Dictators at War and Peace (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

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In sum, Dictators at War and Peace is an excellent book, which makes a number of careful and interesting arguments about an important but understudied topic. For anyone interested in a work which concentrates on not just structures but also individual characteristics, respones, and actions in international relations this would be a good read. S. foreign policy is clear as the United States wrangles with several different types of authoritarian governments in China, Russia, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and elsewhere.

Moreover, retaking the islands posed a major military challenge, requiring the British to carry out amphibious landings thousands of miles from home with no local base from which to operate. Indeed, some types of autocracies are no more belligerent or reckless than democracies, casting doubt on the common view that democracies are more selective about war than autocracies. Case studies are a useful tool in tracing causal mechanisms, and in her book Weeks innovates relative to her earlier published work not just through an analysis of the factors that influence war outcome and post-conflict punishment in Chapter Three but also through presenting new qualitative evidence.While Japan provides a clear example of an aggressive military, its status as a Junta is more open to question given the importance of the civilian emperor and of civilian politicians. We hope that ISSF readers find these essays, as well as Weeks’s reply, to be stimulating and informative, and as encouragement to read Dictators at War and Peace itself.

By allowing such protests to occur and continue, autocratic governments can credibly tie their hands on an issue and compel concessions from adversaries. The idea that these kinds of governments are slightly less likely than democracies to launch overt conventional aggressive war and also significantly more likely to win their wars than other types of authoritarian governments is an argument which should be looked at more by policy makers. None of the foregoing should detract from Weeks’s achievement in Dictators, which represents a substantial advancement in our knowledge of the behavior of authoritarian regimes on questions of war and peace. One significant result of the military’s autonomy in the German system was the mismatch between German political goals—such as keeping Britain on the sidelines of a European war—and its military strategy (the Schlieffen Plan)—which was predicated on violating Belgian neutrality, making it highly likely that Britain would enter any such war.The narrative is not fully convincing, however, since it does not drill all the way down into the mechanisms and evidence on the central points of contention of those who have argued that this was indeed an instance of diversionary conflict. Explicitly building on the bargaining model of war and taking account of strategic interaction at both the domestic and international level, I would argue, might also lead to some countervailing hypotheses.

It is now well established in the military effectiveness literature, for example, that regimes where the leadership fears a military coup take a number of steps—collectively referred to as ‘coup-proofing,’ and including such measures as purging competent military officers and replacing them with incompetent (but loyal) bunglers; creating multiple independent military and paramilitary forces; prohibiting communication between officers and adjacent units to inhibit anti-regime coordination; and allowing little if any realistic training—that decrease coup risk but vitiate the military’s combat effectiveness. As he notes, I differentiate regimes around two dimensions: first, whether or not the leader faces a powerful domestic audience, and second, whether the key decisionmakers in the regime are civilians or military officers. However, the dependent variable is conflict initiation by Side A of the dyad, and the explanatory variables measure regime type for Side A.Amer, for instance, decided to send Egyptian forces into the Sinai without consulting Nasser, and considerable confusion exists regarding who was ultimately responsible for deciding to close the Straits of Tiran, regarded by Israel as a casus belli.