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

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This book owes its existence to the help and support of a large number of advisors, colleagues, friends, and members of my family. Dan Reiter is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Political Science at Emory University. He is the author of Crucible of Beliefs: Learning, Alliances, and World Wars (Cornell, 1996) and How Wars End (Princeton, 2009), as well as coauthor, with Allan C. Stam, of Democracies at War (Princeton, 2002). He has also authored or coauthored dozens of scholarly and popular publications on international relations and foreign policy. Outside Stanford, other individuals gave me helpful comments or shared data that shaped the project early on. First among these is Barbara Geddes, who generously shared the raw data that inform important parts of the empirical analysis. I also thank Hein Goemans, who shared helpful data early in the process and was an important source of advice and encouragement throughout. Public Opinion and the Democratic Peace” (with Michael Tomz), American Political Science Review November 2013 (107.4)

Military Alliances and Public Support for War” (with Michael Tomz) International Studies Quarterly 2021 Downes notes that I do not explicitly say that the leaders of juntas must be military officers themselves, though he points out that in one place in the text I imply this to be the case. Downes then points to Imperial Japan and Wilhemine Germany as examples of regimes that he thinks should be considered machines according to my typology, but which behave more like juntas because civilian elites shared power with, and often could not control, the military. [40] Other comments focused on the book’s empirical sections. In Alex Weisiger’s judgment, the results about juntas are less persuasive than those about the distinction between personalist and nonpersonalist regimes. As he points out, juntas are rare, so the findings about juntas’ war outcomes in Chapter 3 rest on a small number of cases; had some cases been recoded, the success rate of juntas would have looked more like that of personalists. Like Downes, Weisiger also questions whether the Japanese regime is a pure example of a junta given that there were nominal civilian leaders, an issue I discussed above. Jessica Weeks is Associate Professor and Trice Faculty Scholar in the department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to Dictators at War and Peace (Cornell University Press, 2014), she has published in journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and International Organization. She received a B.A. in political science summa cum laude from The Ohio State University, an M.A. in International History from the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland and a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University.Risa A. Brooks, Shaping Strategy: The Civil-Military Politics of Strategic Assessment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008).

Each of these core regime types creates a different set of incentives and opportunities for leaders’ foreign policy decisions. Leaders of nonpersonalist civilian machines, such as modern China or the post-Stalin Soviet Union, face a surprising amount of domestic accountability for decisions to use force. Moreover, the civilians who exercise power in these regimes tend to take a prudent and cautious attitude toward the use of force, much like voters and politicians in democracies. This causes leaders of machines to initiate military conflicts relatively infrequently, to prevail in the conflicts they do initiate, and to face punishment when they miscalculate. Indeed, I show that machines are virtually indistinguishable from democracies in terms of these three behavioral patterns. Overcoming the societally ingrained belief that all non-democratic regimes are alike, Weeks shows the striking differences between them not just internally, but externally. These factors are related in her argument and she makes a convincing case. Although I am personally not fond of positivism in the humanities as a methodology, she uses it adequately to show the differences of conflict occurrence between regime types in her admittedly limited example pool.

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These criticisms should in no way detract from the questions Weeks raises and from her insights into the logic of different authoritarian regimes at war and peace. Weeks deserves much credit for the originality of her contributions, and I hope and am confident that others will follow her lead. Review by Alex Weisiger, University of Pennsylvania One issue that these three essays skirt, and which I wish to touch on here, concerns the policy ramifications of Weeks’s argument. Especially since the end of Cold War, American foreign policy has stressed the importance of converting dictatorships into democracies, in part because, as Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush reiterated, democracies do not fight each other, and dictatorships are belligerent. Weeks’s book challenges this assumption, noting that some types of dictatorships, especially ‘Machine’ regimes led by civilian dictators who have to answer to elites, can be as peaceful as democracies. In August of 1990, Saddam Hussein sent Iraqi tanks rumbling into neighboring Kuwait, announcing that Iraq had regained its nineteenth province and sparking a conflict with the United States and its allies. In April of 1982, General Leopoldo Galtieri, the military dictator of Argentina, sent his forces to occupy the Falkland/Malvinas Islands, a forlorn piece of British territory that had long inspired acrimony between the two nations, and declared that the Malvinas had been restored to its rightful owners. Through the early 1960s, the communist dictatorship in North Vietnam intensified its campaign to reunify North and South, pulling the United States deeper into what would become a full-fledged international war. Domestic Constraints on Foreign Policy in Authoritarian Systems” (with Cody Crunkilton). 2017. Oxford Encyclopedia of Foreign Policy Analysis.

Alex Weisiger is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His published research examines war termination, explanations for particularly destructive interstate wars, the democratic peace, and reputation. His book, Logics of War: Explanations for Limited and Unlimited Conflicts, was published by Cornell University Press in 2013. Review by Alexander B. Downes, The George Washington University Strategic assessment will also be poor when political and military leaders share power but have largely convergent preferences. Strategic assessment will be fair when political leaders dominate and preference divergence is low, or when the military is dominant (preference divergence is less important when civilians have no say in strategic assessment). Brooks, Shaping Strategy, 7 and 42-53. Finally, personalist bosses and strongmen such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Kim Jong Il, Idi Amin, or (some argue) Vladimir Putin do not face powerful, organized domestic audiences. Instead, these are regimes in which the leader personally controls the state and military apparatuses and can use that control to thwart potential rivals. ⁹ Given these leaders’ personal supremacy in matters of foreign policy, we must inquire into the preferences of the leaders themselves. I draw on research from psychology, history, and political science to argue that the challenges of attaining and maintaining absolute power mean that personalist boss and strongman regimes tend to feature leaders who are particularly drawn to the use of military force and often have far-ranging international ambitions. Moreover, the sycophants who surround these leaders have few incentives to rein in their patrons’ impulses, to correct any misperceptions they may have about the likely outcome of a war, or to try to oust them if things go poorly. Compared to leaders of other kinds of regimes, then, leaders of personalist boss and strongman regimes initiate conflict more frequently, lose a higher proportion of the wars they start, and yet survive in office at a remarkable rate even in the wake of defeat. Finally, Goemans raises the question of whether the research design I chose for Chapter 2, which focuses on directed-dyad-years as the unit of analysis, is appropriate for assessing my theory, which is monadic. It is true that my theory focuses on how domestic politics in one country affect its conflict behavior overall, rather than delving into how different authoritarian regime types interact with each other. It is also true that the unit of analysis in Chapter 2 is the directed dyad-year rather than the country-year. However, the dependent variable is conflict initiation by Side A of the dyad, and the explanatory variables measure regime type for Side A. Thus, the tests are about the monadic effect of regime type, regardless of the target’s regime type. Why then, one could ask, not use a smaller, simpler dataset? The reason is that an enormous literature suggests that the strongest predictors of international conflict are dyadic in nature. [49] For example, geographic proximity, shared interests, and trade levels have all been argued to affect interstate relations. To try to boil these down to the monadic level would leave the analysis open to critiques of omitted variable bias, which is why I opted for the dyadic approach that is the most common for analyzing the onset of military disputes (I also included fixed effects in the analyses). Nonetheless, I hope that future research will evaluate whether and how the conclusions change given different ways of approaching the empirical analysis.The first is the idea that all authoritarian regimes are similar in that their leaders face few domestic constraints when making decisions about war and peace. This perspective, which typically concludes that democracies as a group are less warlike than dictatorships, dominates the existing international relations scholarship on regime type and foreign policy. The core of this view, introduced by Immanuel Kant, is that nondemocratic leaders are freer to choose war than leaders who must answer to the public. ² This assessment rests in part on the assumption that citizens find it difficult to punish dictators who subject them to the ravages of war.³ Dictators internalize fewer of the costs of war and are therefore more likely to use military force, whereas democratic leaders have incentives to choose less costly, and hence more peaceful, options.