Stuart J. Kaufman

Spiraling to Ethnic War: Elites, Masses, and Moscow in Moldova's Civil War

I T h e continuing spread of ethnic violence seems set to replace the spread of communism as the central security concern in western capitals. Ethnic wars in Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, and elsewhere frequently dominate the attention of policymakers and publics worldwide, and when top American officials say that ”instability” is the major worldwide threat to American national security, ethnic wars are largely what they have in mind. The impression created by such rhetoric is that ethnic war can happen anywhere, an impression reinforced by the wide range of places where such wars have recently occurred, from Chiapas to Croatia, Iraqi Kurdistan to Sri Lanka. There have been numerous attempts to explain the causes of these ethnic wars. One approach focuses on the role of mass passions or ”ancient hatred” in driving ethnic violence.’ A second theory suggests that inter-ethnic security dilemmas may be the key cause of ethnic war.’ A third approach blames ethnic wars on manipulation by belligerent leaders. However, by focusing on only one cause of conflict-whether hostile masses, belligerent leaders, or the security dilemma-many of these arguments create the false impression that where that one factor is present, ethnic war threatens. They therefore exaggerate the threat of ethnic war.

Escaping the Symbolic Politics Trap: Reconciliation Initiatives and Conflict Resolution in Ethnic Wars

Existing approaches to resolving civil wars are based primarily on the assumption that these wars result from conflicts of interest among rational individuals. However, peacebuilding efforts based on this approach usually fail in cases of ethnic civil war, leading sooner or later to renewed fighting. Symbolic politics theory suggests the problem with these peace efforts is that they pay insufficient attention to ameliorating the emotional and symbolic roots of extremist ethnic politics. The theory suggests that resolving ethnic war requires reconciliation–changing hostile attitudes to more moderate ones, assuaging ethnic fears, and replacing the intragroup symbolic politics of ethnic chauvinism with a politics that rewards moderation. The only policy tools for promoting such attitudinal and social changes are reconciliation initiatives such as leaders’ acknowledgement of their sides’ misdeeds, public education efforts such as media campaigns, and problem-solving workshops. Integrating such reconciliation initiatives into a comprehensive conflict resolution strategy, it is argued, is necessary for conflict resolution efforts to be more effective in ending ethnic civil wars.

Testing Balance-of-Power Theory in World History

The balance of power is one of the most influential theoretical ideas in international relations, but it has not yet been tested systematically in international systems other than modern Europe and its global successor. This article is the product of a collective and multidisciplinary research effort to redress this deficiency. We report findings from eight new case studies on balancing and balancing failure in different international systems that comprise over 2000 years of international politics. Our findings are inconsistent with any theory that predicts a tendency of international systems toward balance. The factors that best account for variation between balance and hegemony within and across international systems lie outside all recent renditions of balance-of-power theory and indeed, international relations scholarship more generally. Our findings suggest a potentially productive way to reframe research on both the European and contemporary international systems.

Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy: A Study in Weberian Activism

It has always been true that foreign policy debates tend to proceed on a weak evidentiary base, with clever quips or stirring oratory regularly trumping sound analysis. According to Thucydides, for example, the Athenian assembly that endorsed the Sicilian expedition during the second Peloponnesian War had only the haziest conception of the adversaries’ capabilities. 1 Contemporary politics is distinctive not in the sloganeering quality of political discourse, but in the divergence between the quality of information available to society as a whole and the quality of information used in making decisions. For example, it was clear to any open-minded observer by the time of the Congressional vote in 2002 that implications of collaboration between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda lacked any basis in reliable evidence. By the time the Bush Administration initiated war in 2003, claims about Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons capabilities were also partially debunked and increasingly dubious. Still, the war went forward, and many Americans continued to believe the Bush Administration’s false claims even after the Administration itself had abandoned them. Many political scientists—like many Americans—were deeply dismayed by this situation, and in the fall of 2004 a group of us determined to try to do something about it. We saw two obvious options. One was to address the substantive issue directly, participating in the election campaign as citizens according to the logic that a new presidential administration would at least not repeat the policies of the Bush team. But anybody could do that, and our marginal contribution could only be modest. We decided

The fragmentation and consolidation of international systems

The world today, Benjamin Barber points out, is “falling precipitantly apart and coming reluctantly together at the very same moment.†While states from Canada to India are threatened with breakup due to fractious nationalist impulses of their peoples, the power of technology and markets is forcing ever-tighter economic integration worldwide. From a common-sense perspective, these two impulses are among the most important processes in contemporary world politics. Yet, there has been remarkably little attention paid to developing a theory of the international system that examines the effects of both. Hegemonic stability theory considers economic integration but not nationalism; the few studies of nationalism as a systemic force play down the effects of economic integration; and neorealism, the most widely accepted theory of the international system, has no room to address either trend. The field is, partly as a result, a cacaphony of voices largely talking past one another.

Organizational Politics and Change in Soviet Military Policy

This article uses two puzzles from the Brezhnev period to test competing models of Soviet military policy and of innovation in military “doctrine.” An organizational model of Soviet military policy offers the best explanation of both cases: why the Soviet Unions Brezhnevera military strategy contradicted the Politburos priorities (to prevent any war from escalating to nuclear use) and why the Soviet Union agreed to the ABM treaty. The ABM case shows that civilian leaders can force change in military “doctrine” when they have a policy handle–a way of redefining the issue to remove it from the militarys exclusive area of competence. When civilians lack a policy handle, as in the military strategy case, they are unable to force innovation if the military is unwilling. The Russian government now faces the task of finding effective policy handles that will institutionalize civilian control of military policy. The fate of Russias reforms may depend on it.

The Irresistible Force and the Imperceptible Object: The Yugoslav Breakup and Western Policy

The author would like to thank Matthew Evangelista, Ben Frankel, Patrick James, Obrad Kesic, Sean Lynn-Jones, Karen Mingst, Edward Rhodes, Dennison Rusinow, Howard Warshawsky, and anonymous reviewers for invaluable comments on earlier drafts; William Zimmerman for his ideas and advice; and Jon Grate and Alan Purcell for much appreciated research assistance.

Hybrid Actors, Tactical Variety: Rethinking Asymmetric and Hybrid War

Wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan should be understood as hybrid wars, wars in which elements of ethnic or tribal conflict, ideologically based insurgency, factional squabbling, and organized crime are inextricably intertwined, with the same actors playing multiple and partially conflicting roles. Hybrid war is inherently transnational, featuring transnational crime networks, “migrant warriors,” transnational diaspora links, legitimate international trade, and foreign intervention. It takes place in hybridized states reliant on local warlords and other actors whose power prevents effective state-building. In this context, while counterinsurgency doctrine prescribes appropriate military strategy and tactics, the core problem is more political than military. Since a hybridized client state is not likely to be politically reformable even if a foreign ally achieves military success, outside allies like the United States should generally refrain from boots-on-the-ground intervention, pursuing instead a diplomatic solution, even though such a deal is likely to be unpalatable.

Narratives and Symbols in Violent Mobilization: The Palestinian-Israeli Case

According to symbolic politics theory, group fears and narratives of group identity that justify hostility are key causes of violent ethno-national conflict. In the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, widely accepted narratives on each side define group identity and group relations in ways that generate incompatible demands on Jerusalem, territory, refugees, security, and other issues. Historical memories of the Holocaust, the Nakba, and other tragedies generate fears of extinction on both sides, and stereotypes encourage beliefs on each side that the other responds only to force. These narratives enable hard-line leaders on both sides to manipulate emotive symbols to block compromise and escalate conflict. Thus the cause of both the failure of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations in 2000-01 and the simultaneous outbreak of the latest Palestinian-Israeli war lies in the irreconcilable demands that are rooted in each sides competing narratives of national identity.

Approaches to Global Politics in the Twenty-first Century: A Review Essay

The contributions to this volume focus on four central driving forces in the international system: realpolitik, the pursuit of power; economic systems for pursuing wealth; social technologies for maintaining order; and identities that define group actors. Examining the effects of these forces generates a range of possible projections for the future of world politics—global war or peace, prosperity or economic collapse, social order or violent breakdown. Most of the contributors here tend toward the optimistic end of the spectrum, though for different reasons: David Wilkinson forecasts a stable unipolar balance of power, for example, while George Modelski and William Thompson foresee the evolution of a stable democratic peace; only Robert Denemark suggests a potentially high likelihood of hegemonic war in the twenty-first century. While most agree that increasing globalization is transforming world politics, they disagree on the effects because those effects will depend on how people react—whether they devise effective social technologies to manage globalization, and whether they adopt cooperative or hostile interpretations of their identities.