Volume 21, Issue 3

The recent years have witnessed a heated debate on China’s rise. Using various theoretical arguments, existing research has generated quite divergent conclusions on whether China rises peacefully. Liberals argue that China has significantly benefited from the existing international economic system and therefore China is rising peacefully. On the other hand, realists such as John Mearsheimer argue that because China is likely to challenge the status quo, a rising China poses a threat to international security. Surprisingly, despite the ample scholarship on this topic and the existing divergent conclusions, a large-N empirical evaluation of China’s rise is missing in the existing research. This study fills this important gap by providing a large-N empirical investigation of militarized interstate disputes between China and other states from 1979 to 2010. We find that although China’s GDP, military spending, and CINC score have increased remarkably since the start of its economic reform, no empirical evidence points to more conflicts between China and other states. Furthermore, trade exerts only a weak effect on China’s conflict, a surprising yet interesting finding that revises the conventional wisdom in the literature.

This paper interprets the Moroccan crisis of 1905–1906 in the context of an incomplete information game model, the Tripartite Crisis game, and one of its proper subgames, the Defender-Protégé subgame. In the early stages of the crisis the action choices of the players were shown to be consistent with the players’ beliefs, but their beliefs were not tested. In the final phase, beliefs and action choices were brought into harmony. British support of France during the conference that ended the crisis, the firm stand that France took at the conference, and the German decision to press for a conference is explained in terms of the model’s principal variables. The explanation derived from the model is not necessarily at odds with consensus historical interpretations of the Moroccan crisis. Nonetheless, it offers several advantages over standard, largely atheoretical or ad hoc descriptions. One clear advantage is the convenient framework the model provides for organizing information about the crisis around a common set of assumptions and concepts and for the clear way the most salient causal variables are highlighted. Another is the model’s ability to point to a logically consistent set of expectations about the connections between certain action choices and the beliefs that drive them. Finally, the model’s straightforward applicability to an important and complicated watershed event is suggestive of its potential generality.

The data-set of the casualties of terrorist attacks in the Years of Lead in Italy is analyzed in order to empirically test theoretical open issues about terrorist activity. The first is whether Richardson’s law holds true when the scale is narrowed down from global to only one epoch of domestic terrorism in a single country. It is found that the power law is a plausible model. Then, the distribution of the inter-arrival times between two consecutive strikes is investigated, finding (weaker) indications that also for this parameter a power law is a plausible model and that this is the result of non-stationary dynamics of terrorist activity. The implications of this finding on the models available today for explaining a power law in the severity of attacks are then discussed. The paper also highlights the counter-intuitive implications that a power law distribution of the waiting times has for a State inferring the time to the next strike from the observation of the time already elapsed since the previous one. Further, it is shown how the analysis of the inter-arrival times provides estimates about the temporal evolution of terrorist strength that can help discriminating among competing hypotheses derived from qualitative analysis. Finally, a simplified mathematical model of the policy decision-making process is constructed to show how the nature of power laws biases the prioritizing of the policy agenda and the consequent allocation of resources to concurring issues. It is shown how the bias causes systematical relative underfunding of policy issues whose severity follows a power law distribution and that this trend is likely to persist until a major event will reverse the behavior of the decision-maker, then causing relative overfunding.

This paper analyzes the “revolving door” phenomena in the military sector in the US. The revolving door refers to the back-and-forth movement of personnel between the government and private sector. We examine the structure of the revolving door and explain how its very nature leads to the perpetuation of the permanent war economy. This analysis yields several important implications. First, the dynamics of the revolving door shape the military-industrial complex in a way that serves the narrow interests of select elites rather than the broad interests of citizens. Second, because the perverse incentives are a product of the institutional structure of the US military sector, the negative consequences are also structural and cannot be solved by increased oversight.