Suchergebnisse

Van hen hoef je geen blauwdruk voor een nieuwe samenleving of een businessplan te verwachten. Zij plegen geen aanslagen - niet de straat is hun element, maar de studeerkamer of het schildersatelier. Zij zijn anarchisten, al verwacht je dat niet meteen. Dat de revolutie er nu snel aankomt, weten zij wel zeker. Niet alleen in Parijs of Moskou, maar ook in België.00Rond 1900 ziet een generatie intellectuelen en artiesten de wereld kantelen. Hun nieuwe maatschappij zal gelijkheid en geluk brengen. Loon naar werken. Vrede. De vrijheid om lief te hebben. Schooltjes op kindermaat. Een leven zonder God of Gebod. "Ni dieu ni maître!"00Wie zij zijn? Enkele bourgeois-bohèmes uit het Brusselse universitaire milieu rond Élisée Reclus: Jacques Mesnil, August Vermeylen en Alexandra David-Néel. Kunstenaars uit de links-liberale burgerij als Émile Verhaeren, Henry van de Velde, Théo Van Rysselberghe en hun Parijse kameraden. De Antwerpse bende van De Kapel. Een handvol pioniers die in de groene rand van Brussel communes stichten. Dichters en pedagogen. Ongeduldige socialisten. Geniale knoeiers. Dolende idealisten in het zwarte licht van de anarchie. Een prachtig misverstand was het.00

How does battlefield activity affect belligerents' behavior during wartime negotiations? While scholars have studied when and why warring parties choose to negotiate, few insights explain what negotiators do once seated at the table. I argue that actors engage in obstinate negotiation behavior to signal resolve when undergoing contentious and indeterminate hostilities. I explore this claim by analyzing all negotiation transcripts and associated daily military operations reports from the Korean War. Using text-based, machine learning, and statistical methods, I show that high levels of movement or casualties in isolation produce clear information on future trends, thus yielding more substantive negotiations, while more turbulent activity featuring high movement and casualties in tandem produces cynical negotiations. Moving past contemporary literature, this study explores micro-level dynamics of conflict and diplomacy, builds a theoretical bridge between two perennial views of negotiation, and provides a framework for studying war by applying computational methods to archival documents.

Extant scholarship on interstate war and conflict resolution predominantly utilizes formal models, case studies, and statistical models with wars as the unit of analysis to assess the impact of battlefield activity on war duration and termination. As such, longstanding views of war have not been tested systematically using intraconflict measures, and deeper studies of war dynamics have also been hampered. I address these gaps by creating and introducing the Interstate War Battle (IWB) dataset, which captures the outcomes and dates of 1,708 battles across 97 interstate wars since 1823. This article describes the sources used to create these data, provides definitions, and presents descriptive statistics for the basic battle data and several daily-level measures constructed from them. I then use the data to test the implications of two major theoretical perspectives on conflict termination: the informational view, which emphasizes convergence in beliefs through battlefield activity; and Zartman's ripeness theory, which highlights costly stalemates in fighting. I find suggestive evidence for informational views and little support for ripeness theory: new battlefield outcomes promote negotiated settlements, while battlefield stagnation undermines them. The IWB dataset has significant implications, highlights future research topics, and motivates a renewed research agenda on the empirical study of conflict.

AbstractContemporary studies of conflict have adopted approaches that minimize the importance of negotiation during war or treat it as a constant and mechanical activity. This is strongly related to the lack of systematic data that track and illustrate the complex nature of wartime diplomacy. I address these issues by creating and exploring a new daily-level data set of negotiations in all interstate wars from 1816 to the present. I find strong indications that post-1945 wars feature more frequent negotiations and that these negotiations are far less predictive of war termination. Evidence suggests that increased international pressures for peace and stability after World War II, especially emanating from nuclear weapons and international alliances, account for this trend. These original data and insights establish a dynamic research agenda that enables a more policy-relevant study of conflict management, highlights a historical angle to conflict resolution, and speaks to the utility of viewing diplomacy as an essential dimension to understanding war.

Extant scholarship on interstate war and conflict resolution predominantly utilizes formal models, case studies, and statistical models with wars as the unit of analysis to assess the impact of battlefield activity on war duration and termination. As such, longstanding views of war have not been tested systematically using intraconflict measures, and deeper studies of war dynamics have also been hampered. I address these gaps by creating and introducing the Interstate War Battle (IWB) dataset, which captures the outcomes and dates of 1,708 battles across 97 interstate wars since 1823. This article describes the sources used to create these data, provides definitions, and presents descriptive statistics for the basic battle data and several daily-level measures constructed from them. I then use the data to test the implications of two major theoretical perspectives on conflict termination: the informational view, which emphasizes convergence in beliefs through battlefield activity; and Zartman's ripeness theory, which highlights costly stalemates in fighting. I find suggestive evidence for informational views and little support for ripeness theory: new battlefield outcomes promote negotiated settlements, while battlefield stagnation undermines them. The IWB dataset has significant implications, highlights future research topics, and motivates a renewed research agenda on the empirical study of conflict.

Crisis bargaining literature has predominantly used formal and qualitative methods to debate the relative efficacy of actions, public words, and private words. These approaches have overlooked the reality that policymakers are bombarded with information and struggle to adduce actual signals from endless noise. Material actions are therefore more effective than any diplomatic communication in shaping elites' perceptions. Moreover, while ostensibly "costless," private messages provide a more precise communication channel than public and "costly" pronouncements. Over 18,000 declassified documents from the Berlin Crisis of 1958–63 reflecting private statements, public statements, and White House evaluations of Soviet resolve are digitized and processed using statistical learning techniques to assess these claims. The results indicate that material actions have greater influence on the White House than either public or private statements; that public statements are noisier than private statements; and that private statements have a larger effect on evaluations of resolve than public statements.

AbstractHow do racial stereotypes affect perceptions in foreign policy? Race and racism as topics have long been marginalized in the study of international relations but are receiving renewed attention. In this article we assess the role of implicit racial bias in internal, originally classified assessments by the US foreign policy bureaucracy during the Cold War. We use a combination of dictionary-based and supervised machine learning techniques to identify the presence of four racial tropes in a unique corpus of intelligence documents: almost 5,000 President's Daily Briefs given to Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. We argue and find that entries about countries that the US deemed "racialized Others"—specifically, countries in the Global South, newly independent states, and some specific regional groupings—feature an especially large number of racial tropes. Entries about foreign developments in these places are more likely to feature interpretations that infantilize, invoke animal-based analogies, or imply irrationality or belligerence. This association holds even when accounting for the presence of conflict, the regime type of the country being analyzed, the invocation of leaders, and the topics being discussed. The article makes two primary contributions. First, it adds to the revival of attention to race but gives special emphasis to implicit racialized thinking and its appearance in bureaucratic settings. Second, we show the promise of new tools for identifying racial and other forms of implicit bias in foreign policy texts.

AbstractDo advisers affect foreign policy and, if so, how? Recent scholarship on elite decision making prioritizes leaders and the institutions that surround them, rather than the dispositions of advisers themselves. We argue that despite the hierarchical nature of foreign policy decision making, advisers' predispositions regarding the use of force shape state behavior through the counsel advisers provide in deliberations. To test our argument, we introduce an original data set of 2,685 foreign policy deliberations between US presidents and their advisers from 1947 to 1988. Applying a novel machine learning approach to estimate the hawkishness of 1,134 Cold War–era foreign policy decision makers, we show that adviser-level hawkishness affects both the counsel that advisers provide in deliberations and the decisions leaders make: conflictual policy choices grow more likely as hawks increasingly dominate the debate, even when accounting for leader dispositions. The theory and findings enrich our understanding of international conflict by demonstrating how advisers' dispositions, which aggregate through the counsel advisers provide, systematically shape foreign policy behavior.