12 Items

Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee Gen. Ehsan ul Haq, 9th from right, with other members pose in front of Pakistan's Hatf IV (Shaheen-I) nuclear capable ballistic missile before its test launch on  Nov. 29, 2006.

AP Photo

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Policy

Pakistan's Nukes are Safe. Maybe.

| August 13, 2009

"...[T]he primary risk to the Pakistani Army's ability to safely secure nuclear assets in its custody would likely be during crisis scenarios — either against India or due to a perceived Western threat to the integrity of Pakistan's arsenal — that might cause Pakistan to move to a higher state of nuclear readiness. If the Army feels compelled to rapidly disperse or relocate nuclear components and loses the defensive advantage of protecting them in secure fixed locations, insider foreknowledge of movements and the loss of centralized control could increase the probability of theft or loss...."

Journal Article - International Organization

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

| Spring 2009

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.