1,721,062 research outputs found
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Democratization in the Middle East
Full text linkThis chapter discusses the recent findings relevant to the debate whether democratization affects the possibility of cooperation. Democratization could arguably heighten nationalism but full joint consolidation of internationalization and democracy can offset proclivities toward war. Two approaches in international relations assess the rise of China in starkly different ways. The first stems from a general theory that great powers are bound to challenge each other, often by force. A second approach builds on elements of the liberal tradition adapted to the conditions of an emerging global economy. There are important precedents for China's commitment to multilateral frameworks. Its "charm offensive" led to an understanding that a peaceful and prosperous Southeast Asia could guarantee continued overseas and regional investments, sustained flow of natural resources for China's growth and political stability, and smooth operation of crucial sea lanes in the Straits of Malacca that enable 80 percent of oil shipments to China
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The Genesis, Design and Effects of Regional Institutions: Lessons from East Asia and the Middle East
Full text linkThis chapter focuses on regional organizations as productive arenas for developing contingent propositions on institutions more generally. They include the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), and the Arab League. A regional institution outlines a research strategy sensitive to scope conditions, joint methodological shortcomings, and the institutional puzzle at hand. Domestic coalitions are best positioned to explain the genesis of regional institutions when the consequences of their creation for regional power distribution or transaction costs are negligible or unclear, and where there is little normative convergence around the institution's creation. The Arab League's establishment in 1945 as the first postwar regional institution adds to the paradox of stunted institutional development. East Asian institutions had minimal effects on the whole, and various approaches provide plausible accounts for this outcome. One may also conceive of East Asian institutions as shaping an identity pivoted on global markets and institutions
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When the Target Fights Back: Economic Coercion and Interstate Conflict in the Era of Global Value Chains
Full text linkWhen exposed to economic coercion, why do some target states choose to escalate a conflict by retaliating instead of acquiescing or ignoring it altogether? More broadly, what is the nature of the relationship between economic interdependence and conflict today? Whereas many scholars examine economic coercion as tools to be used against “rogue” states, economic pressure applied by partners within shared GVCs represents a fast-growing form of conflict in the 21st century as a substitute to military action. Moreover, GVC centered economic interdependence is distinct from that based on traditional trade, making it plausible that these distinctive economic relationships impact actors in distinct ways.In this dissertation, I use prospect theory to show that decisionmakers are influenced by their perceived position in GVCs, relative to the sender, in formulating their response to economic pressure. When a target’s key industries are more dependent on the sender within their shared GVCs, its leaders are more likely to escalate conflicts. This asymmetry in dependency makes policymakers see themselves as strategically disadvantaged. The prospect of losing the sender’s less replaceable GVC inputs predisposes them towards more risk-seeking behavior. By contrast, when a target holds relative dominance, its leaders are less likely to risk conflict escalation. They perceive themselves as occupying a superior strategic position and will act in a relatively risk-averse manner to avoid potential losses. For them, the opponent’s inputs are easier to replace and, as a consequence, the incentive to retain them is less meaningful relative to the risk of conflict escalation. The empirical section of the dissertation largely draws on two methods. First, I use a process-tracing method and within-case congruence tests to conduct in-depth case analysis on two contemporary East Asian cases: the ongoing Japan-South Korea trade conflict and the China-South Korea conflict over THAAD. Additionally, I conduct two experiments to further highlight how GVCs and traditional forms of economic interdependence can influence actors differently
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Two Paths: A Comparative Analysis of the Narco-economies and Drug Control Policies in Latin America—The Case of Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, and Uruguay
Full text linkThe illegal drug trade has presented numerous challenges for many regions around the globe but none more so than Latin America. Some nations in Latin America have followed the U.S. and adopted a “law and order” approach in their attempts at combating the illegal drug trade while other nations have adopted a “regulate and treatment” approach. This dissertation analyzes how different Latin American countries are combating the illegal drug trade and explores the effectiveness of the two approaches. To examine the successfulness of each approach, I analyze the drug production and seizure rates among the different narco-economies of Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, and Uruguay. This dissertation also examines the illicit drug production models of Mexican Transnational Criminal Organizations (MTCOs) as they respond to the legalization of recreational cannabis in the U.S. by examining U.S. southern border illicit drug seizure data and conducting interviews with drug control experts comprised of former and current government officials and academics from around the world. Lastly, this dissertation assesses the relationships between the narco-economies and the legitimate economies of the cases examined. I find that all four cases examined have experienced both successes and failures while combating the illicit drug trade from 2000 to 2015, indicating neither prohibitionist drug control policies nor alternative drug control policies can claim absolute success in their attempts to combat the illicit drug trade. The results of the dissertation highlight the need for countries to implement individualized drug control policies that best combat the illicit drug trade activities most prevalent in their countries. Moreover, I find that MTCOs are diversifying not only their illicit drug production models as they respond to recreational cannabis legalization, but also their criminal activities generally. Lastly, I find that the economies of Mexico and Bolivia benefit from the production of heroin and coca respectively, while, counter-intuitive to my expectations, I find that the seizures of certain illicit drugs also contribute to economic growth in a number of cases
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Nuclear Debates and Political Competition in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan: Denuclearization or Nuclear Latency in the aftermath of Fukushima
Full text linkThe objective of this research has been primarily analytical, aiming at a better understanding of why Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are experiencing different outcomes in their nuclear decisions in the post-Fukushima era and how these deviating outcomes will influence these states’ non-nuclear weapons policies in the coming years. To date, much of the scholarship on nonproliferation in Northeast Asia has paid inadequate attention to the effect of political segmentation and competition within the nuclear policy arena on nuclear decision-making processes and nuclear policies. As Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan democratized and liberalized, the political segmentation within the nuclear policy arena diversified into multiple domestic coalitions with different agendas. Thus, political competition within the nuclear policy arena became more complicated as multiple domestic coalitions interacted and competed for political influence. This research seeks to answer the following questions: What determines the nuclear orientation of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in the aftermath of Fukushima? And why are these three states experiencing different outcomes in the post-Fukushima era? Finally, what is the likelihood that these states will reverse their non-nuclear weapons policies in the coming years? This research argues that in the aftermath of the Fukushima incident, the segmentation and rearrangement of political competition within the nuclear policy arenas of these states are the main factors in determining these states’ nuclear orientations. Nuclear orientation is operationalized via the political behavior of domestic nuclear coalitions which include coalitions that are pro-nuclear energy, pro-nuclear weapons, anti-nuclear energy, and anti-nuclear weapons. Thus, this research contends that in the post-Fukushima era, the final nuclear decision-making of these states is determined by the interplay of these four domestic coalitions within the nuclear policy arena and the ways in which the international and domestic conditions of economy, safety, security, and social norms are filtered through the lenses of these four coalitions. The controlled comparison of these three states in the aftermath of the Fukushima incident provides important benefits for improving our systematic understanding of the relationship between the interplay of coalitions and the nuclear orientation of states.In the post-Fukushima era, changing international and domestic conditions filtered through the lenses of domestic coalitions affected their nuclear weapons debates differently and resulted in various decision outcomes. These states have been very adamant about their non-nuclear weapons policies while heavily condemning North Korea. As North Korea continued to conduct its nuclear tests, a domino effect or “reactive proliferation,” as many experts predicted, did not occur in Northeast Asia. However, there are still some possibilities that reactive proliferation could occur in Northeast Asia and spill over to other regions if any one of these states decides to go nuclear in the future. Taiwan is moving toward complete denuclearization by removing its civilian nuclear programs. South Korea is gradually moving toward complete denuclearization via a gradual phase out of its nuclear power and finding different paths to complete its nuclear fuel cycle. However, Japan’s nuclear orientation is circling back to the original position that it had prior to the Fukushima incident. According to the findings of the case study chapters, this dissertation cautiously envisions that, for different domestic political reasons, Japan and South Korea are more prone to go nuclear than Taiwan if the U.S. nuclear umbrella fails to work properly in the coming years. Japan has an ambition to become the power house of Asia once more. Thus, nuclear weapons might not be an end goal but a necessary step on its way to becoming a great power. This study contends that Japan is more prone to go nuclear due to its political motivations and the consistency shown by its leadership on the matter of nuclear hedging throughout the years. Unlike South Korea and Taiwan, the Japanese leadership continuously used external threats, such as China and North Korea, to rouse nationalistic sentiment within the general population and to justify its remilitarization process. In particular, the surge of nationalism in Japan should be carefully monitored because this will not influence its short-term, but will influence its long-term national strategy. In contrast, this study contends that South Korea is prone to go nuclear due to high public support for nuclear weapons. Even though public support for nuclear weapons is showing a pattern of downward trend since 1999, the idea of acquiring nuclear weapons is still popular among many South Koreans. The recent polls from 2017 to 2018 vary from 43% to 67%. Thus, even though there are no immediate concerns for these states to abandon their non-nuclear weapons policies, the international community needs to keep close eyes on the public support for the nuclear weapons in South Korea and the surge of nationalism and the remilitarization process that is currently in progress in Japan
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Emergent Strategic Culture: Post-Cold War Europe Navigating Great Power Relations with the U.S., Russia, and China
Full text linkContemporary strategic culture research views strategic cultural change as a product of subculture competition. These competitive models can overlook "latent" subcultures and have difficulty explaining how subculture dominance relates to time. I argue that strategic subcultures are dynamic conceptual spaces shaped by material and ideational factors, which overlap with ill-defined boundaries. It is impossible to describe one subculture without referencing another. This interconnectedness resembles the behavior of quantum entangled particles.I apply quantum-theoretical approaches to open up innovative conceptual tools for strategic cultural analysis. Entangled subcultures generate an emergent macroscopic strategic culture. Once a strategic culture emerges, its irreducible macroscopic properties affect strategic behavior. I explore my novel strategic cultural approach by considering the strategic culture of the EU in the post-Cold War period.I assert that European strategic culture is not an amalgam of Member States' strategic cultures. Instead, it is a unique culture that transcends nations and institutions, emerging from subcultural interaction. European strategic culture as an emergent social system considers the influence of all strategic subcultures, unlike contemporary approaches that focus only on dominant subcultures arising from competition with other subcultures.I use topic modeling of EU documents to identify latent patterns in the ideational landscape in which subcultural interaction occurs. Once generated, I coded the topics based on strategic cultural dimensions, including civilian power, normative projection, multilateralism, and transatlanticism. Using these dimensional profiles, I characterize the emergent macroscopic strategic culture.I identify four periods marked by shocks to the international system to explore how European strategic culture emerged. These periods are the end of the Cold War, the September 11 attacks, the global financial crisis (GFC), and the rise of right-wing populism marked by Brexit and the election of American President Donald Trump. I consider how the EU's emergent strategic culture helps explain Europe's relations with other major powers, including the United States, Russia, and China
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Global Supply Chains in Economic Statecraft: Interdependence Structure, Conflict, and Cooperation
Full text linkGlobal supply chains have become instruments of economic statecraft in contemporary international relations. This dissertation examines the presence, impact, and causality of the relationship between intermediate goods trade and interstate conflict and cooperation. It extends the conceptualization of trade interdependence structure focused on flow attributes by introducing the dimension of flow composition. This dimension is based on a typology of commodities that uses centrality, which assesses a commodity’s importance in the global production ecosystem, and substitutability, which evaluates the availability of alternative supplier countries to define the compositional attributes of dependence between states.The dissertation develops a theoretical framework that addresses the influence and vulnerabilities flow attributes and flow composition jointly produce for interdependent states. Specifically, the study posits that high interdependence involving central intermediate goods increases the likelihood of conflict initiation through the actual or potential use of negative sanctions, while dependence on non-central intermediate goods promotes cooperation through positive sanctions. The substitutability of these goods further influences the magnitude of the counterpart’s response.The study employs a mixed methods approach to test the argument. A quantitative analysis demonstrates the calculation of the centrality and substitutability indices for intermediate goods with United Nations Comtrade directed dyadic trade data, the categorization of the intermediate goods based on the typology using unsupervised machine learning, and construction of the interdependence scores to examine the relationship between intermediate goods interdependence structure and interstate conflict and cooperation. It also introduces a new measure of interstate conflict and cooperation using Integrated Crisis Early Warning System event data. A regression analysis of all directed dyads between 1995 and 2020 reveals that an increase in dependence that is primarily made of central intermediate goods is positively associated with the increase in the likelihood of conflict, while non-central intermediate goods with cooperation. Additionally, decreased substitutability of the flows is associated with increased outcome magnitudes, whether in conflict or cooperation.Case studies of the 2019 Japan-South Korea Trade Dispute and the 2010 China-Japan Rare Earth Elements Dispute contextualize the argument. Congruence testing reveals that the structure of dependence incentivized the use of negative sanctions on central intermediate goods which in turn led to deterioration in relations in both cases. Results from interrupted time series analysis suggest that these sanctions intensified tensions beyond pre-existing levels, and findings from counterfactual estimations indicate that the mere threat of economic impact at the time of the dispute was sufficient to exacerbate conflict. In the Japan-South Korea case, the response involved a WTO dispute, widespread boycotts and protests, and threats to scrap a critical security agreement. In the China-Japan case, the reactions included protests and a post-crisis WTO dispute. However, the intensity of the conflict was mitigated by Japan’s effective diversification of suppliers. These cases demonstrate that flow attributes made interdependence a variable in directed dyadic relations and flow composition shaped the nature and outcome of the applied economic statecraft
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Economic Coercion and the Logics of Global Business
Full text linkHow do multinational enterprises (MNEs) in or planning to invest in a target state respond to economic coercion -- the threat or imposition of economic sanctions? The ability of states to cajole, coerce, or convince MNEs to alter their investment strategies speaks to the usefulness of economic statecraft and to the potential impact of economic statecraft on the global economy. I argue that explaining MNE responses to economic coercion requires (1) attending to the different pathways through which sanctions coerce MNEs and other economic actors and (2) accounting for systematic differences in MNEs' economic logics -- the advantages that enable these enterprises to invest abroad in the first place. Economic sanctions can restrict foreign investment through direct legal restrictions, reputation costs, or negative indirect effects on the target economy. In turn, two economic logics predict whether MNEs will be vulnerable or resistant to these costs. First, MNEs invest in the target state seeking either resources or another market. Second, MNEs require either significant capital investment or relatively little. I develop and test hypotheses about the interactions between sanction costs and MNE logics. I first test the framework using an extreme case: Libya from 1951 to 2005. Libya was subjected to increasingly severe unilateral and multilateral economic coercion, illuminating the processes and sequences of MNE decisions. I trace these processes using case histories, newspaper reports, and archival data. I then examine the framework’s generalizability by examining U.S. outward FDI stocks in the petroleum, manufacturing, and wholesale trade industries in non-OECD states, Mexico, and Turkey between 1989 and 2005. Using Bayesian time-series cross-sectional multilevel models, I find key differences between industries’ vulnerabilities to economic coercion. Overall, I find evidence that economic coercion is correlated with minimal disinvestment – i.e., investment that leaves a target state. I conclude by examining whether sanctioned states suffer from underinvestment, becoming less competitive destinations for world FDI. My statistical results suggest that while economic coercion does not lead many MNEs to leave a target state, it is more effective at deterring MNEs from making new investments. I conclude with the scholarly and policy ramifications of these results
Sanctions, statecraft, and nuclear proliferation
No full textSome states have violated international commitments not to develop nuclear weapons. Yet the effects of international sanctions or positive inducements on their internal politics remain highly contested. How have trade, aid, investments, diplomacy, financial measures and military threats affected different groups? How, when and why were those effects translated into compliance with non-proliferation rules? Have inducements been sufficiently biting, too harsh, too little, too late or just right for each case? How have different inducements influenced domestic cleavages? What were their unintended and unforeseen effects? Why are self-reliant autocracies more often the subject of sanctions? Leading scholars analyse the anatomy of inducements through novel conceptual perspectives, in-depth case studies, original quantitative data and newly translated documents. The volume distils ten key dilemmas of broad relevance to the study of statecraft, primarily from experiences with Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, bound to spark debate among students and practitioners of international politics
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Regional Peace and Conflict: The Role of Global Value Chains
No full textThis study tests the relationship between Global Value Chains (GVCs) and regional security across six cases: three in Southeast Asia – Cambodia, Indonesia, and Vietnam and three in East Africa – Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania in East Africa. This comparison not only determines if and how GVCs impact conflict but also assesses its relative impact compared to that of traditional trade. An empirical analysis of the relationship between GVC and regional security reveals four important conclusions. First, GVC has a significant impact on domestic and regional security. However, its effect is not the main effect. Instead, GVC acts as a moderating variable. Second, what a ruling coalition perceives as its existential threat influences its choice of a regime survival strategy. The regime survival strategy, in turn, determines the regime’s relationship with GVCs. Three, GVCs help regimes reinforce their regime security, create the political need for negotiation, and establish the condition for trading partners to make pre-negotiation adjustments during discord or potential discord. Some ruling coalitions also use GVC for state and nation-building. All these factors increase the odds of de-escalating conflicts before they become full-blown wars. Four, GVC cannot guarantee peace because while they effectively create a need for negotiation, they are less effective in generating a political need for compromise. Moreover, political actors that devalue economic gains can override their constraints. In summary, GVCs can tame wars and promote cooperation. However, unfortunately, they can also contribute to conflict escalation in some cases. The direction of their impact depends on the ruling coalition’s role in their adoption or proliferation
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