Fred H Lawson
Biographic Data
| ID | 288459 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Fred H Lawson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Fred H |
| FAMILY NAME | Lawson |
| SIGNATURE | LAWSON F H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Mills College |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9060-688X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 125 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 76 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 125 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1958 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Indonesia's ‘Layered Incoherence’: A Response to Moch Faisal Karim
Indonesia's policy towards the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has taken a notable turn in the past few years. Previously, Jakarta responded to developments by providing humanitarian assistance; it now concerns itself with security and military affairs, and has adopted a more activist posture. Moch Faisal Karim's concept of ‘layered incoherence’ provides insight into the shift, but would do better to underscore the detrimental impact that a high deg…
Red Sea: Power Competition in the Red Sea: Testing the Post-Liberal International Order
Indonesia recalibrates relations with the Middle East
Beyond Balancing: How States Actually Respond to Threatening Adversaries
Modern History and Politics: Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East
Antinomies of Alignment Redux: The United Arab Emirates and the United States
Over the past three decades, the United Arab Emirates has forged a sturdy bilateral security alignment with the United States. It has also pursued foreign policies that conflict with US interests in the Gulf and the broader Middle East. This contradiction is usually attributed to a hedging strategy. However, a more accurate analysis indicates that this reflects the peculiar type of alignment that exists between the two countries: a dyadic protect…
Domestic Conflict and Foreign Belligerence: Revisiting a Vintage Puzzle
Large-N statistical studies have found little or no association between domestic conflict and belligerent foreign policies. A strong and persistent intuition that this negative finding is unwarranted has nevertheless encouraged scholars to revisit the topic. Seven recent contributions propose divergent theoretical arguments to explain external bellicosity in terms of internal turmoil. Important implications can be drawn from each explanation, whi…
Iran’s Troubled Relations with Afghanistan and Tajikistan: A Compound Alignment Dilemma
Afghanistan’s reversion to Taliban rule poses severe threats to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Tehran faces a dilemma over how best to respond to these dangers: it could continue to conciliate the Taliban or it could revert to the antagonistic posture it adopted towards Kabul in the 1990s. While each of these strategies can improve Iran’s security situation to some extent, they also entail unintended consequences that exacerbate Iranian vulnerabil…
Commentary: Revisiting Contemporary Revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa
Mark Beissinger’s The Revolutionary City marks a major advance in current scholarship on revolutions. Cases drawn from the Middle East and North Africa are an important component of the analysis. Yet instances of popular rebellion in this part of the world have been omitted and several instances that are included are mischaracterized. Specialists in regional affairs can contribute to improving the study of revolutions by revisiting this influenti…
Gulf Affaris: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates: Foreign Policy and Strategic Alliances in an Uncertain World , by Robert Mason
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates: Foreign Policy and Strategic Alliances in an Uncertain World , by Robert Mason. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023. 320 pages. $85.00 cloth, e-book
The Foreign Policy of Smaller Gulf States: Size, Power, and Regime Stability in the Middle East
How conciliating Taliban-led Afghanistan ended up endangering Iran
Crisis and transformation in post-Bouteflika Algeria
Algeria faces a renewed conjunction of political-economic crisis and widespread popular discontent. Making sense of the current situation requires a careful consideration of the social structure of accumulation that governs the country’s domestic affairs. This institutional arrangement has undergone a notable transformation since the previous crisis of 2015–16, but it continues to be inimical to sustained growth and stable governance
Iranian overtures to Indonesia: Why? and Why now
Iran's 'Look East' policy entails more than relations with the People's Republic of China, India and the republics of Central Eurasia. Crucial to the Islamic Republic's eastward turn are recent overtures to Indonesia, which include not only diplomatic and economic initiatives but also joint military projects. Why Tehran has stepped up its efforts to align with Jakarta can be explained in terms of recent moves by the Arab Gulf states, most notably…
Revisiting the modes of China's revisionism: A comment on Natalizia and Termine
Gabriele Natalizia and Lorenzo Termine lay out an innovative framework to analyze the trajectory of the current foreign policy of the People's Republic of China. As it stands, it suffers from serious conceptual ambiguities and generates a set of categories that is too large to guide empirical research. After revision, however, the framework that Natalizia and Termine propose can be deployed to elucidate Beijing's behavior in various parts of the …
Iran's Taliban problem revisited
Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study
Civil wars and international conflicts revisited: Insights from the southern theatre of the Syrian uprising, 2011–2017
Recent scholarship reports a strong statistical correlation between civil wars and international conflicts, yet the process whereby internal warfare generates external military confrontations remains understudied and obscure. Insight into the linkage can be gained from a detailed exploration of the southern theatre of the Syrian uprising. From 2011 to 2013, sporadic skirmishes took place between anti-government forces and defenders of the Ba’thi …
Antinomies of Alignment: Kuwait and the United States
Kuwait has forged a strong bilateral security alignment with the United States over the past three decades. But it has also pursued foreign policies that run counter to expressed American objectives and priorities in the Gulf and the broader Middle East. Why this happens can best be explained in terms of a combination of shifts in the overt US commitment to the partnership and changes in the level of threat in the region
Algeria’s Assertive Re-emergence
Algeria is re-emerging as an active player in international politics following the Arab Spring uprisings that swept across the Middle East and North Africa beginning in 2010–11. But it has adopted a much different posture from the one it maintained during the 1960s and 1970s. The broadly accommodative attitude that Algiers previously exhibited towards the outside world has been replaced by a more combative stance. Military power has become its pr…
Securitising Identity: The Case of the Saudi State
English-language scholarship on the history and politics of Saudi Arabia has proliferated markedly over the past two decades. Although significant gaps in the narrative remain to be filled –– if pe
Why foreign military interventions prolong civil wars: Lessons from Yemen
Spatial clustering of fighting during civil wars: Insights from Syria
Quantitative research demonstrates that fighting clusters in space during civil wars, and that communities will be more likely to take up arms if they are located close to one or more other communities that are already engaged in combat. Yet the proposed explanations for such spatial clustering remain inadequate. Existing studies posit the importance of the dispersion of government resources, logistical connections among combatants, asymmetries o…
Kings and Presidents: Saudi Arabia and the United States since FDR
Analytical studies of the fluctuating relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia remain surprisingly rare. Meanwhile, anecdotal, personality-oriented overviews of the partnership, most
Why did the Syrian Uprising Become a Sectarian Conflict? A Provisional Synthesis
When the Syrian uprising broke out in February 2011, protesters voiced a broad range of grievances. Prominent among these were complaints about pervasive corruption and the regime's failure to respect the rights of citizens. Even after the uprising took a turn toward violent contention, religious rhetoric and symbolism played only an instrumental role in mobilizing popular discontent. As the uprising persisted, however, anti-regime activism start…
Bahrain: The Modernization of Autocracy
First published in 1989. Bahrain is at the same time unique among the Arab oil-producing Gulf states and indicative of future developments in these emirates. Its uniqueness lies in the social, political, and economic structures of the country: The indigenous population is characterized by a peculiar set of overlapping cleavages; the country's industrial work force has a history of militant action and a degree of political consciousness unmatched …
State Interests and Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan’s Identity
Journal Article State Interests and Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan’s Identity Get access State Interests and Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan’s Identity by Marc Lynch. New York, Columbia University Press, 1999. 330 pp. Cloth, $49.50; paper, $18.50. Fred H. Lawson Fred H. Lawson Mills College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 115, I…
Hegemony and the structure of international trade reassessed: A view from Arabia
Mercantilist explanations for the development of international trading orders have assumed that changes in peripheral areas during the 19th century corresponded with developments among the largest and most advanced countries of the period. Relatively free trade, however, was not the rule at three important ports along the Arabian coast when Great Britain was in a hegemonic position in the area. Rather, British predominance in this part of the wor…
Why Syria Goes to War: Thirty Years of Confrontation
Rejecting conventional explanations for Syrian foreign policy, which emphasize the personalities and attitudes of leaders, cultural factors peculiar to Arab societies, or the machinations of the great powers, Fred H. Lawson describes key shifts in Damascus's response to regional adversaries in terms of changes in the intensity of political struggles at home. Periodic eruptions of domestic conflict have inspired Syria's ruling coalition to adopt a…
Rural Revolt and Provincial Society in Egypt, 1820–1824
Given Gabriel Baer's 1962 study “Submissiveness and Revolt of the Fellah,” there should be no more talk of the political passivity of Egyptian peasants and their rural neighbors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Baer demonstrates that rural uprisings were frequent and widespread during the years just before and on into the regime of Muhammad Ali Pasha. Furthermore, he describes three series of provincial rebellions which were signif…
The Iranian Crisis of 1945–1946 and the Spiral Model of International Conflict
Diplomatic historians of all persuasions agree that the Iranian Crisis of 1945–1946 played a considerable part in initiating the Cold War. For revisionist writers, the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that took place during these months resulted from American efforts to carve out a sphere of influence in the oil-producing areas of the Middle East. By the autumn of 1945, according to this view, U.S. firms had gained con…
Syria's intervention in the Lebanese civil war, 1976: A Domestic Conflict Explanation
Syria's intervention in the Lebanese civil war in the late spring of 1976 has usually been explained in either structural or perceptual terms. Neither kind of account does a very good job of explaining the character and timing of this military operation. But relating the intervention to changes in Syria's domestic political situation accounts for it much more satisfactorily. Specifically, Syria's ruling social coalition found itself confronted wi…
Crisis and transformation in post-Bouteflika Algeria
Algeria faces a renewed conjunction of political-economic crisis and widespread popular discontent. Making sense of the current situation requires a careful consideration of the social structure of accumulation that governs the country’s domestic affairs. This institutional arrangement has undergone a notable transformation since the previous crisis of 2015–16, but it continues to be inimical to sustained growth and stable governance
Desecuritization, Domestic Struggles, and Egypt’s Conflict with Ethiopia over the Nile River
Egypt maintained a policy of antagonism at arm’s length toward Ethiopia throughout Husni Mubarak’s presidency. This pattern changed immediately following Mubarak’s ouster. The burst of rapprochement and diplomatic activism that took shape in the spring of 2011 signaled a fundamental shift in the content and form of Egyptian policy vis-à-vis Ethiopia, which was reflected in President Muhammad Mursi’s reluctance to respond belligerently to Ethiopia…
Explaining the Spread of Ethnosectarian Conflict: Syria's Civil War and the Resurgence of Kurdish Militancy in Turkey
Ethnic civil wars tend to spread to adjacent countries, yet the processes whereby diffusion takes place remain obscure. Quantitative studies point to a wide range of factors and dynamics that drive ethnosectarian conflicts across international borders with no consensus regarding the causal potency of these variables or the ways in which they interact with one another. Surveying the most influential theories that have been advanced so far clarifie…
Syria's mutating civil war and its impact on Turkey, Iraq and Iran
Journal Article Syria's mutating civil war and its impact on Turkey, Iraq and Iran Get access FRED H. LAWSON FRED H. LAWSON 1Professor of Government at Mills College in Oakland, California, and Visiting Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 90, Issue 6, November 2014, Pages 1351–1365, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.12173 Published: 12 Novembe…
Alliance Behavior in Nineteenth-Century Europe
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Saudi Arabia Calls Out Hezbollah: Why Now
From Here We Begin: A Survey of Scholarship on the International Relations of the Gulf
Academic writing on the international relations of the Gulf has mushroomed over the last decade and a half, but for the most part the quality of work has not kept pace with the quantity. As a result, most literature on the topic adds little to our understanding of world politics, either in the region or in the world at large. This essay surveys the state of existing scholarship in three broad areas: foreign policy studies, security studies and th…
Syria's Relations with Iran: Managing the Dilemmas of Alliance
Syria's relations with Iran illustrate the importance of what Glenn Snyder calls the “alliance dilemma.” Efforts to strengthen the strategic partnership with Tehran have had a direct impact on Damascus's policies toward regional rivals. Nevertheless, the connection between the alliance game and the adversary game is not as straightforward as one might think. Whenever one ally adopts a posture of moderate hostility toward an adversary, the other i…
Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy
Journal Article Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy Get access Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy by Stephen D. Krasner. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1999. 264 pp. Cloth, $49.50; paper, $16.95. Fred H. Lawson Fred H. Lawson Mills College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 114, Issue 4, Winter 1999, Pages 716–717, https://doi.org/10.2307/2657807 Published: 15 February 2…
Iranian overtures to Indonesia: Why? and Why now
Iran's 'Look East' policy entails more than relations with the People's Republic of China, India and the republics of Central Eurasia. Crucial to the Islamic Republic's eastward turn are recent overtures to Indonesia, which include not only diplomatic and economic initiatives but also joint military projects. Why Tehran has stepped up its efforts to align with Jakarta can be explained in terms of recent moves by the Arab Gulf states, most notably…
Revisiting the modes of China's revisionism: A comment on Natalizia and Termine
Gabriele Natalizia and Lorenzo Termine lay out an innovative framework to analyze the trajectory of the current foreign policy of the People's Republic of China. As it stands, it suffers from serious conceptual ambiguities and generates a set of categories that is too large to guide empirical research. After revision, however, the framework that Natalizia and Termine propose can be deployed to elucidate Beijing's behavior in various parts of the …
Why foreign military interventions prolong civil wars: Lessons from Yemen
The changing role of the Gulf in the international political economy
In the past half-decade, the role of the Gulf in the international political economy has changed dramatically. The region’s position as a supplier of world hydrocarbons has slipped, even as local consumption of oil and gas continues to expand. Gulf investments have shifted from the industrialized countries to the Middle East and North Africa. Saudi Arabia no longer exercises disproportionate influence in the Group of 20. Finally, relations with t…
China's Gulf Policy: Existing Theories, New Perspectives
Keys to the Kingdom: Current Scholarship on Saudi Arabia
Among the Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa, Saudi Arabia is at once paradigmatic and exceptional. The kingdom epitomizes what every schoolchild knows about this part of the world—limitless deserts, camel-herding nomads, oil wells, jet-setting princes, reactionary religious authorities, severely restricted gender relations—all in one neat package. At the same time, it takes these features to extremes approximated only by neighboring…
Zunes: Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism
(2003). Zunes: Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism. Journal of Palestine Studies: Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 110-111
Westphalian Sovereignty and the Emergence of the Arab States System: The Case of Syria
(2000). Westphalian Sovereignty and the Emergence of the Arab States System: The Case of Syria. The International History Review: Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 529-556
Military Muddle: Israel and Conventional Deterrence: Border Warfare from 1953 to 1970. . Jonathan Shimshoni
International Regimes and Commercial Hegemony: Control of the Arabian Littoral, 1800–1905
(1983). International Regimes and Commercial Hegemony: Control of the Arabian Littoral, 1800–1905. The International History Review: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 84-112
In Memoriam: Robert Warden Lee
Journal Article In Memoriam: Robert Warden Lee Get access F. H. Lawson F. H. Lawson Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Journal of Comparative Law, Volume 7, Issue 4, Autumn 1958, Pages 659–661, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcl/7.4.659b Published: 01 October 1958
Alliance Behavior in Nineteenth-Century Europe
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Question of Imperialism: The Political Economy of Dominance and Dependence
The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century
Rural Revolt and Provincial Society in Egypt, 1820–1824
Given Gabriel Baer's 1962 study “Submissiveness and Revolt of the Fellah,” there should be no more talk of the political passivity of Egyptian peasants and their rural neighbors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Baer demonstrates that rural uprisings were frequent and widespread during the years just before and on into the regime of Muhammad Ali Pasha. Furthermore, he describes three series of provincial rebellions which were signif…
Social Bases for the Hamah Revolt
Egypt's Military Bureaucracy: Saad El-Shazly. The Crossing of the Suez
Egypt's Military Bureaucracy
Egypt's Military Bureaucracy: The Crossing of the Suez. . Saad El-Shazly
International Regimes and Commercial Hegemony: Control of the Arabian Littoral, 1800–1905
(1983). International Regimes and Commercial Hegemony: Control of the Arabian Littoral, 1800–1905. The International History Review: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 84-112
Using Positive Sanctions to End International Conflicts: Iran and the Arab Gulf Countries
Efforts by the Gulf Co-operation Council to persuade Iran to end its war with Iraq in exchange for access to a large amount of capital during the late spring of 1982 were not only ignored by the Iranian government but also met with greatly increased demands for reparations on the part of Iranian leaders. This event raises at least two important questions regarding the use of positive sanctions as a way of ending inter national conflicts: under wh…
Hegemony and the structure of international trade reassessed: A view from Arabia
Mercantilist explanations for the development of international trading orders have assumed that changes in peripheral areas during the 19th century corresponded with developments among the largest and most advanced countries of the period. Relatively free trade, however, was not the rule at three important ports along the Arabian coast when Great Britain was in a hegemonic position in the area. Rather, British predominance in this part of the wor…
The Reagan Administration in the Middle East
Syria's intervention in the Lebanese civil war, 1976: A Domestic Conflict Explanation
Syria's intervention in the Lebanese civil war in the late spring of 1976 has usually been explained in either structural or perceptual terms. Neither kind of account does a very good job of explaining the character and timing of this military operation. But relating the intervention to changes in Syria's domestic political situation accounts for it much more satisfactorily. Specifically, Syria's ruling social coalition found itself confronted wi…
South Yemen: A Marxist Republic in Arabia
This book explains why the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen has embarked on an unexpected path, providing a cogent outline of its venerable and turbulent history and a succinct description of its geography, culture, natural resources, and economy
Class and State in Kuwait
Challenging Colonialism: Bank Misr and Egyptian Industrialization, 1920-1941
Domestic conflict and foreign policy: The contribution of some undeservedly neglected historical studies
How to conceptualize the relationship between domestic political conflict and foreign policy has been a perennial problem of international relations. Quantitative studies of the internal and external conflict behaviors of nations have proposed and rejected correlations between these two phenomena on a regular basis. But the theoretical linkages that are presented in these studies between the domestic and external political arenas are generally ma…
Positive Sanctions and the Managing of International Conflict: Five Middle Eastern Cases
Conflicts among nations are most often resolved by means of punishments or deprivations. Given the anarchic character of the international arena, countries have little incentive to abjure the potential gains from pursuing a conflictful course of action until the costs of continuing the conflict become inordinate. Nor do governments have a clear incentive to submit their disputes with one another to outside arbitration, since any negotiated settle…
Political Perspectives on the Muslim World
This study is designed to serve as an introduction to the political situation of the Muslim World and to bridge the gap between theoretical and descriptive studies
Linkage Politics: Linkage Politics in the Middle East: Syria Between Domestic and External Conflict, 1961–1970 by Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov
Linkage Politics: Linkage Politics in the Middle East: Syria between Domestic and External Conflict, 1961-1970. . Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov
The Determinants of Middle East Policy: The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict: Making America's Middle East Policy, from Truman to Reagan. . Steven L. Spiegel
The Determinants of Middle East Policy: The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict: Making America's Middle East Policy, from Truman to Reagan, by Steven L. Spiegel
Defending Arabia
Political science (109 works) · Law (84 works) · Politics (65 works) · Law (60 works) · History (56 works) · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts (54 works) · Sociology (42 works) · Political economy (37 works) · Economics (36 works) · History (36 works)