Joanna Spear

From political economies of war to political economies of peace: The contribution of DDR after wars of predation

Can disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) be a means to ‘jump start’ a transition to a political economy for peace? This essay considers the key groups targeted in DDR – individual fighters, middle-level officers and leaderships – and each element of a DDR campaign with a focus on political economy issues. This leads to suggestions for reorienting some elements of DDR campaigns to place more emphasis on looking after middle-ranked officers, for the international community to place much emphasis on an often under-resourced part of the process, reintegration, and for more parallel attention to dealing with illicit economic activities.

The Militarization of United States Foreign Aid

United States foreign aid has always been securitized, that is, explicitly used in support of geostrategic goals. However, the first decade of the 21st century saw the temporary return of a past trend, the militarization of United States (US) aid; where official development assistance (ODA) is used to serve battlefield goals. The Department of Defense (DOD) became both a major aid donor and an important implementing agent for ODA projects in the field. This chapter examines how and why US ODA has been consistently securitized and, on occasions, militarized, and assesses the consequences of both. The most recent militarization was due to the chronic bureaucratic weakness of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which meant it could not respond swiftly to the Bush administration’s demands that it play a prominent role in national security strategy after the 11 September 2001 attacks (9/11 attacks) on the US (Atwood et al. 2008). This incapacity of USAID led to the DOD proactively taking on these roles. When aid has been militarized to serve specific and time-bound US military goals — as it was in the Vietnam conflict and again in the recent fight against terrorism and insurgency — it has failed to meet instrumental military goals and ultimately served neither security nor development well.

More Business as Usual? The Obama Administration and the Nuclear Posture Review

This article examines the preparation of the US Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) by the Obama Administration. In doing so it seeks to answer a puzzle: why is there such a gap between the vision of a ‘world free of nuclear weapons’ set out by President Obama in his Prague speech of 2009 and the significantly more modest outcomes of the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review? The question is answered by employing the Bureaucratic Politics Paradigm developed by Graham Allison and Morton Halperin. It is argued that the answer lies in the fierce bureaucratic battles that are playing out within the administration, with both routine decision making and the outcomes of political games affecting the eventual NPR.

Governmental politics and the Conventional Arms Transfer Talks

In 1977 at the instigation of the Carter Administration, the United States and the Soviet Union opened negotiations aimed at concluding an agreement to control conventional arms transfers. Four rounds of talks were held over a period of twelve months and expectations were raised in both countries that the negotiations would be successful. However, at the fourth round of talks these expectations were dashed by the abrupt termination of negotiations. It is the contention of this article that the immediate fate of the talks and the timing of their collapse can be understood only in the context of the bureaucratic battles within the Carter Administration over the issue of arms transfer control and the wider question of relations with the Soviet Union and China.

Carter and arms sales : implementing the Carter administration's arms transfer restraint policy

Preface - Acknowledgements - List of Abbreviations - Implementation - The Governmental Arena - The Domestic Political Arena - The International Arena - The Conventional Arms Transfer Policy - Implementation Structures - The Conventional Arms Transfer Talks - The Implementation of the Ceiling Policy - The Implementation of Controls 2-6 - Conclusions - Footnotes to Chapters One to Ten - Index

Arms and Arms Control

In this chapter two main categories of weapons are discussed: so-called weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical and biological weapons) and conventional weapons. In each case the weapons are discussed in the context of security, economic and ethical issues. What quickly becomes apparent is that conventional weapons are the ‘odd man out’. Weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have traditionally been the targets of national and international arms control efforts, are regarded as having important implications for international security, have consequently been subject to export controls, and are the subject of considerable ethical concern. By contrast, conventional weapons have rarely elicited such attention.

Exit Strategies and State Building

By the eighteenth century, conspicuous expenditure on palaces, fêtes, urban renewal and the like demanded even more revenue and centralisation. Treating nationalism as a rational response to modernisation offers at best a partial explanation for the profound psychological reorientation of identities. It is not evident that nationalism was a rational response or an inevitable one. Karl Deutsch demonstrated, back in 1953, that the emergence and growth of nationalist movements depended on the degree of responsiveness by leaders to the needs of minority or low-status groups in their societies. Wimmer acknowledges this condition. If state-building and competition among states was the key driver, it would have made responsiveness far and away the most rational response by leaders, but it was not that common. We accordingly end up with a theory, or set of linked propositions, that relies on rational behaviour only when it suits its theoretical needs. Another issue is the relationship between alliances and ethnic groups. Wimmer maintains that alliances create co-operation and feelings of similarity among participants. This is undeniably true, but feelings of common ethnicity also create a predisposition to co-operate. It is a classic chicken-andegg problem, andWimmer unreasonably bases his theory on the priority of the eggs (alliances) over chickens (ethnic groups). No doubt, we can find examples of both, but their relative importance is an unanswered empirical question. Like many social scientists, Wimmer believes that grand developments like the emergence of the state and nationalism and the frequency of war can be explained by parsimonious rational models. This reviewer is unconvinced. History and social science alike demonstrate the opacity of the social world, in large part because outcomes are the result of the interactions of multiple actors. As often as not, policies have outcomes that are unanticipated by actors, and sometimes the opposite of those intended. Even if the world were filled with rational and perceptive actors – which it certainly is not – there is a great problem in going from the choices to outcomes or assuming that context dictates choice. Nevertheless, this book is a worthwhile read as its arguments are worth considering as partial answers to the problems the author addresses.