Jeffrey Pickering
Biographic Data
| ID | 249749 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jeffrey Pickering |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jeffrey |
| FAMILY NAME | Pickering |
| SIGNATURE | PICKERING J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Kansas State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1862-3623 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 59 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 612 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Civil-Military Relations and Heterogeneity in Foreign Military Force
The relationship between domestic civil-military relations and the use of foreign military force has long been debated. Unfortunately, mixed findings in cross-national studies have added little clarity to our understanding to date. We argue that past scholarship overlooks something fundamental in the relationship and, further, we present a new theoretical lens to help to fill this gap. We contend that measures of civil-military contestation like …
Can renewable energy zones become regional equity zones? Policy coherence and social equity in the Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap in New South Wales, Australia
Governments across a range of countries are establishing renewable energy zones to accelerate and coordinate the construction of large-scale solar, wind and battery infrastructure and associated transmission lines, mainly in regions outside metropolitan areas. Renewable energy zones intensify the geographical concentration of both the benefits and impacts for communities living near this infrastructure, raising both opportunities and challenges f…
Rivalry, insurgency, and pro-government militias in authoritarian states
It has long been understood that pro-government militia activity and pro-government militia violence increase during civil war. Recent literature contends that pro-government militia activity also rises when a state is involved in an interstate rivalry. We maintain that the combination of these two threats may, somewhat counterintuitively, result in reduced pro-government militia activity in some autocracies. This unexpected outcome can be explai…
Civil-Military Relations and Domestic Terrorism
Civil-military relations and terrorism are both extensively studied subjects. Their relationship has, however, yet to be examined. We maintain that public conflict between the civilian and the military leadership in a country and declining civil control over the armed forces may often precipitate a rise in domestic terror events. Civil-military conflict and reduced civilian control can lead to agency slack by the armed forces and ineffective coun…
Civilian Control, Civil-Military Friction, and Foreign Military Intervention
The relationship between domestic civil-military relations and the use of foreign military force has been long debated. The two primary perspectives on the issue, civilian conservatism and military conservatism, are antithetical. The former maintains that military authorities are more likely to advocate for the use of military force than civilian counterparts, while the latter advances the opposite argument. Empirical research to date has added l…
Can democracy accelerate sustainability transformations? Policy coherence for participatory co-existence
The 2030 Agenda envisages a world “in which democracy, good governance and the rule of law [...] are essential for sustainable development” (Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for sustainable development, 2015, paragraph 9). However, the extent to which democratic practices can help or hinder sustainable development remains contested. I show how the relationship between democracy and environmental sustainability can be illuminated by recent …
Foreign Military Intervention and Cabinet Government Stability
Cabinet governments are the most prevalent form of democratic rule and studies of cabinet government duration are common. These studies tend to focus on the domestic influences associated with cabinet longevity, not the impact that foreign policy decisions may have. We begin to address this gap in the literature by analyzing the effect that one particularly visible foreign policy decision, the initiation of a foreign military intervention, has on…
Pluralizing Debates on the Anthropocene Requires Engaging with the Diversity of Existing Scholarship
A recent article in this journal (Jackson 2021 Jackson, M. 2021. On decolonizing the Anthropocene: Disobedience via plural constitutions. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111 (3):698–708. doi: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1779645.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) validly emphasized that debates about the Anthropocene need to recognize a diverse range of perspectives, worldviews, and forms of knowledge. In…
Process Tracing
A major challenge for empirical analysis of deliberative processes is to establish causal relationships between the context or design of these processes (e.g. access to information or the inclusion of marginalized participants) and desired outcomes (e.g. decisions that have higher epistemic or deliberative quality or are more reflective of citizens’ values). While some of these causal relationships can be tested in experimental settings or throug…
Democratising sustainability transformations: Assessing the transformative potential of democratic practices in environmental governance
Many democracies find it difficult to act swiftly on problems such as climate change and biodiversity loss. This is reflected in long-standing debates in research and policy about whether democratic practices are capable of fostering timely, large-scale transformations towards sustainability. Drawing on an integrative review of scholarly literature from 2011 to early 2021 on sustainability transformations and the democracy-environment nexus, this…
International Interactions best paper award 2022
International Interactions best paper award 2022." International Interactions, 48(6), pp. 1253–1254
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy is the first book that brings together a wide range of methods used in the study of deliberative democracy. It offers thirty-one different methods that scholars use for theorizing, measuring, exploring, or applying deliberative democracy. Each chapter presents one method by explaining its utility in deliberative democracy research and providing guidance on its application by drawing on examples from prev…
Rivalry Type and Cyber Operations: “Hot” Rivalries, “Cold” Rivalries, and Cyber Incidents, 1990–2009
Cyber operations targeting government computers and network infrastructure are becoming increasingly common and have the potential to be extremely damaging. Interstate rivalry has been shown to shape a wide range of global patterns. This paper examines the intersection between these two important phenomena. It builds upon previous scholarship by developing a broader and more nuanced theory of the rivalry-cyber operation relationship and testing i…
Massive soybean expansion in South America since 2000 and implications for conservation
Disparity and Diversion: Domestic Economic Inequality and MID Initiation
Scholarship has demonstrated that domestic economic inequality is related to a number of forms of intrastate conflict, such as civil wars and rebellions. There are good reasons to believe that it also has an impact on the initiation of militarized interstate disputes for diversionary reasons. Such use of external force may refocus popular attention and may reinforce the strong nationalist sentiment that tends to prevail in societies with substant…
Between environmental and ecological democracy: Theory and practice at the democracy-environment nexus
Concepts of ecological and environmental democracy seek to reconcile two normative ideals: ensuring environmental sustainability while safeguarding democracy. These ideals are frequently conceived as being in conflict, as democracy is perceived as too slow and cumbersome to deliver the urgent large-scale collective action needed to tackle environmental problems. Theories addressing the democracy-environment nexus can be situated on a spectrum fro…
The Human Cost of the Weapons Trade: Small Arms Transfers and Recipient State Homicide
Empirical research has increasingly turned its attention to ways that international phenomena impact the human condition within countries. International influences have been shown to affect human rights, health, and quality of life within societies. They may also impact microlevel phenomena such as violent criminal behavior. In this study, we build on such recent scholarship and research that bridges the theoretical and empirical gap between inte…
Deliberative Ecologies: Complexity and Social–Ecological Dynamics in International Environmental Negotiations
Theories of complex systems can yield valuable insights for understanding the increasingly intricate networks of actors, institutions, and discourses involved in international environmental negotiations. While analysis of regimes and regime complexes has shed light on macro-level structures and relationships in global environmental politics, systemic analysis has gained less traction in making sense of micro-level interactions—such as communicati…
Aid, Intervention, and Terror: The Impact of Foreign Aid and Foreign Military Intervention on Terror Events and Severity
Objective Relatively few empirical studies have analyzed the foreign policy options that leaders employ to counter terrorism, and the results have been mixed to date. This study takes a fresh look at two such policies: foreign aid and foreign military intervention. Method Using system generalized method of moments to control for endogeneity and a technique that identifies short‐ and long‐term effects, we examine the impact of both policy options …
New directions in earth system governance research
The Earth System Governance project is a global research alliance that explores novel, effective governance mechanisms to cope with the current transitions in the biogeochemical systems of the planet. A decade after its inception, this article offers an overview of the project's new research framework (which is built upon a review of existing earth system governance research), the goal of which is to continue to stimulate a pluralistic, vibrant a…
Ecological reflexivity: Characterising an elusive virtue for governance in the Anthropocene
Reflexivity – the capacity of an agent, structure or process to change in the light of reflection on its performance – has attracted widespread support among political theorists as a virtue for environmental governance. Dryzek argues that a distinctively ecological form of reflexivity becomes crucial for governing in the Anthropocene. But there remains a need to clarify the conceptual scope of ecological reflexivity and to ascertain whether it ha…
Conclusion: A practical politics of the Anthropocene
How exactly might ecological reflexivity be established as a core priority of social, economic, and political institutions? Rather than think in terms of any model to aim for, it is better to begin with where we are now and figure out positive moves on many fronts. Living frameworks—embodied in institutions that are flexible enough to respond to changing social and ecological conditions but stable enough to provide a basis for long-term flourishi…
Democratic Anthropocene
The formative sphere is the sum of activity encompassing the creation, questioning, and development of principles for collective action. This sphere gives shape to the meaning of the Anthropocene and how its implications are taken up in collective decision-making. An effective formative sphere should operate as a deliberative and ecological democracy capable of questioning its own foundations. This chapter shows how the formative sphere can opera…
Governance in the Holocene
In the late Holocene, humans and their social institutions came to endanger their planetary comfort zone. Holocene institutions have had their successes when it comes to economic prosperity and even (recently) limiting violent conflict. But change that could enable governance to grapple with Anthropocene conditions is blocked where it is most needed. Dominant institutions such as states and markets have found ways to organize feedback that confir…
Sustainability
The idea of sustainability has dominated global environmental affairs for several decades, though sustainable development has nowhere been achieved in practice. Established conceptions of sustainable development asserting that growth, justice, and environmental protection can be mutually reinforcing now need to be rethought under the more challenging circumstances of the Anthropocene. Sustainability needs to become more reflexive: more open to a …
New directions in earth system governance research
The Earth System Governance project is a global research alliance that explores novel, effective governance mechanisms to cope with the current transitions in the biogeochemical systems of the planet. A decade after its inception, this article offers an overview of the project's new research framework (which is built upon a review of existing earth system governance research), the goal of which is to continue to stimulate a pluralistic, vibrant a…
Democracy and Diversionary Military Intervention: Reassessing Regime Type and the Diversionary Hypothesis
This article concentrates on two limitations in the literature on diversionary force. First is the common assumption that major powers are the only actors capable of diversion. Second is the narrow conceptualization of regime type prevalent in the literature. Instead of dichotomizing regimes, we distinguish mature democracies and autocracies from consolidating variants of these regimes. We draw hypotheses from the institutional approach and test …
Forging Democracy at Gunpoint
Can liberal interventionism build liberal democracy? This manuscript examines the military interventions undertaken by the U.S., U.K., France, and the UN in the post-World War II era to see if they had a positive impact on democracy in target countries. Empirical analysis centers on multivariate time series, cross section PCSE and relogit regressions of political liberalization and democratization from 1946 to 1996. The former is operationalized …
Diversionary Despots? Comparing Autocracies' Propensities to Use and to Benefit from Military Force
This article adds to recent research that has begun to systematically analyze the varied conflict propensities of autocracies. Using political incentive theory, we develop hypotheses on the diversionary proclivities of three distinct types of autocratic regimes that contradict conventional wisdom and the findings of recent empirical studies. To provide a full rendering of autocracies' diversionary tendencies, we test our hypotheses with Generaliz…
The Politics of the Anthropocene
The Politics of the Anthropocene is a sophisticated yet accessible treatment of how human institutions, practices, and principles need to be re-thought in response to the challenges of the Anthropocene, the emerging epoch of human-induced instability in the Earth system and its life-support capacities. However, the world remains stuck with practices and modes of thinking that were developed in the Holocene – the epoch of around 12,000 years of un…
Diverting with Benevolent Military Force: Reducing Risks and Rising above Strategic Behavior
Research on the diversionary use of force has burgeoned in recent years, but the literature remains divided. This paper attempts to reconcile extant findings by advancing a new theoretical framework for diversionary force centered on the agenda-setting literature. It expands the conventional conception of diversionary behavior and distinguishes the benevolent use of force over low politics issues (which we term socioeconomic interventions, SEI) f…
The International Military Intervention Dataset: An Updated Resource for Conflict Scholars
As major wars have become uncommon over recent decades and the efficacy of economic sanctions is questioned, foreign military intervention seems to have become increasingly prevalent on the international scene. Military intervention has also gained a degree of moral legitimacy, as it is now often launched for humanitarian ends rather than simply to further the intervener's strategic or material interests. Despite the apparent increase in the use …
Political, Economic, and Social Consequences of Foreign Military Intervention
Foreign military intervention is one of the most common types of interstate military force used over recent decades. As war’s costliness increases and the efficacy of economic sanctions and other foreign policy tools is increasingly questioned, it may become even more prevalent. Unfortunately, the field of international relations has little systematic understanding of the types of impacts such military ventures can have on target states in the de…
The Dividends of Diversion: Mature Democracies’ Proclivity to Use Diversionary Force and the Rewards They Reap from It
The diversionary proclivities of democratic and autocratic regimes have been debated in the empirical literature. This new theoretical synthesis on the subject builds upon the insights of the institutional approach, rational choice literature on voting and research on audience costs. It is contended that leaders in mature democracies have more incentive to use diversionary force than leaders in other regimes, and they are more likely to gain dome…
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy is the first book that brings together a wide range of methods used in the study of deliberative democracy. It offers thirty-one different methods that scholars use for theorizing, measuring, exploring, or applying deliberative democracy. Each chapter presents one method by explaining its utility in deliberative democracy research and providing guidance on its application by drawing on examples from prev…
Democratic Accountability and Diversionary Force: Regime Types and the Use of Benevolent and Hostile Military Force
Agreement on which democratic regime types are prone to use diversionary force has yet to materialize in the embryonic empirical literature on the subject. Nor has consensus emerged on the theoretical approach that best explains the diversionary tendencies of different democratic political systems. By separating out benevolent and belligerent diversionary military missions, we begin to offer some clarity to this mixed empirical literature. In zer…
If Equity's In, We're Out: Scope for Fairness in the Next Global Climate Agreement
At the United Nations climate change conference in 2011, parties decided to launch the "Durban Platform" to work towards a new long-term climate agreement. The decision was notable for the absence of any reference to "equity," a prominent principle in all previous major climate agreements. Wealthy countries resisted the inclusion of equity on the grounds that the term had become too closely yoked to developing countries' favored conception of equ…
On the concept of climate debt: Its moral and political value
A range of developing countries and international advocacy organizations have argued that wealthy countries, as a result of their greater historical contribution to human-induced climate change, owe a ‘climate debt’ to poor countries. Critics of this argument have claimed that it is incoherent or morally objectionable. In this essay we clarify the concept of climate debt and assess its value for conceptualizing responsibilities associated with gl…
Massive soybean expansion in South America since 2000 and implications for conservation
Give Me Shelter: Reexamining Military Intervention and the Monadic Democratic Peace
Increasing empirical evidence points to the existence of a monadic democratic peace. However, the quantitative literature on international conflict has yet to produce any compelling evidence that such a peace holds for one of the most prominent types of interstate force in use today, foreign military intervention. This study tests the hypotheses that democracies are less prone to intervene militarily and less likely to be the targets of such incu…
Dangerous Drafts? A Time-Series, Cross-National Analysis of Conscription and the Use of Military Force, 1946-2001
Conscription has been claimed to both increase leaders' propensity to use military force abroad and constrain them from doing so. The author sheds new light on this longstanding controversy by presenting the first time-series, cross-national quantitative analysis of the impact that state military manpower systems (either conscription or volunteerism) have on the initiation of both traditional, belligerent military missions and 'operations other t…
Rebels, Rivals, and Post-colonial State-Building: Identifying Bellicist Influences on State Extractive Capability1
A recent, notable strain of empirical research argues that postcolonial state-building follows a pattern similar to the European state-building experience. It acknowledges that war is less common today, but contends that interstate rivalry now drives state-building. We argue that postcolonial state-managers have little reason to build state capacity in response to rival states. There is only a slight chance that these rivalries will escalate into…
Politics and 'Black Tuesday: Shifting Power in the Cabinet and the Decision to Withdraw from East of Suez, November 1967-January 1968
On 16 January 1968, the Wilson government announced that the British would swiftly depart from what had long been considered one of the country's most vital strategic assets—the east of Suez network. Traditional scholarship maintains that the decision was driven by economic scarcity and the jolts that repeated financial crises gave to the body politic. Whilst economic pressures were real, this essay utilizes newly released government records to a…
Democratising sustainability transformations: Assessing the transformative potential of democratic practices in environmental governance
Many democracies find it difficult to act swiftly on problems such as climate change and biodiversity loss. This is reflected in long-standing debates in research and policy about whether democratic practices are capable of fostering timely, large-scale transformations towards sustainability. Drawing on an integrative review of scholarly literature from 2011 to early 2021 on sustainability transformations and the democracy-environment nexus, this…
Sharing the Global Climate Finance Effort Fairly with Limited Coordination
Mobilizing climate finance for developing countries is crucial for achieving a fair and effective global climate regime. To date, developed countries retain wide discretion over their national contributions. We explore how different degrees of international coordination may influence the fairness of the global financing effort, and we present quantitative scenarios, for both the metrics used to distribute the collective effort among countries con…
War-weariness and Cumulative Effects: Victors, Vanquished, and Subsequent Interstate Intervention
It is often assumed that policymakers and populations grow weary from war. The costs associated with the use of military force are thought to become readily apparent in the wake of devastating conflicts, and support for military forays is expected to erode as a result. Although the notion is compelling, to date, empirical studies of war-weariness have yielded mixed results. This article re-examines war-weariness theory. It focuses upon a recent, …
Stability in a Fragmenting World: Interstate Military Force, 1946-1988
Six hypotheses, developed from arguments about the fragmentation of the international system, are applied to a data set encompassing 667 interstate uses of armed force between 1946 and 1988. Particular attention is paid to center-periphery and intra-peripheral interventions. The data suggest sup port for one perspective on fragmentation, imperial disintegration, but not for a model based upon eroding polarization. While center interventionary act…
Ecological reflexivity: Characterising an elusive virtue for governance in the Anthropocene
Reflexivity – the capacity of an agent, structure or process to change in the light of reflection on its performance – has attracted widespread support among political theorists as a virtue for environmental governance. Dryzek argues that a distinctively ecological form of reflexivity becomes crucial for governing in the Anthropocene. But there remains a need to clarify the conceptual scope of ecological reflexivity and to ascertain whether it ha…
Special issue: Managing fragmentation and complexity in the emerging system of international climate finance
The structural shape of force: Interstate intervention in the zones of peace and turmoil, 1946–1996
Two structural models are analyzed using data on foreign military interventions over the past half‐century. A vertical model posits constancy in center‐periphery ties, while a horizontal model suggests that the center and the periphery will gradually decouple when it comes to the use of force. The latter, horizontal, view is more commonly accepted. Because of dwindling interest in the periphery with the end of the Cold War and the increased milit…
Britain’s Withdrawal from East of Suez
After 1945, Britain maintained a great chain of overseas military outposts stretching from the Suez Canal to Singapore. Commonly termed the `east of Suez' role, this chain had long been thought to be
The Return to Normalcy: Postwar British Strategy
Britain emerged from the Second World War among the ruling trinity in the world, one of the 'Big Three' wartime victors. But the country's position at the conference tables of world diplomacy obscured the reality of diminished power. Britain had, in effect, given its all to win the war, exhausting domestic industries and selling off many of its overseas assets. The country was devastated economically. Yet, the perception of world power remained, …
James B. Christoph
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Stability in a Fragmenting World: Interstate Military Force, 1946-1988
Six hypotheses, developed from arguments about the fragmentation of the international system, are applied to a data set encompassing 667 interstate uses of armed force between 1946 and 1988. Particular attention is paid to center-periphery and intra-peripheral interventions. The data suggest sup port for one perspective on fragmentation, imperial disintegration, but not for a model based upon eroding polarization. While center interventionary act…
The structural shape of force: Interstate intervention in the zones of peace and turmoil, 1946–1996
Two structural models are analyzed using data on foreign military interventions over the past half‐century. A vertical model posits constancy in center‐periphery ties, while a horizontal model suggests that the center and the periphery will gradually decouple when it comes to the use of force. The latter, horizontal, view is more commonly accepted. Because of dwindling interest in the periphery with the end of the Cold War and the increased milit…
Politics and 'Black Tuesday: Shifting Power in the Cabinet and the Decision to Withdraw from East of Suez, November 1967-January 1968
On 16 January 1968, the Wilson government announced that the British would swiftly depart from what had long been considered one of the country's most vital strategic assets—the east of Suez network. Traditional scholarship maintains that the decision was driven by economic scarcity and the jolts that repeated financial crises gave to the body politic. Whilst economic pressures were real, this essay utilizes newly released government records to a…
Give Me Shelter: Reexamining Military Intervention and the Monadic Democratic Peace
Increasing empirical evidence points to the existence of a monadic democratic peace. However, the quantitative literature on international conflict has yet to produce any compelling evidence that such a peace holds for one of the most prominent types of interstate force in use today, foreign military intervention. This study tests the hypotheses that democracies are less prone to intervene militarily and less likely to be the targets of such incu…
War-weariness and Cumulative Effects: Victors, Vanquished, and Subsequent Interstate Intervention
It is often assumed that policymakers and populations grow weary from war. The costs associated with the use of military force are thought to become readily apparent in the wake of devastating conflicts, and support for military forays is expected to erode as a result. Although the notion is compelling, to date, empirical studies of war-weariness have yielded mixed results. This article re-examines war-weariness theory. It focuses upon a recent, …
Balancing Risks: Great Power Intervention in the Periphery
Journal Article Balancing Risks: Great Power Intervention in the Periphery Get access Balancing Risks: Great Power Intervention in the Periphery by Jeffrey Taliaferro. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2004. 320 pp. $39.95. Jeffrey Pickering Jeffrey Pickering Kansas State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 120, Issue 2, Summer 2005, Pages 306–307, https://doi…
Democracy and Diversionary Military Intervention: Reassessing Regime Type and the Diversionary Hypothesis
This article concentrates on two limitations in the literature on diversionary force. First is the common assumption that major powers are the only actors capable of diversion. Second is the narrow conceptualization of regime type prevalent in the literature. Instead of dichotomizing regimes, we distinguish mature democracies and autocracies from consolidating variants of these regimes. We draw hypotheses from the institutional approach and test …
Political, Economic, and Social Consequences of Foreign Military Intervention
Foreign military intervention is one of the most common types of interstate military force used over recent decades. As war’s costliness increases and the efficacy of economic sanctions and other foreign policy tools is increasingly questioned, it may become even more prevalent. Unfortunately, the field of international relations has little systematic understanding of the types of impacts such military ventures can have on target states in the de…
The Scourge of War: New Extensions on an Old Problem
The Scourge of War: New Extensions on an Old Problem. Edited by Paul F. Diehl. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 280p. $70.00. This volume is dedicated to J. David Singer, and it is designed to be a collective reflection on Singer's work and the Correlates of War (COW) research program that he initiated more than 40 years ago. It accomplishes much more than simply revisiting or lauding previous COW research, however. As Paul Diehl (p…
Forging Democracy at Gunpoint
Can liberal interventionism build liberal democracy? This manuscript examines the military interventions undertaken by the U.S., U.K., France, and the UN in the post-World War II era to see if they had a positive impact on democracy in target countries. Empirical analysis centers on multivariate time series, cross section PCSE and relogit regressions of political liberalization and democratization from 1946 to 1996. The former is operationalized …
Diverting with Benevolent Military Force: Reducing Risks and Rising above Strategic Behavior
Research on the diversionary use of force has burgeoned in recent years, but the literature remains divided. This paper attempts to reconcile extant findings by advancing a new theoretical framework for diversionary force centered on the agenda-setting literature. It expands the conventional conception of diversionary behavior and distinguishes the benevolent use of force over low politics issues (which we term socioeconomic interventions, SEI) f…
The Dividends of Diversion: Mature Democracies’ Proclivity to Use Diversionary Force and the Rewards They Reap from It
The diversionary proclivities of democratic and autocratic regimes have been debated in the empirical literature. This new theoretical synthesis on the subject builds upon the insights of the institutional approach, rational choice literature on voting and research on audience costs. It is contended that leaders in mature democracies have more incentive to use diversionary force than leaders in other regimes, and they are more likely to gain dome…
The International Military Intervention Dataset: An Updated Resource for Conflict Scholars
As major wars have become uncommon over recent decades and the efficacy of economic sanctions is questioned, foreign military intervention seems to have become increasingly prevalent on the international scene. Military intervention has also gained a degree of moral legitimacy, as it is now often launched for humanitarian ends rather than simply to further the intervener's strategic or material interests. Despite the apparent increase in the use …
Diversionary Despots? Comparing Autocracies' Propensities to Use and to Benefit from Military Force
This article adds to recent research that has begun to systematically analyze the varied conflict propensities of autocracies. Using political incentive theory, we develop hypotheses on the diversionary proclivities of three distinct types of autocratic regimes that contradict conventional wisdom and the findings of recent empirical studies. To provide a full rendering of autocracies' diversionary tendencies, we test our hypotheses with Generaliz…
Democratic Accountability and Diversionary Force: Regime Types and the Use of Benevolent and Hostile Military Force
Agreement on which democratic regime types are prone to use diversionary force has yet to materialize in the embryonic empirical literature on the subject. Nor has consensus emerged on the theoretical approach that best explains the diversionary tendencies of different democratic political systems. By separating out benevolent and belligerent diversionary military missions, we begin to offer some clarity to this mixed empirical literature. In zer…
Dangerous Drafts? A Time-Series, Cross-National Analysis of Conscription and the Use of Military Force, 1946-2001
Conscription has been claimed to both increase leaders' propensity to use military force abroad and constrain them from doing so. The author sheds new light on this longstanding controversy by presenting the first time-series, cross-national quantitative analysis of the impact that state military manpower systems (either conscription or volunteerism) have on the initiation of both traditional, belligerent military missions and 'operations other t…
On the concept of climate debt: Its moral and political value
A range of developing countries and international advocacy organizations have argued that wealthy countries, as a result of their greater historical contribution to human-induced climate change, owe a ‘climate debt’ to poor countries. Critics of this argument have claimed that it is incoherent or morally objectionable. In this essay we clarify the concept of climate debt and assess its value for conceptualizing responsibilities associated with gl…
Introductory Note
Recent developments in climate policy have done little to suggest that the world is acting quickly enough to avoid a dangerous rise in global temperatures.Despite some important steps in national policy-making-including the commencement of Australia's carbon pricing mechanism and the piloting of subnational emissions trading in China-the polarized nature of the climate debate in the United States continues to obstruct progress.Moreover, a substan…
If Equity's In, We're Out: Scope for Fairness in the Next Global Climate Agreement
At the United Nations climate change conference in 2011, parties decided to launch the "Durban Platform" to work towards a new long-term climate agreement. The decision was notable for the absence of any reference to "equity," a prominent principle in all previous major climate agreements. Wealthy countries resisted the inclusion of equity on the grounds that the term had become too closely yoked to developing countries' favored conception of equ…
Foreign military intervention and post-colonial state-building: An actor-centric analysis
In an era where state borders are relatively fixed and interstate wars are uncommon, it seems wise to begin to look beyond full-scale war when examining the relationship between military force and state-building. We thus examine the impact that a low-scale form of armed force, foreign military intervention, has on state-building in post-colonial countries. Using selectorate theory within an actor-centric framework, we hypothesize that certain dem…
Rebels, Rivals, and Post-colonial State-Building: Identifying Bellicist Influences on State Extractive Capability1
A recent, notable strain of empirical research argues that postcolonial state-building follows a pattern similar to the European state-building experience. It acknowledges that war is less common today, but contends that interstate rivalry now drives state-building. We argue that postcolonial state-managers have little reason to build state capacity in response to rival states. There is only a slight chance that these rivalries will escalate into…
Sharing the Global Climate Finance Effort Fairly with Limited Coordination
Mobilizing climate finance for developing countries is crucial for achieving a fair and effective global climate regime. To date, developed countries retain wide discretion over their national contributions. We explore how different degrees of international coordination may influence the fairness of the global financing effort, and we present quantitative scenarios, for both the metrics used to distribute the collective effort among countries con…
Political science (46 works) · Economics (35 works) · Law (35 works) · Politics (34 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Law (21 works) · Political economy (20 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (18 works) · Democracy (16 works) · Psychology (16 works)