretical and empirical rigour and in its balanced coverage."---Jonathan Sullivan, Political Studies Review "How China handles the issue of Taiwan is going to offer a significantly novel framework for international studies over territorial sovereignty disputes. Fravel has provided a plethora of historical details and sophisticated explanations for these diplomatic events, and has produced a highly readable book."---Yuk Wah Chan, Journal of Chinese Political Science "Professor M. Taylor Fravel . . . has made a valuable contribution to Princeton Studies in International History and Politics. . . . His impeccable research helps in correcting false notions, for instance, on China's boundary agreement with Pakistan on March 2, 1963."---A. G. Noorani, Frontline "This excellent book is the first to systematically examine China's
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Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era
Regional Powers and International Conflict
by Vipin Narang
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"Winner of the 2015 Best Book, International Security Studies Section of the International Studies Association" Vipin Narang is the Frank Stanton Professor of Nuclear Security and Political Science and a member of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The world is in a second nuclear age in which regional powers play an increasingly prominent role. These states have small nuclear arsenals, often face multiple active conflicts, and sometimes have weak institutions. How do these nuclear states-and potential future ones-manage their nuclear forces and influence international conflict? Examining the reasoning and deterrence consequences of regional power nuclear strategies, this book demonstrates that these strategies matter greatly to international stability and it provides new insights into conflict dynamics across important areas of the world such as the Middle East, East Asia, and South Asia.
Vipin Narang identifies the diversity of regional power nuclear strategies and describes in detail the posture each regional power has adopted over time. Developing a theory for the sources of regional power nuclear strategies, he offers the first systematic explanation of why states choose the postures they do and under what conditions they might shift strategies. Narang then analyzes the effects of these choices on a state's ability to deter conflict. Using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, he shows that, contrary to a bedrock article of faith in the canon of nuclear deterrence, the acquisition of nuclear weapons does not produce a uniform deterrent effect against opponents. Rather, some postures deter conflict more successfully than others.
Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era considers the range of nuclear choices made by regional powers and the critical challenges they pose to modern international security. "Narang adds importantly to the scholarly understanding of nuclear posture in a way that can inform policy. He studies an important topic, shatters false assumptions, provides insightful and useful new conceptual categories, offers apparently powerful theoretical explanations of important behaviors, provides a valuable set of case studies, and opens doors for additional scholarly research. . . . The many avenues for additional research it suggests and worrisome possibilities it surfaces testify to the analytic strength and policy ambition of this important book."---Douglas B. Shaw, Arms Control Today "Narang explores an understudied aspect of nuclear strategy and doctrine. Rejecting conventional scholarly thinking that nuclear weapons have an inherent ability to deter conflict, Narang examines the nuclear postures of Pakistan, India, China, Israel, South Africa, and France." "Finally, we have a book on proliferation that is rooted in the discipline of Political Science with persuasive explanatory powers and great analytical value."---Michael Krepon, Arms Control Wonk "This book fills a gaping hole in the existing literature."---Jacques Hymans, Political Science Quarterly "Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era impressively advances scholarship on nuclear proliferation and its consequences."---Dinshaw Mistry, Perspectives on Politics "With its combination of theoretical ambition, empirical rigor, and lucid writing, Narang's book deserves a place on the strategist's bookshelf alongside Brodie, Schelling, Jervis, Betts, and other classics."---Todd S. Sechser, Journal of Strategic Studies "This excellent book offers a novel typology of nuclear postures and a theory that explains why states adopt certain postures but not others, before assessing the consequences of postures for deterrence. An exemplary blend of theory and qualitative and quantitative evidence, its conclusions have wide-ranging implications for the way we think about nuclear deterrence."-Alexander Downes, George Washington University "This book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the nuclear challenges
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Active Defense
China's Military Strategy since 1949
by M. Taylor Fravel
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
"2019 War on the Rocks Holiday Reading List" M. Taylor Fravel is the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and a member of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Strong Borders, Secure Nation (Princeton). Twitter @fravel
What changes in China's modern military policy reveal about military organizations and strategy
Since the 1949 Communist Revolution, China has devised nine different military strategies, which the People's Liberation Army (PLA) calls "strategic guidelines." What accounts for these numerous changes? Active Defense offers the first systematic look at China's military strategy from the mid-twentieth century to today. Exploring the range and intensity of threats that China has faced, M. Taylor Fravel illuminates the nation's past and present military goals and how China sought to achieve them, and offers a rich set of cases for deepening the study of change in military organizations.
Drawing from diverse Chinese-language sources, including memoirs of leading generals, military histories, and document collections that have become available only in the last two decades, Fravel shows why transformations in military strategy were pursued at certain times and not others. He focuses on the military strategies adopted in 1956, 1980, and 1993-when the PLA was attempting to wage war in a new kind of way-to show that China has pursued major change in its strategic guidelines when there has been a significant shift in the conduct of warfare in the international system and when China's Communist Party has been united.
Delving into the security threats China has faced over the last seven decades, Active Defense offers a detailed investigation into how and why states alter their defense policies. "This is the first book to provide a comprehensive history of China's military doctrine as it has evolved since the founding of the People's Republic."---Andrew J. Nathan, Foreign Affairs "Meticulously analyzes China's military strategy since 1945 . . . . A classic that is likely to have great long-term influence . . . . In this unstable environment, Professor Fravel's book could hardly be timelier."---Chas W. Freeman, Jr., Book Post "This book is an outstanding contribution to the canon on Chinese military and strategic affairs . . . . Fravel's new book is an instant classic and a mandatory reference source. I would recommend this volume to students of Chinese foreign policy, international relations, and military affairs without reservation."---James Mulvenon, China Quarterly "Taylor is an authority on the People's Liberation Army, and his latest book is deeply researched and based on primary materials, providing a picture of the ways in which strategic thought in the Chinese military context has evolved over the years. It's easy to recommend as a necessary reference volume for anyone writing on China's contemporary approach to military affairs, rich in context and history."---Ankit Panda, War on the Rocks "An invaluable reference with great intellectual rigor and excellent explanation of sources and methods, Active Defense belongs in a prominent place in the bookshelf of all serious students of China security issues."---Andrew S. Erickson, Journal of Chinese Political Science "Fravel's book is a worthwhile read. China experts and enthusiasts will find it especially compelling, as will those interested in military strategy."---Shai A. Kivity, Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs "Active Defense confirms Fravel's standing as one of the top experts on China's national security strategy. His mastery of history, political science theory, and military doctrine is extraordinary. Given growing Sino-American competition, this is a timely work, relevant to policymakers, strategists, and scholars alike."-Karl Eikenberry, Stanford University and former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan "Active Defense is a major contribution to our u
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Cult of the Irrelevant
The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security
by Michael C. Desch
Part of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series
Michael C. Desch is the Packey J. Dee Professor of International Relations and founding director of the Notre Dame International Security Center. He is the author or coauthor of four previous books on US national security policy.
How professionalization and scholarly "rigor" made social scientists increasingly irrelevant to US national security policy
To mobilize America's intellectual resources to meet the security challenges of the post–9/11 world, US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates observed that "we must again embrace eggheads and ideas." But the gap between national security policymakers and international relations scholars has become a chasm.
In Cult of the Irrelevant, Michael Desch traces the history of the relationship between the Beltway and the Ivory Tower from World War I to the present day. Recounting key Golden Age academic strategists such as Thomas Schelling and Walt Rostow, Desch's narrative shows that social science research became most oriented toward practical problem-solving during times of war and that scholars returned to less relevant work during peacetime. Social science disciplines like political science rewarded work that was methodologically sophisticated over scholarship that engaged with the messy realities of national security policy, and academic culture increasingly turned away from the job of solving real-world problems.
In the name of scientific objectivity, academics today frequently engage only in basic research that they hope will somehow trickle down to policymakers. Drawing on the lessons of this history as well as a unique survey of current and former national security policymakers, Desch offers concrete recommendations for scholars who want to shape government work. The result is a rich intellectual history and an essential wake-up call to a field that has lost its way. "Stimulating and thought-provoking, Cult of the Irrelevant brings a valuable historical perspective to a subject that too often lacks it."-Hal Brands, author of American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump "The question of policy relevance has bedeviled social scientists for the past century. This is a serious, sober, and well-researched exploration of the issue."-Daniel W. Drezner, author of The Ideas Industry "In this deep history of scholarly engagement with strategy and tactics in the age of nuclear and guerrilla war, Michael Desch shows how formalization, rooted in economic fads and fashions, stripped common sense and practical utility from security studies. Gripping, meticulous, and persuasive, his work is of equal value to those who share his wish that academics may better serve the state-and those who think the point is to change it."-James K. Galbraith, author of Inequality: What Everyone Needs to Know "Michael Desch has written a fascinating account of the relationship between the academy and the Washington policy community over the past century. For the growing number of younger scholars who are seeking to develop academically rigorous research that is relevant to policy, this look back at how some leading figures in national security tried to bridge the academic and policy worlds will prove tremendously instructive."-James Goldgeier, American University