Dictators at War and Peace (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

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Some of these arguments turn out to apply to all types of political regimes, whereas others are unique to autocracies. In my understanding, exciting ongoing data collection efforts by Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz will allow scholars to construct measures of regime type that are comparable to those I use in my book, and check whether the results change. Thus, even without recourse to force, the Japanese military could topple the regime, a prerogative it exercised on multiple occasions.

Rather, the key distinction between our explanations is whether Galtieri made what he believed to be a desperate gamble because he feared severe punishment, or chose war because he and members of his domestic audience, composed of other junta members and top military officers, believed that diplomacy would be fruitless and that war could further the military’s parochial interests. Weeks' theory helps explain not only conflict initiation but also war outcomes and the fates of wartime leaders. She finds that the differences in the conflict behavior of distinct kinds of autocracies are as great as those between democracies and dictatorships. In previous secret diplomacy, the British government had made clear that it was willing to cede the islands if the inhabitants agreed, and moreover expressed frustration at the islanders’ reluctance to go along.I hope to see it explored further in the burgeoning theoretical and empirical literature on civil-military relations. Similarly, army officers escalated the Changkufeng and Nomonhan conflicts against the wishes of the civilian government (124-125). Regimes in which leaders are not accountable to any audience differ only in whether the leader has a civilian (Bosses) or military (Strongmen) background. Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide.

Weeks] makes readers insightfully aware of the key differences among 'dictatorships' that may account for alternative foreign policies. With such numbers in recent history, it seems eminently plausible that Galtieri feared an irregular removal from office and subsequent severe punishment.In sum, Dictators at War and Peace is an excellent book, which makes a number of careful and interesting arguments about an important but understudied topic. Since these factors come together coherently, Weeks can use them to rank regimes from least to most likely on each of the proposed dependent variables, with for example Strongmen having the highest, Bosses, the second highest, Juntas the second lowest and Machines the lowest probability of conflict initiation.

Because leaders of juntas also must worry about punishment in the event of foreign policy failure, they too are relatively cautious about the use of force, though their military outlook leaves them more likely to see resort to violence as appropriate. In this cogent analysis of the important variation among autocratic regimes when it comes to decisions about war and peace, Jessica L. First, the evidence related to Juntas is open to questions and potential criticisms, which in turn raises some broader questions about the importance of military backgrounds. Downes suggests that power-sharing between civilians and the military could introduce unique pathologies into the decisionmaking process. Weeks also performs illuminating case studies of two Bosses—Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin—two Juntas—Argentina in the early 1980s and interwar Japan—and two Machines—North Vietnam and the Soviet Union under Khrushchev.E. Goemans, War and Punishment: The Causes of War Termination and the First World War (Princeton, N. Moreover, the military tends to focus on its internal rival, undermining its ability to assess its own (and its external adversary’s) strengths and weaknesses, and it is unclear who has the final say on military strategy.