Volume 27, Issue 3

The fatal conceit of foreign intervention refers to the limitations faced by governments using discretionary power to address perceived problems in foreign societies. Drawing on evidence from the “Afghanistan Papers”—a collection of internal government documents compiled by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) and released in December 2019—we demonstrate how the failure of the U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan to meet the stated objectives illustrates the fatal conceit of foreign intervention. We explore the limitations faced by foreign government interveners in three stages, reflecting distinct decision nodes within a means-ends framework in which the policies relating to foreign intervention are formulated and implemented.

The forced migration literature has acknowledged violence as the main driver of internal displacement in the context of armed conflicts. Nonetheless, scant attention has been devoted to the role of income, a factor identified by the standard economic literature as the key driver of voluntary migration. This study aims to fill in this gap by investigating the impact of agricultural income shocks on the number of internally displaced persons fleeing from violence, in the context of the Colombian armed conflict. To address the possible endogeneity between forced migration and income, we use the standardized deviation of rainfall from its historic mean as an instrumental variable for municipal agricultural income. Our main results suggest that the elasticity of forced migration with respect to agricultural income shocks is unitary. This finding highlights the fact that forced migration is the result of a complex decision-making process where violence interacts with individual characteristics and environmental factors. Therefore, public policies aimed at reducing forced migration from rural to urban areas should develop comprehensive strategies that not only improve security conditions at the place of origin but also enhance agricultural productivity and provide access to risk-coping mechanisms for farmers.

I investigate the determinants of interstate political alignment, examining why states take part in ongoing conflicts and which side they take in them. The puzzle I seek to address is why some states are much more likely to gain support than others, and whether the likelihood of such support varies on the basis of the issue under dispute and the characteristics of the state itself. I emphasize the interests of rulers, particularly their need to obtain support on issues of high salience to them. The desire for future reciprocity lies at the heart of these alignment decisions. First, leaders consistently reciprocate positive and negative alignments. Second, rulers avoid positively aligning with leaders of unstable or politically unrepresentative states, as the latter are less likely to be in a position to return the favor. In order to test this alignment explanation, I compile a dataset of interventions into existing wars, MIDs, and sanctions regimes, covering the 1816–1999 time period. The results show that not all types of states are likely to enter an ongoing conflict. When those states do join a dispute, they do so on the side of those who helped them in the past.

The hypothesis that military spending affects economic growth and other aspects of the economy has been under scrutiny over the last decades. However, the macroeconomic impact of defense outlays is still an open question for researchers and policymakers. Aiming to contribute to the existing debate, this paper combines Keynesian with monetary theory and develops a discrete-time model that allows for potential fiscal-monetary coordination for financing the military sector in order to examine the effects of defense outlays on income and inflation. Τhe theoretical analysis suggests that military budget expansions can only have temporary effects on income, as in the long run, their impact on the economy is solely inflationary. However, the empirical findings associated with the economy of Turkey are not fully consistent with the theoretical conclusions of the specified model.

This paper investigates the nexus of military expenditure, income inequality, and profit rate, applying the non-parametric technique of Partial Least Squares Path Modeling (PLS-PM) to 21 countries for 1988–2008. The findings suggest that military expenditure has a positive effect on income inequality while income inequality has a positive impact on profit rate. In contrast, military expenditure has a (relatively small) positive effect on profit rate. However, these results change significantly once unobserved heterogeneity is considered. Accordingly, based on four segments, although the positive effect of income inequality on profit rate remains the same for each segment, for some segments, the effect of military expenditure on income inequality and profit rate become negative.