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"Interventions/Uses of Force Short of War" published on by Oxford University Press.

Research on enduring rivalry has received considerable theoretical and empirical attention in the last few years. As scholars begin to relax assumptions regarding event independence and historical memory, rivalry has emerged to explain dependencies across countries and over time. Despite the evidence to date, some scholars challenge the rivalry distinction and suggest that a stochastic model may explain the distribution of militarized disputes equally as well. However, if the pairings of states that define the list of enduring rivals are fundamentally different than other pairs of states, differences in behavior should be evident in crisis situations. For rival states in crisis, conflict patterns should vary systematically across conflicts. The likelihood of military action should be lower in dispute one compared to dispute six, or eight, or twelve. Moreover, the conflict strategies of rival states in crisis should differ from the conflict strategies of nonrival states in crisis. Using data from the Interstate Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project, the evidence uncovered here supports the conjecture that states in rival contexts tend to behave differently in crises than their nonrival counterparts, although an indirect effect of rivalry is observed as well. Rival states in crisis frequently resort to a military response against nonrivals. The evidence also provides empirical support for the evolutionary model of rivalry, rather than the punctuated equilibrium model.

While considerable empirical evidence shows democratic dyads to be less prone to violence than other types of regime pairs, disagreement still exists on the causal factors inhibiting conflict among democratic states. Some scholars have concluded that increased attention needs to be given to identifying specific characteristics of democratic states that might mitigate or incite coercive foreign policy actions. This article begins to pull apart the Polity IIId regime index by assessing the role of political participation in crisis bargaining. If the ability of opposition groups to challenge government policies enables state leaders to communicate credibly their intentions and thus avoid conflict, increased attention needs to be given to the permanence of such structural features of the domestic political environment. What may facilitate efficient signaling is not only competitive political participation, but also the enduring nature of such participation. Regimes that oscillate between severe restrictions on political participation and regulated competition engage in more escalatory behavior because they fail to signal their preferences effectively. The results indicate that while democracy has little effect on MID reciprocation, factionalism among domestic political groups tends to be strongly associated with such a dispute response. Contiguity, military balance, and years at peace also appear to influence dispute reciprocation.

Despite empirical support for democratic peace, disagreement still exists on the causal factors inhibiting conflict among democratic states. Many democratic peace theorists maintain that democratic norms & political institutions inhibit conflict initiation. Other scholars, however, suggest that the pacific effects of liberal regimes may be a function not so much of their ability to avoid conflict as of their capacity to resolve conflict short of armed hostilities. In an attempt to understand better the foreign policy decision making of democratic states, I examine dispute reciprocation from 1816-1992. That is, given a dispute, are democratic states more or less likely to reciprocate when the initiator is another democracy? The results I find indicate that the relationship between regime type & dispute reciprocation depends strongly on the democracy levels of the states involved. Bilateral disputes in which both states are immature democracies actually have the highest propensity for conflict reciprocation, 38% higher than disputes where both states are nondemocracies. Fully institutionalized democracies, on the other hand, experience few disputes. In addition, when targeted, they tend to tailor their foreign policy behavior to the regime type of the initiating state. The results suggest that the pacific effects of democracy may only take hold once liberal institutions & political culture become sufficiently entrenched. 4 Tables, 2 Figures, 73 References. Adapted from the source document.

Maritime piracy - like civil war, terrorism, and organized crime - is a problem of weak states. Surprisingly, though, pirates do not operate in the least-governed areas of weak states. 'Pirate Lands' addresses this puzzle by explaining why some coastal communities experience more pirate attacks in their vicinity than others.

Do UN peacekeeping forces protect civilians from harm in post-war environments? Current evidence suggests that the answer to this question is yes. But extant research mostly examines this relationship at the country-level and consequently has logical difficulty tracing decreases in civilian fatalities to actual peacekeeper activities. We would have more confidence in the ability of peacekeepers to limit harm and protect non-combatants if the reduction in violence occurred locally where blue helmets were positioned. Using original geocoded data of yearly UN deployments in four Sub-Saharan African conflicts (Sudan, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ivory Coast), we find that peacekeeping units get locally deployed to violent post-war areas and they reduce the level of civilian harm almost immediately. But, in areas without violent clashes between government forces and rebels, we find peacekeeping units more responsive to civilian targeting by rebels, which indicates a reluctance among peacekeepers to confront government forces that target civilians. While host nation consent is crucial for the success of a peacekeeping mission, the findings from this study caution against nurturing illiberal regimes by failing to check government atrocities. The failure to confront government abuse can jeopardize long-term peace and reconciliation.

A prominent explanation of the resource–conflict relationship suggests that natural resources finance rebellion by permitting rebel leaders the opportunity to purchase weapons, fighters, and local support. The bunkering of oil in the Niger Delta by quasi-criminal syndicates is an example of how the black-market selling of stolen oil may help finance anti-state groups. More systematic assessments have also shown that the risk and duration of conflict increases in the proximity of oil and diamond deposits. Yet despite the emphasis on rebel resource extraction in these arguments, empirical assessments rely almost exclusively on latent resource availability rather than actual resource extraction. Focusing on maritime piracy, this article argues that piracy is a funding strategy neglected in current research. Anecdotal evidence connects piracy in the Greater Gulf of Aden to arms trafficking, the drug trade, and human slavery. The revenue from attacks may find its way to Al-Shabaab. In Nigeria, increasing attacks against oil transports may signal an effort by insurgents to use the profits from piracy as an additional revenue stream to fund their campaign against the Nigerian government. The article hypothesizes that piracy incidents, that is, actual acts of looting, increase the intensity of civil conflict. Using inferential statistics and predictive assessments, our evidence from conflicts in coastal African and Southeast Asian states from 1993 to 2010 shows that maritime piracy increases conflict intensity, and that the inclusion of dynamic factors helps improve the predictive performance of empirical models of conflict events in in-sample and out-of-sample forecasts.

Existing studies of piracy focus attention on the institutional determinants of maritime piracy, but neglect variation in governments' reach over territory. We argue that the effect of state capacity on piracy is a function of states' ability to extend authority over the country's entire territory. We expect that government reach—a function of geographic factors such as the distance between a country's capital and its coastline—mediates the effect of state capacity on piracy. Weak governments allow for the planning and implementation of attacks and reduce the risk of capture, but particularly so if sufficient distance separates pirates from political authority. An empirical analysis of country-year data on maritime piracy collected by the International Maritime Bureau for the 1995–2013 period shows that capital–coastline distance mediates the effect of institutional fragility on piracy as hypothesized. These results remain robust for alternative operationalizations of state capacity and reach. In addition, the models perform well in terms of predictive power, forecasting piracy quite accurately for 2013. The expectations and evidence presented in this paper help explain why states with intermediate levels of state capacity but low levels of reach—such as Indonesia, Tanzania or Venezuela—struggle with substantial incidence of piracy.