Suchergebnisse

Why do the strong lose? Intuitively, stronger violent actors should win in wars against weaker actors. The literature on insurgencies suggests that democracies will do worse than other countries. However, there is little quantitative literature on why states succeed or fail in their efforts against insurgencies, and the key works find that democracy does not matter. We argue that the combined effect of political inclusion and political competition present in inclusive democracies is a key missing component impacting the success or failure of counterinsurgency (COIN). When procedural elements of democracy are combined with political inclusion, countries are less likely to be successful at suppressing insurgencies because normatively they are less willing to be as repressive and ruthless as necessary. We find that inclusion and procedural democracy separately have no impact on COIN success; however, when combined, the impact is significant, large, and negative. Inclusive democracies lose COIN operations more often than their counterparts.

Undergraduates often struggle with theoretical perspectives in political science. Often students can get a better handle on theories if they are able to relate them to something tangible in their experience. Lichbach and Zuckerman lay out cultural, rational actor, and structural perspectives as a way to think more systematically about comparative politics but often students struggle with these meta-theories and the different ways they encourage us to think theoretically about comparative politics. In this paper, we discuss a set of exercises that enable students to get a better handle on cultural, rational actor, and structural perspectives on comparative politics by making them 'lab rats in their own experiments.' We group these exercises together and treat them as a Comparative Politics Game Show. In this paper, we describe the different exercises and how they were used and our view of the utility of this approach for teaching comparative politics theory. Adapted from the source document.

Since 2014 the conflict in Ukraine has escalated from an internal crisis into an ongoing full scale conventional war. The extensive public documentation and commentary on these unfolding events present an opportunity for empirical research yet untainted by hindsight perspectives. Drawing on an extensive regional network of local stakeholders and experts, this book combines theoretical insights with practical reflections on the efficacy of a selected range of tools employed by the West to assist Ukraine, such as the provision of military assistance, troop training, intelligence sharing, information campaigns, early crisis signaling by aircraft carrier deployments, and coalition building efforts. Bridging the gap in open-source studies between academic research and practitioner assessments, the authors discuss how these specific measures correspond with theoretical assessments of the effects they are due to produce, as well as with the expectations about their performance held by the deploying policy makers and their audience. As the war continues to unfold, and the reality on the ground, as well as emerging new data, mean a constantly shifting landscape, this volume will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in the conflict in Ukraine