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In this article, we examine how attitudes toward the United States shape trade & investment policy preferences in Mexico. To the extent that rising anti-Americanism changes public opinion on the desirability of free trade & open markets, increased economic globalization may be at risk from publics & governments who seek to break its advance in multilateral trade negotiations or force its retreat through domestic protectionist policies. We measure Mexican attitudes with public opinion data drawn from the recent Mexico y el Mundo 2004 survey. We find that, in Mexico, rational sociotropic & retrospective evaluations, as well as non-rational political & social values, tend to drive attitudes toward trade & investment, but rational expectations about average economic prospects do not. Our results suggest that the well-documented rise in anti-Americanism & opposition to American foreign policy may indeed put economic globalization at risk. Adapted from the source document.

The authors analyze a unique data source to study the determinants of violence against civilians in a civil war context. During the Vietnam War, the United States Department of Defense pioneered the use of quantitative analysis for operational purposes. The centerpiece of that effort was the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES), a monthly and quarterly rating of `the status of pacification at the hamlet and village level throughout the Republic of Vietnam'. Consistent with existing theoretical claims, the authors find that homicidal violence against civilians was a function of the level of territorial control exercised by the rival sides: Vietnamese insurgents relied on selective violence primarily where they enjoyed predominant, but not full, control; South Vietnamese government and US forces exercised indiscriminate violence primarily in the most rebel-dominated areas. Violence was less common in the most contested areas. The absence of spatial overlap between insurgent selective and incumbent indiscriminate violence, as well as the relative absence of violence from contested areas, demonstrates both the fundamental divergence between irregular and conventional war and the need for cautious use of violent events as indicators of conflict.

The conflict in Iraq has been portrayed as "ethnic" civil war, a radically different conflict from "ideological" wars such as Vietnam. We argue that such an assessment is misleading, as is its theoretical foundation, which we call the "ethnic war model." Neither Iraq nor Vietnam conforms to the ethnic war model's predictions. The sectarian conflict between Shia and Sunni militias is not simply the outcome of sectarian cleavages in Iraqi society, but to an important extent, a legacy of U.S. occupation. On the other hand, although Vietnam was a society riven by ethnic cleavages, the Vietnam War also fails to conform to the ethnic war model. We show that there is no necessary overlap between ethnic conflict and ethnic war. Some ethnic conflicts evolve into ethnic wars, and others develop dynamics virtually indistinguishable from those of ideological civil wars. We suggest that the state's role is essential in transforming conflicts into either ethnic or irregular wars. We conclude with an analysis of the current situation and future prospects in Iraq.

That rebels face a collective action problem is one of the most widely shared assumptions in the literature on civil wars. The authors argue that the collective action paradigm can be both descriptively inaccurate and analytically misleading when it comes to civil wars. They question both pillars of the paradigm as applied to the study of civil wars, namely, the free-riding incentive generated by the public goods dimension of insurgency and the risks of individual participation in insurgent collective action. The authors argue, instead, that although insurgent collective action may entail the expectation of future collective benefits, public (rather than just private) costs tend to predominate in the short term. Moreover, the costs of nonparticipation and free riding may equal or even exceed those of participation. The authors support these claims by triangulating three types of evidence: historical evidence from counterinsurgency operations in several civil wars; data from the Vietnam War's Phoenix Program; and regional evidence from the Greek Civil War. They conclude by drawing implications for the study of civil wars.