The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and de‹ciency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself the enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency. (Ibn al-Haytham)1

국제정치이론 = Theory of international politics

Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India. By Kanchan Chandra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 368p. $80.00. In the post-9/11 world where the “clash of civilizations” has moved beyond classroom debates to the public realm, it is refreshing, and challenging, to see a study that does not give ethnicity an easy ride. The title of this book is slightly misleading, though, because even while it concedes that appeals for political support on the basis of ethnic categories based on “race, caste, tribe or religion” (p. 2) are frequently made, sometimes with considerable success, it asserts that such tactics do not always succeed. When they do, it is not necessarily because of their putative appeal to sentiments but, instead, because both ethnic candidates and their supporters, rather than being swayed by appeals to their nonrational selves, are actually driven by sophisticated calculations of expected gain. Their utility calculus takes the size of the ultimate prize as well as the probability of winning it into account when they choose to align themselves with one set of politicians as opposed to another. Kanchan Chandra's parsimonious and general model explains why ethic parties in India, riding on Hindu or, for that matter, Tamil nationalism, succeed in some contexts but not in others.

Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India

Preface vii *1. Introduction 1 *2. Mathematical Prelude: A Selective Introduction to Logic and Set Theory for Social Scientists 16 I. CAUSAL MODELS AND INFERENCE *3. Causes-of-Effects versus Effects-of-Causes 41 *4. Causal Models 51 *5. Asymmetry 64 *6. Hume's Two Definitions of Cause 75 II. WITHIN-CASE ANALYSIS *7. Within-Case versus Cross-Case Causal Analysis 87 *8. Causal Mechanisms and Process Tracing 100 *9. Counterfactuals 115 III. CONCEPTS AND MEASUREMENT *10. Concepts: Definitions, Indicators, and Error 127 *11. Meaning and Measurement 139 *12. Semantics, Statistics, and Data Transformations 150 *13. Conceptual Opposites and Typologies 161 IV. RESEARCH DESIGN AND GENERALIZATION *14. Case Selection and Hypothesis Testing 177 *15. Generalizations 192 *16. Scope 205 *17. Conclusion 220 Appendix 227 Name Index 231 Subject Index 235

A Tale of Two Cultures: Qualitative and Quantitative Research in the Social Sciences

The sources of military doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the world wars

A probe of various regional power nuclear postures reveals that such postures, rather than simply the acquisition of nuclear weapons, can have differential effects on deterrence and stability dynamics. The India-Pakistan dyad is a useful candidate for exploring these various effects because the three regional power nuclear postures—catalytic, assured retaliation, and asymmetric escalation—have interacted with each other in South Asia. In particular, Pakistan's shift from a catalytic posture to an asymmetric escalation posture in 1998 against a continuous Indian assured retaliation posture allows the effects of nuclear posture to be isolated in an enduring rivalry in which many variables can be held constant. The asymmetric escalation posture may be “deterrence optimal” for Pakistan, suggesting that nuclear postures do have different effects on conflict dynamics, but it has also enabled Pakistan to more aggressively pursue longstanding revisionist preferences in India, triggering more frequent and intense ...

Posturing for Peace? Pakistan's Nuclear Postures and South Asian Stability

List of Figures and Tables vii Acknowledgments ix Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 The Sources of Regional Power Nuclear Postures: Posture Optimization Theory 13 Chapter 3 Pakistan 55 Chapter 4 India 94 Chapter 5 China 121 Chapter 6 France 153 Chapter 7 Israel 179 Chapter 8 South Africa 207 Chapter 9 Deterring Unequally I: A Large-n Analysis 222 Chapter 10 Deterring Unequally II: Regional Power Nuclear Postures and Crisis Behavior 253 Chapter 11 Conclusion 299 Bibliography 313 Index 333

Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict

In a key finding in the democratic peace literature, Mansfield and Snyder argue that states with weak institutions undergoing incomplete transitions to democracy are more likely to initiate an external war than other types of states. We show that the empirical data do not support this claim. We find a dearth of observations where incomplete democratizers with weak institutions participated in war. Additionally, we find that the statistical relationship between incomplete democratization and war is entirely dependent on the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire prior to World War I. We also find that the case selection in Mansfield and Snyder rarely involved incomplete democratizers with weak institutions. We therefore conclude that the finding that incomplete democratizers with weak institutions are more likely to initiate or participate in war is not supported by the empirical data.

Who Are These Belligerent Democratizers? Reassessing the Impact of Democratization on War

Existing nuclear deterrence scholarship evinces a pervasive ''existential bias,'' assuming that once a state merely possesses nuclear weapons, it should be able to deter armed conflict. The empirical literature expresses this bias by simply dichot- omously coding a state based on whether it has nuclear weapons, thereby treating all nuclear states as equivalent. Thus, whether nuclear weapons deter conflict, and how much is required to do so, is unclear. This article shifts the unit of analysis away from nuclear weapons to postures, hypothesizing that different nuclear postures are distinct and generate differential deterrent power, particularly amongst the non- superpower states which comprise the lion's share of nuclear powers. I find that an asymmetric escalation nuclear posture uniquely deters conflict initiation and esca- lation. Not only do small arsenals have little deterrence success, but I find that even assured retaliation postures fail to deter intense conventional conflict. This suggests that the deterrence dividend is distributed unequally across nuclear powers, and that states may need to do more than simply acquire nuclear weapons to successfully deter conventional attacks.

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What Does It Take to Deter? Regional Power Nuclear Postures and International Conflict

How do states pursue nuclear weapons? Why do they select particular strategies to develop them, and how do these choices affect the international community’s ability to prevent nuclear proliferation? The bulk of the proliferation literature focuses on why states want nuclear weapons. The question of how they pursue them, however, has largely been ignored. This question is important because how states try to acquire nuclear weapons—their strategies of nuclear proliferation—affects their likelihood of success and thus the character of the nuclear landscape. Four strategies of proliferation are available to states: hedging, sprinting, hiding, and sheltered pursuit. Nuclear acquisition theory explains why a proliferator might select one strategy over the others at a given time. Empirical codings from the universe of nuclear pursuers, combined with a detailed plausibility probe of India’s long march to acquiring nuclear weapons—including novel details—establish the analytical power of the theory. Different strategies of proliferation offer different opportunities and vulnerabilities for nuclear proliferation and nonproliferation, with signiacant implications for international security.

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Vipin Narang

Papers

Posturing for Peace? Pakistan's Nuclear Postures and South Asian Stability

Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict

Who Are These Belligerent Democratizers? Reassessing the Impact of Democratization on War

What Does It Take to Deter? Regional Power Nuclear Postures and International Conflict

Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation: How States Pursue the Bomb