How Democracies Lose Small Wars

How Democracies Lose Small Wars PDF Author: Gil Merom
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521008778
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
1. Introduction 2. Military superiority and victory in small wars: historical observations 3. The structural original of defiance: the middle-class, the marketplace of ideas, and the normative gap 4. The structural origins of tenacity: national alignment and compartmentalization 5. The French war in Algeria: a strategic, political, and economic overview 6. French instrumental dependence and its consequences 7. The development of a normative difference in France and its consequences 8. The French struggle to contain the growth of the normative gap and the rise of the 'democratic agenda' 9. Political relevance and its consequences in France 10. The Israeli war in Lebanon: a strategic, political, and economic overview 11. Israeli instrumental dependence and its consequences 12. The development of a normative difference in Israel and its consequences 13. The Israeli struggle to contain the growth of the normative gap and the rise of the 'democratic agenda' 14. Political relevance and its consequences in Israel.

The People's Liberation Army

The People's Liberation Army PDF Author: Stephen J. Flanagan
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781478267164
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
The global war on terrorism has provided a new context for relations between the United States and China. As the September 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America makes clear, cooperation with China on a range of economic, political, security, and military issues increasingly serves U.S. interests. At the same time, this relationship retains elements of competition and the potential for confrontation, compounded by a legacy of periodic crises and mutual wariness. Achieving a national consensus on an appropriate balance in U.S.-China relations, especially in military-to-military affairs, remains a central challenge for those who analyze, formulate, and implement America's China policies.

Why America Loses Wars

Why America Loses Wars PDF Author: Donald Stoker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009220888
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Book Description
How can you achieve victory in war if you don't have a clear idea of your political aims and a vision of what victory means? In this provocative challenge to US political aims and strategy, Donald Stoker argues that America endures endless wars because its leaders no longer know how to think about war, particularly wars fought for limited aims, taking the nation to war without understanding what they want or valuing victory and thus the ending of the war. He reveals how flawed ideas on so-called 'limited war' and war in general evolved against the backdrop of American conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. These ideas, he shows, undermined America's ability to understand, wage, and win its wars, and to secure peace. Now fully updated to incorporate the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, Why America Loses Wars dismantles seventy years of misguided thinking and lays the foundations for a new approach to the wars of tomorrow.

Freedom in the World 2018

Freedom in the World 2018 PDF Author: Freedom House
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538112035
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1265

Book Description
Freedom in the World, the Freedom House flagship survey whose findings have been published annually since 1972, is the standard-setting comparative assessment of global political rights and civil liberties. The survey ratings and narrative reports on 195 countries and fifteen territories are used by policymakers, the media, international corporations, civic activists, and human rights defenders to monitor trends in democracy and track improvements and setbacks in freedom worldwide. The Freedom in the World political rights and civil liberties ratings are determined through a multi-layered process of research and evaluation by a team of regional analysts and eminent scholars. The analysts used a broad range of sources of information, including foreign and domestic news reports, academic studies, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, individual professional contacts, and visits to the region, in conducting their research. The methodology of the survey is derived in large measure from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and these standards are applied to all countries and territories, irrespective of geographical location, ethnic or religious composition, or level of economic development.

Military Coercion and US Foreign Policy

Military Coercion and US Foreign Policy PDF Author: Melanie W. Sisson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000056872
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Book Description
This book examines the use of military force as a coercive tool by the United States, using lessons drawn from the post-Cold War era (1991–2018). The volume reveals that despite its status as sole superpower during the post-Cold War period, US efforts to coerce other states failed as often as they succeeded. In the coming decades, the United States will face states that are more capable and creative, willing to challenge its interests and able to take advantage of missteps and vulnerabilities. By using lessons derived from in-depth case studies and statistical analysis of an original dataset of more than 100 coercive incidents in the post-Cold War era, this book generates insight into how the US military can be used to achieve policy goals. Specifically, it provides guidance about the ways in which, and the conditions under which, the US armed forces can work in concert with economic and diplomatic elements of US power to create effective coercive strategies. This book will be of interest to students of US national security, US foreign policy, strategic studies and International Relations in general.

Democracy and War

Democracy and War PDF Author: David L. Rousseau
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804767513
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Book Description
Conventional wisdom in international relations maintains that democracies are only peaceful when encountering other democracies. Using a variety of social scientific methods of investigation ranging from statistical studies and laboratory experiments to case studies and computer simulations, Rousseau challenges this conventional wisdom by demonstrating that democracies are less likely to initiate violence at early stages of a dispute. Using multiple methods allows Rousseau to demonstrate that institutional constraints, rather than peaceful norms of conflict resolution, are responsible for inhibiting the quick resort to violence in democratic polities. Rousseau finds that conflicts evolve through successive stages and that the constraining power of participatory institutions can vary across these stages. Finally, he demonstrates how constraint within states encourages the rise of clusters of democratic states that resemble "zones of peace" within the anarchic international structure.

Democracies at War

Democracies at War PDF Author: Dan Reiter
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691089493
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description
Publisher Description

Information Wars

Information Wars PDF Author: Richard Stengel
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN: 0802147992
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Book Description
A “well-told” insider account of the State Department’s twenty-first-century struggle to defend America against malicious propaganda and disinformation (The Washington Post). Disinformation is nothing new. When Satan told Eve nothing would happen if she bit the apple, that was disinformation. But today, social media has made disinformation even more pervasive and pernicious. In a disturbing turn of events, authoritarian governments are increasingly using it to create their own false narratives, and democracies are proving not to be very good at fighting it. During the final three years of the Obama administration, Richard Stengel, former editor of Time, was an Under Secretary of State on the front lines of this new global information war—tasked with unpacking, disproving, and combating both ISIS’s messaging and Russian disinformation. Then, during the 2016 election, Stengel watched as Donald Trump used disinformation himself. In fact, Stengel quickly came to see how all three had used the same playbook: ISIS sought to make Islam great again; Putin tried to make Russia great again; and we know the rest. In Information Wars, Stengel moves through Russia and Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and introduces characters from Putin to Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Mohamed bin Salman, to show how disinformation is impacting our global society. He illustrates how ISIS terrorized the world using social media, and how the Russians launched a tsunami of disinformation around the annexation of Crimea—a scheme that would became a model for future endeavors. An urgent book for our times, now with a new preface from the author, Information Wars challenges us to combat this ever-growing threat to democracy. “[A] refreshingly frank account . . . revealing.” —Kirkus Reviews “This sobering book is indeed needed to help individuals better understand how information can be massaged to produce any sort of message desired.” —Library Journal

Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present

Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present PDF Author: Max Boot
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0871404249
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 809

Book Description
As fitting for the 21st century as von Clausewitz's "On War" was in its own time, "Invisible Armies" is a complete global history of guerrilla uprisings through the ages.

Armies of Sand

Armies of Sand PDF Author: Kenneth Michael Pollack
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190906960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 697

Book Description
Since the Second World War, Arab armed forces have consistently punched below their weight. They have lost many wars that by all rights they should have won, and in their best performances only ever achieved quite modest accomplishments. Over time, soldiers, scholars, and military experts have offered various explanations for this pattern. Reliance on Soviet military methods, the poor civil-military relations of the Arab world, the underdevelopment of the Arab states, and patterns of behavior derived from the wider Arab culture, have all been suggested as the ultimate source of Arab military difficulties. Armies of Sand, Kenneth M. Pollack's powerful and riveting history of Arab armies from the end of World War Two to the present, assesses these differing explanations and isolates the most important causes. Over the course of the book, he examines the combat performance of fifteen Arab armies and air forces in virtually every Middle Eastern war, from the Jordanians and Syrians in 1948 to Hizballah in 2006 and the Iraqis and ISIS in 2014-2017. He then compares these experiences to the performance of the Argentine, Chadian, Chinese, Cuban, North Korean, and South Vietnamese armed forces in their own combat operations during the twentieth century. The book ultimately concludes that reliance on Soviet doctrine was more of a help than a hindrance to the Arabs. In contrast, politicization and underdevelopment were both important factors limiting Arab military effectiveness, but patterns of behavior derived from the dominant Arab culture was the most important factor of all. Pollack closes with a discussion of the rapid changes occurring across the Arab world-political, economic, and cultural-as well as the rapid evolution in war making as a result of the information revolution. He suggests that because both Arab society and warfare are changing, the problems that have bedeviled Arab armed forces in the past could dissipate or even vanish in the future, with potentially dramatic consequences for the Middle East military balance. Sweeping in its historical coverage and highly accessible, this will be the go-to reference for anyone interested in the history of warfare in the Middle East since 1945.