Alex Weisiger

Fading Friendships: Alliances, Affinities and the Activation of International Identities

In international politics ‘friends’ co-ally. But friendship is relational and contextual. Countries are more likely to act on particular common interests if few other actors share that identity. In contrast, new cleavages are likely to emerge as an identity becomes ubiquitous. The tendency for states to form alliances based on certain affinities is thus best thought of as a variable, rather than as a constant. For example, in systems where democracies are scarce, democracies eagerly co-ally. As democracy becomes common, however, incentives binding democratic allies together weaken compared to other definitions of mutual interest. This argument, and the evidence we provide, suggest that the salience of identities as cues to affinity and difference vary with the distribution of types in the system.

The Limits to Partition

In his article “Partitioning to Peace: Sovereignty, Demography, and Ethnic Civil Wars,” Carter Johnson argues that partition is frequently the best available policy response to ethnic civil wars. By creating a new measure of the degree of demographic unmixing achieved through partition, Johnson demonstrates that mere changes in sovereignty are insufacient to produce peaceful outcomes. He contends, however, that “complete” separation of the two sides will help to bring peace. He concludes that partition is a useful tool for the international peacemaker, with the caveat that it “should be considered, however, only where populations are already largely separated at the time of intervention, or where interveners are prepared to separate groups using mass population transfers.”1 He interprets these andings as “strong evidence for advocates of partition (p. 168).” We believe that Johnson’s caveat is more important than it appears at arst blush, and that its practical implication is to render partition an effectively useless policy tool. The partition prescription is grounded in the logic of the ethnic security dilemma, but there is empirical evidence that genuine conoicts of interest exist alongside security dilemma fears. In this context, participants will resist the population transfers necessary for effective partition. Given that the international community is not going to carry out population transfers in the face of violent resistance, effective partition is unlikely to occur except through ethnic cleansing during war. Johnson’s data are consistent with these observations: effective partition rarely happens, and when it does, it is through ethnic cleansing rather than organized population transfers. In short, successful partitions ratify military outcomes. Furthermore, when we consider that even effective partition has not guaranteed peace, these observations strongly suggest that the international community should retain its current position toward partition of tacit acquiescence in a small number of unavoidable cases, but should not promote partition as a strategy to end ongoing wars. The partition prescription is grounded in the logic of the ethnic security dilemma, in which conoict breaks out in an intermixed ethnic setting because each side fears that the other is going to attack it and therefore sees a strategic beneat to striking arst. Neutral partition, if possible, is a logical solution to this problem because it eliminates inCorrespondence: The Limits to Partition

Learning from the Battlefield: Information, Domestic Politics, and Interstate War Duration

What drives leaders’ decisions about whether to continue or end an ongoing war? The private information explanation for war holds that leaders fight because they believe that doing so will advance national interests, and they settle hostilities when new information reduces their optimism about the possibility of long-term success. Yet significant theoretical disagreement exists about both the extent to which and the manner in which new information, especially battlefield information, promotes settlement. This article unpacks the logic of the informational mechanism, arguing that settlement will be more likely when there has been more extensive fighting and that countries are more likely to make concessions to end wars when battlefield results have deteriorated; short-term spikes in war intensity by contrast do not promote settlement. Moreover, building on work on leadership turnover and settlement, I show that leader replacement is sometimes part of the information-updating process, especially in autocracies: new leaders without political ties to the person in power at the start of the war are more likely both to come to power when war is going poorly and to end wars once in office. Tests of these arguments make use of new participant-level data on the timing of battle deaths for all Correlates of War interstate wars, which allows me to examine the effects of changing battlefield developments across a wide range of cases in a manner that was previously impossible.

Victory without peace: Conquest, insurgency, and war termination

The decisive defeat of an enemy in conventional war—conquest—frequently brings about peace on the victor’s terms; in some cases, however, conquest does not end the violence, but instead marks a transition to guerrilla war. What determines whether conquest results in war termination? While traditional theories of insurgency would predict that peace depends on appealing to the hearts and minds of the defeated population, I argue that conquerors in conventional wars cannot expect to win over the defeated population, and hence that avoiding post-conquest resistance requires quick and often brutal responses to initial opposition to deter potential challengers. I test this argument both statistically and through two sets of short paired case studies.