Suchergebnisse

Warlordism creates significant problems in failed states: it impedes the development of stable and secure societies, thwarts economic growth, and creates new threats to international security. Through a comparative study of four seemingly disparate cases—medieval Europe, Republican China, and Somalia and Afghanistan in the mid-2000s—it is possible to develop an inductive, generalizable definition of warlordism. Warlordism emerges when armed men seize small slices of territory in disintegrating states for their own benefit, using charisma and patronage ties to cement their local authority, and disrupting commerce and investment through their fragmentary rule. Two causal factors were necessary for the demise of warlordism in medieval Europe and Republican China: the presence of a powerful and aggrieved economic interest group, and the appearance of a transformative idea from outside the existing system that supported the interest group's actions. If this same causal relationship holds true today, then warlordism will be more quickly eliminated in Somalia than in Afghanistan. The international community can take action to help eliminate warlordism, but change ultimately depends on domestic factors and will likely be violent.

Anarchy makes it easy for terrorists to set up shop. Yet the international community has been reluctant to commit the necessary resources to peacekeeping -- with devastating results locally and around the globe. This daring new work argues that modern peacekeeping operations and military occupations bear a surprising resemblance to the imperialism practiced by liberal states a century ago. Motivated by a similar combination of self-interested and humanitarian goals, liberal democracies in both eras have wanted to maintain a presence on foreign territory in order to make themselves more

Did a ""doctrine race"" exist alongside the much-publicized arms competition between East and West? Using recent insights from organization theory, Kimberly Marten Zisk answers this question in the affirmative. Zisk challenges the standard portrayal of Soviet military officers as bureaucratic actors wedded to the status quo: she maintains that when they were confronted by a changing external security environment, they reacted by producing innovative doctrine. The author's extensive evidence is drawn from newly declassified Soviet military journals, and from her interviews with retired high-