Suchergebnisse

The past decade has witnessed the investment of considerable energy and ingenuity in the refinement of the categories of foreign policy determinants proposed in James Rosenau's famous essay, "Pre-theories and Theories of Foreign Policy." A sizable literature on foreign policy behavior is now developing, based upon empirical tests of the explanatory power of such variables as size, wealth, degree of political accountability, decision-maker attributes, environmental stimuli, etc. Surprisingly little attention in the field of comparative foreignpolicy, however, has been directed at specifying more precisely and in operational form the concept ofissue area—an important component of Rosenau's "pre-theory" and an analytic concept that has received much attention in the public policy field. Moreover, among those scholars who do employ the concept there is little consensus as to the merits of a content based as opposed to a process oriented treatment of issue area or to the implications for empirical research of selecting one approach over the other. This essay seeks: 1) to review the foreign policy literature that attaches major importance to issue area; 2) to assess the merits of alternative treatments of the concept in terms of their contribution to the development of a theory of comparative foreign policy; and 3) to specify the conditions under which different issue area approaches can be used most profitably in comparative foreign policy research.

Since 1965 when the problem of verifying a MIRV ban was added to the charge that MIRV was a threat to deterrence stability, the case against MIRV has remained essentially unchanged. Although MIRV was defended alternatively as a cost-effective means to cover increased Soviet targets, a hedge against Soviet ABM designs, a weapon in the domestic battle over ABM, and a bargaining chip in international negotiations, the principal charge against MIRV (counterforce threat) was never seriously disputed. Nevertheless, because of verification obstacles, both critics and supporters of the program have tended to agree that prospects for a future MIRV ban are not promising. A case is made here that MIR Ved systems themselves are not inherently destabilizing. Moreover, a practical method does exist for achieving a ban on the most destabilizing variety of MIRVs—those on land-based ICBMs. This approach, a ban or severe limitation on flight tests of missiles in a MIRVed mode, avoids the substantial verification difficulties of other MIRV reduction schemes and reinforces the principle of mutual deterrence.

This book, first published in 1984, analyses the critically important Cold War issue of the Soviet national security decision-making process dealing with weapons acquisition, arms control and the application of military force. It conceptualises Soviet decision-making for national security from Stalinist antecedents to 1980s modes, and examines the problems of decision-making concerning weapons development, defence research and development and SALT negotiations. It also focuses on the decision-making processes which led to the use or threatened use of military force in Czechoslovakia (1968), the Middle East (1973) and Afghanistan (1979).

This book is originated from the 1985 Rome conference on "Soviet-East European Relations: Implications for the West," which explored the elements of continuity and change, especially the trends in intra-Warsaw Pact relations. It contains revised versions of the papers presented at the conference.

Although projections of nuclear proliferation abound, they rarely are founded on empirical research or guided by theory. Even fewer studies are informed by a comparative perspective. The two books under review—The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign Policy, by Jacques Hymans, and Nuclear Logics: Alternative Paths in East Asia and the Middle East, by Etel Solingen, are welcome exceptions to this general state of affairs, and represent the cutting edge of nonproliferation research. Both works challenge conventional conceptions of the sources of nuclear weapons decisions and offer new insights into why past predictions of rapid proliferation failed to materialize and why current prognoses about rampant proliferation are similarly flawed. While sharing a number of common features, including a focus on subsystemic determinants of national behavior, the books differ in their methodology, level of analysis, receptivity to multicausal explanations, and assumptions about decisionmaker rationality and the revolutionary nature of the decision. Where one author emphasizes the importance of the individual leader's national identity conception in determining a state's nuclear path, the other explains nuclear decisions primarily with regard to the political-economic orientation of the ruling coalition. Notwithstanding a tendency to overinterpret evidence, the books represent the best of contemporary social science research and provide compelling interpretations of nuclear proliferation dynamics of great relevance to scholars and policymakers alike.

Enthält Rezension von Levi, Michael: On nuclear terrorism. - Cambridge/Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2007