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Something remarkable has occurred in Asia with little fanfare over the past twenty-five years. Considered severely underinstitutionalized at the end of the Cold War, Asia’s regional architecture is now characterized by a complex patchwork of overlapping alliances and multilateral institutions. How did this happen? Why should we care? And what does this mean for the future of regional order and Asian security? Adopting a new framework grounded in historical institutionalism, this book examines the transformation of Asia’s regional architecture from 1945 to the present. The book traces institutional and political developments in Asia beginning with the emergence of the postwar US bilateral alliance system and covers the debate and contention behind the rise of several post–Cold War multilateral initiatives. These include the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, ASEAN Regional Forum, East Asian Summit, Trans-Pacific Partnership, China-Japan-Korea Trilateral Summit, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the Belt and Road Initiative, among others. Asian policy makers have endeavored to create a set of rules, norms, and institutions to build confidence, facilitate cooperation, improve governance, and ultimately bring peace and order to a region fraught with underlying historical and political tensions. Although Asia’s complex patchwork of institutions may exacerbate regional rivalries, the book demonstrates how overlapping institutions may ultimately bring greater stability to the region.

The last six years have witnessed a virtually unending debate over U.S. policy toward Iraq, one that is likely to continue well into the new administration and perhaps the next, notwithstanding recent improvements on the ground. Too often, however, the debate has been narrowly framed in terms of the situation in Iraq and what steps the United States should take there next, leaving the broader impact of the war on American interests largely overlooked. Ultimately, though, the success and failure of the war will have to be judged in terms of its overall contribution to U.S. national security, including those repercussions that extend far beyond the borders of Iraq. This book addresses this gap by providing a comprehensive evaluation of the consequences of the Iraq war for the national security of the United States. It examines both how the war has advanced or retarded the achievement of other important goals of U.S. national security policy and its impact on the ability of the United States to pursue its security interests now and in the future. Individual chapters address such issues as the war on terror, nuclear non-proliferation, stability in the Middle East, the health of the U.S. military, America's standing in the world, and U.S. public opinion. By doing justice to the full range of stakes involved, the book not only reframes the debate over the Iraq war but provides a foundation for future U.S. policymaking toward Iraq and beyond.

In 2008, the iconic doomsday clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientistswas set at five minutes to midnight—two minutes closer to Armageddon than in 1962, when John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev went eyeball to eyeball over missiles in Cuba. We still live in an echo chamber of fear, after eight years in which the Bush administration and its harshest critics reinforced each other's worst fears about the Bomb. And yet, there have been no mushroom clouds or acts of nuclear terrorism since the Soviet Union dissolved, let alone since 9/11. The worst fears still could be realized at any time, but this book argues that the United States has never possessed more tools and capacity to reduce nuclear dangers than it does today—from containment and deterrence to diplomacy, military strength, and arms control. The bloated nuclear arsenals of the Cold War years have been greatly reduced, nuclear weapon testing has almost ended, and all but eight countries have pledged not to acquire the Bomb. Thus, despite wars, crises, and Murphy's Law, the dark shadows cast by nuclear weapons can continue to recede. The book believes that positive trends can continue, even in the face of the twin threats of nuclear terrorism and proliferation that have been exacerbated by the Bush administration's pursuit of a war of choice in Iraq based on false assumptions. It advocates a “back to basics” approach to reducing nuclear dangers, reversing the Bush administration's denigration of diplomacy, deterrence, containment, and arms control.

The global rise of political religion is one of the defining and most puzzling characteristics of current world politics. Since the early 1990s, religious parties have achieved stunning electoral victories around the world. This book investigates religious politics and its implications for contemporary democracy through a comparison of political parties in Israel and Turkey. While the politics of Judaism and Islam are typically seen as outgrowths of oppositionally different beliefs, the author's comparative inquiry shows how limiting this understanding of religious politics can be. Her cross-country and cross-religion analysis develops a unique approach to identifying religious parties' idiosyncratic and shared characteristics without reducing them to simple categories of religious/secular, Judeo-Christian/Islamic, or democratic/antidemocratic. The author shows that religious parties in both Israel and Turkey attract broad coalitions of supporters and skillfully inhabit religious and secular worlds simultaneously. They imbue existing traditional ideas with new political messages, blur conventional political lines and allegiances, offer strategic political choices, and exhibit remarkably similar political views. The book's findings will be especially relevant to those who want to pass beyond rudimentary typologies to better assess religious parties' capacities to undermine and contribute to liberal democracy. The Israeli and Turkish cases open a window to better understanding the complexities of religious parties. Ultimately, the book demonstrates that the characteristics of religious political parties—whether Jewish, Muslim, or yet another religion—can be as striking in their similarities as in their differences.

This book examines the prospects for advancing reform in Ukraine in the wake of the February 2014 Euromaidan revolution. It examines six crucial areas of reform: identity-memory divides, corruption, constitution, judiciary, patrimonialism and the oligarchs, and the economy. On each of these topics, the book provides one chapter that focuses on Ukraine’s experience and one chapter that examines the issue in the broader context of other international practice. Placing Ukraine in comparative perspective shows that many of the country’s problems are not unique and that other countries have been able to address many of the issues currently confronting Ukraine. The chapters provide an in-depth analysis of Ukraine’s challenges and describe the difficulties Ukrainians will have in overcoming the numerous obstacles to reform. As with the constitution, there are no easy answers, but careful analysis shows that some solutions are better than others. Ultimately, the authors offer a series of reforms that can help Ukraine make the best of a bad situation. The book stresses the need to focus on reforms that might not have immediate effect, but that comparative experience shows can solve fundamental contextual challenges. Finally, the book shows that pressures from outside Ukraine can have a strong positive influence on reform efforts inside the country.

Drawing on primary sources from both sides of the Atlantic, Britain and the Bomb explores how economic, political, and strategic considerations have shaped British nuclear diplomacy. The book concentrates on Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s first two terms of office, 1964-1970, which represent a critical period in international nuclear history. Wilson’s commitment to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and his support for continued investment in the British nuclear weapons program, despite serious economic and political challenges, established precedents that still influence policymakers today. The continued independence of Britain’s nuclear force, and the enduring absence of a German or European deterrent, certainly owes a debt to Wilson’s handling of nuclear diplomacy more than four decades ago. Beyond highlighting the importance of this period, the book explains how and why British nuclear diplomacy evolved during Wilson’s leadership. Cabinet discussions, financial crises, and international tensions encouraged a degree of flexibility in the pursuit of strategic independence and the creation of a non-proliferation treaty. The book shows us that British nuclear diplomacy was a series of compromises, an intricate blend of political, economic, and strategic considerations.

This book is the first to theorize third party mediation in crises between regional nuclear powers. Its relevance flows from two of the most significant international developments since the end of the Cold War: the emergence of regional nuclear rivalries; and the shift from the Cold War’s bipolar context to today’s unipolar international setting. Moving away from the traditional bilateral deterrence models, the book conceptualizes crisis behavior as “brokered bargaining”: a three-way bargaining framework where the regional rivals and the ‘third party’ seek to influence each other to behave in line with their crisis objectives and in so doing, affect each other’s crisis behavior. The book tests brokered bargaining theory by examining U.S.-led crisis management in South Asia, analyzing three major crises between India and Pakistan: the Kargil conflict, 1999; the 2001-02 nuclear standoff; and the Mumbai crisis, 2008. The case studies find strong evidence of behavior predicted by the brokered bargaining framework. They also shed light on several risks of misperceptions and inadvertence due to the challenges inherent in signaling to multiple audiences simultaneously. Traditional explanations rooted in bilateral deterrence models do not account for these, leaving a void with serious practical consequences, which the introduction of brokered bargaining seeks to fill. The book’s findings also offer lessons for crises on the Korean peninsula, between China and India, and between potential nuclear rivals in the Middle East.

As China and the U.S. increasingly compete for power in key areas of U.S. influence, great power conflict looms. Yet few studies have looked to the Middle East and Africa, regions of major political, economic, and military importance for both China and the U.S., to theorize how China competes in a changing world system. China's Rise in the Global South examines China's behavior as a rising power in two key Global South regions, the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. Dawn C. Murphy, drawing on extensive fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, compares and analyzes thirty years of China's interactions with these regions across a range of functional areas: political, economic, foreign aid, and military. From the Belt and Road initiative to the founding of new cooperation forums and special envoys, China's Rise in the Global South offers an in-depth look at China's foreign policy approach to the countries it considers its partners in South-South cooperation. Intervening in the emerging debate between liberals and realists about China's future as a great power, Murphy contends that China is constructing an alternate international order to interact with these regions, and this book provides policymakers and scholars of international relations with the tools to analyze it.

This book explores the strategic and institutional dynamics of international relations in East Asian history when imperial China was the undisputed regional hegemon. It draws on both Chinese and Western intellectual traditions to develop a relational theory of grand strategy and fundamental institutions in regional relations. The theory is evaluated with three case studies of Sino-Korean, Sino-Japanese, and Sino-Mongol relations during China’s early Ming dynasty (1368-1424). The book argues that early Ming China and its neighbors adopted a variety of grand strategies in their interactions, including both instrumental strategies and strategies with a distinct Confucian expressive rationality. The strategic patterns showed that expressive rationality embodying Confucian relational affection and obligation was an essential, though not dominant, feature of regional relations. This finding challenges the Eurocentric International Relations literature that has little conception of expressive rationality. Providing an institutional analysis of the early-Ming East Asian international society of Chinese hegemony, the book also challenges the venerable tribute system paradigm in the traditional historical as well as the more recent International Relations literatures. Contemporary policy implications are suggested by outlining ethical relationalism as a critical and normative theory to critique contemporary Chinese foreign policy and assess the strategic impact of China’s rise.

This book argues that the interaction between urban political economies and patterns of armed territorial control shape the nature and trajectory of the ways in which developing world cities confront the challenge of urban violence. The study introduces business as a pivotal actor in the politics of urban violence, and shows that private sector mobilization can either support or subvert state efforts to stem and prevent urban violence and, more broadly, urban governance. The effects that private sector mobilization have on the institutional outcomes of the politics of urban violence are contingent on how business communities are institutionally configured within cities and the nature of their relations with political actors and parties. A focus on city mayors finds that the degree to which politicians rely upon clientelism to secure and maintain power weighs heavily on whether they favor responses to violence that perpetuate or weaken exclusionary local political orders. The book builds a new typology of patterns of armed territorial control within cities, each of which poses challenges and opportunities for sustaining distinct political projects in response to urban violence. To demonstrate the framework’s analytic utility the book develops subnational comparative analyses of variation in the institutional outcomes of the politics of urban violence across Colombia’s three principal cities –Medellin, Cali, and Bogota –and over time within each. The analysis shows that the politics of urban violence is a powerful new lens on the broader question of who governs in major developing world cities.

This book considers why with its tremendous military advantage the United States so often fails to coerce much weaker states. The answer frequently resides in the large asymmetry in power which provides the United States a high probability of victory in a brute force war. The resultant high expected outcome from war introduces an incentive to leverage coercive demands upon a weak adversary, concession to which threaten the survival of the state, its regime, or its regime leadership. Perceiving its survival at stake an opponent will resist, so long as it has the means to do so. Theoretically, to avoid signaling costs, a powerful challenger should only choose coercive strategies likely to succeed. In practice, however, as in Iraq in 1991 and 2003, U.S. leaders may first seek United Nations Security Council resolutions to lower the diplomatic and political costs for brute force war. Coercion may also fail when interests are so limited that the United States cannot continue to make its threats credible as in 1986 following the El Dorado air raid against Libya. In other cases, as in Bosnia and Kosovo, coercion eventually succeeded, but not before coercive diplomacy failed as the United States placed the prestige of NATO at stake over non-vital interests.

The CIA was created in 1947 in large part to prevent another Pearl Harbor. On at least four dramatic occasions, the Agency failed at this task: prior to in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the Iranian revolution of 1978, the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. There has been no shortage of studies to understand how such failures happened. Until now, however, none of the explanations proffered has been fully satisfying, and sometimes competing explanations have been mutually incompatible. In contrast, this book proposes a unified, coherent and rigorous theory of intelligence failure built on culture and identity. Crucially, the book takes a systematic look at Cassandras - people who offered strategic warning, but were ignored, to show that surprises could be anticipated. As the first post-positivist study of intelligence failure, the book views intelligence analysis as permeated by social facts, and thus firmly in the grip of the identity and culture of the intelligence producer, the CIA. As a consequence, it can present novel model of surprise that focuses on the internal make-up the CIA, including the identities of analysts, the corporate identity of Langley as a whole, and the Agency's organizational culture. It suggests that by examining the key features of the Agency's identity and culture, we can arrive at a holistic, unified understanding of the intelligence failures that resulted in dramatic strategic surprises.

This book explores the emergence of an anarchic states-system in the twentieth-century Arab world. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalist movements first considered establishing a unified regional arrangement to take the empire's place and present a common front to outside powers. But over time, different Arab leaderships abandoned this project and instead adopted policies characteristic of self-interested, territorially limited states. In the explanation of this phenomenon, the book shifts attention away from older debates about the origins and development of Arab nationalism and analyzes instead how different nationalist leaderships changed the ways that they carried on diplomatic and strategic relations. It situates this shift in the context of influential sociological theories of state formation, while showing how labor movements and other forms of popular mobilization shaped the origins of the regional states-system.

The incongruity between territory, citizenry, and nation has long preoccupied students of international migration, nationalism, and citizenship, including the state’s transborder relationship with its “external” members (e.g., emigrants, diasporas, and ethnonational “kin”). This book is a comparative, historical, and ethnographic study of the complex relationships among the states in the Korean peninsula, colonial-era Korean migrants to Japan and northeast China and their descendants, and the states in which they have resided. Despite a widespread and quasi-primordial belief in Korean ethnic nationhood, the embrace of these transborder coethnic populations by the Japanese colonial state and the two postcolonial states (North and South Korea) has been shifting and recurrently contested. Through analyses of transborder membership politics in the colonial, Cold War, and post-Cold War periods, the book explores under what circumstances and by what means the colonial and postcolonial states have sought to claim (or failed to claim) certain transborder populations as “their own,” and how transborder Koreans have themselves shaped the making, unmaking, and remaking of transborder ties as they have sought long-distance membership on their own terms. Extending the constructivist approach to nations/nationalisms and the culturalist/cognitive turn in recent theorizing on the modern state to a transnational context, it demonstrates that being a “homeland” state or a member of the “transborder nation” is not an ethnodemographic fact, but an arduous and revocable political achievement, mediated profoundly by the historically evolving and mutually interlinked bureaucratic practices of the state.

This book explains why Latin America’s pattern of protective labor regulation has been surprisingly resistant to fundamental reform over the course of the last century, especially during the period of intense pressure from globalization. It develops a theory based on two factors – the skill distribution in the economy and the organizational capacity of labor – to explain the remarkable continuity in national-level labor codes. It argues that where workers have mid- to high-level skills and sufficient leadership or ties to political parties, they can be most effective in forming coalitions that preserve or increase the protectiveness of labor legislation. Where unskilled labor predominates, and where ties to political parties are weak, labor regulation is less developed and less protective. This theory is tested in two ways. First, the book takes a quantitative approach, conducting a systematic analysis of the determinants of 23 different labor law provisions in 18 Latin American countries over the period from the 1980s to the 2000s. Second, it employs a longer-term qualitative historical analysis to trace out labor law development and attempted reform over the last century in three representative countries: one which had highly developed protections for individual workers, but whose laws fragmented collective action by unions (Chile), one which provided only narrow protection of individual workers but accorded unions significant freedom (Peru), and one that was strongly protective of both individual workers and the unions that represented them (Argentina).

This book examines how societies, cultures, political structures, and the global environment affect countries' military organizations. Unlike most analyses of countries' military power, which focus on material and basic resources—such as the size of population, technological and industrial base, and gross national product (GNP)—this volume takes a more expansive view. Its overarching argument is that states' global environments and the particularities of their cultures, social structures, and political institutions often affect how they organize and prepare for war, and ultimately impact their effectiveness in battle. The creation of military power is only partially dependent on states' basic material and human assets. Wealth, technology, and human capital certainly matter for a country's ability to create military power, but equally important are the ways a state uses those resources, and this often depends on the political and social environment in which military activity takes place.

The essays in this book analyze and explain the crisis of democratic representation in five Andean countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela. In this region, disaffection with democracy, political parties, and legislatures has spread to an alarming degree. Many presidents have been forced from office, and many traditional parties have fallen by the wayside. These five countries have the potential to be negative examples in a region that has historically had strong demonstration and diffusion effects in terms of regime changes. The book addresses an important question for Latin America as well as other parts of the world: Why does representation sometimes fail to work?

This is an examination of how grassroots conservative activists use rights discourse to pursue their political goals. It argues that conservative activists engage in frequent and sincere mobilizations of rights talk—a discourse that includes accusations that socially marginal Americans are seeking un-American, “special” rights that violate the nation's commitment to equal rights. The book finds that such rights talk is central both to the identities of conservative activists and to the broad appeal of modern New Right politics. However, through an in-depth case study of opposition on the Indian treaty rights, it establishes that the impact of conservative rights talk is ultimately ambiguous. While conservative rights discourse effectively expresses the nationalistic resentment that saturates New Right politics, it deflects critical scrutiny from the actual causes of that resentment. By tracing the interplay of rights and resentment, this book adds new insight to the prevailing scholarship on law and politics, which typically overlooks the importance of rights discourse for conservative politics.

The examination of wars and conflicts of the twenty-first century immediately draws one to their culture and sectarian dimensions. The contributors to this volume reflect on the following fundamental questions; where and how is culture important in a national security and foreign policy context? Is cultural understanding important, or is it merely a fad? What constitutes cultural data? What frameworks should be used to analyze culture? What are the challenges of cultural data collection and application? Part I (encompassing chapters’ one through three) examines the theory to methodology of culture and conflict. Two formal intelligence disciplines, Cultural intelligence (CULINT) and ethnographic intelligence (ETHINT), and their incorporation into existing joint intelligence infrastructure are examined. Part II (encompassing chapters four through ten) takes us from methodology to practice, and addresses some of the lessons of Afghanistan. Here, the authors frame Taliban’s successful expansion into Pastuhn areas and the critical role religious authorities’ play in Afghanistan’s present conflict. The IO assessment tool is depicted, illustrating its various uses, most importantly, the ability to quantify the success or failure of an operation. This book draws on the research, analysis’s, and experiences of its scholars’ to conclude that the success of a country intending to invade and occupy another is in large part dependent on its fundamental knowledge and sensitivity to the relevant cultural processes and dynamics.

The inviolability of diplomatic personnel and premises is a cornerstone of interstate relations and international law. As epitomized by the murder of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi, host countries are not always willing or capable to protect foreign diplomats and missions, which have become increasingly vulnerable to terrorism and other forms of political violence. Consequently, states with a large diplomatic presence have complemented host countries protection with a host of additional measures ranging from relocating embassies to fortified suburban locations to the deployment of military, police, and private security guards. By increasing the separateness of foreign envoys from local societies and informing local societies’ perceptions of the sending states, however, diplomatic security policies may not simply protect diplomats, but also reshape the institution and practice of diplomacy. In spite of its theoretical and policy relevance, diplomatic security has received very sporadic scholarly attention. This volume fills this gap by providing a comparative analysis of diplomatic protective policies enacted by the US, China, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Israel and Turkey. Moreover, the book investigates the reasons underlying the evolution of diplomatic security policies over time and their variations across countries, examining the factors underlying the choosing of protective actors and arrangements. It then examines the effectiveness of these arrangements analyzing how diplomatic security policies have been reformed in response to major incidents and the extent to which they can secure diplomats without hindering their ability to interact with local society and tarnishing the image of the sending state.