Ruolin Su responds to Alexander B. Downes and Lindsey A. O'Rourke's fall 2016 article, "You Can’t Always Get What You Want: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Seldom Improves Interstate Relations."

Michael Poznansky responds to Alexander B. Downes and Lindsey A. O'Rourke's fall 2016 article, "You Can't Always Get What You Want: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Seldom Improves Interstate Relations."

As recent U.S. experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya show, helping to overthrow a regime doesn’t usually result in a compliant, friendly government in the target state. 

In recent decades, the United States has attempted to overthrow the regimes of several other countries in the hopes that the new regimes will be friendly toward Washington. Does foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC) succeed in making target states more accommodating to interveners’ interests? A new dataset and an analysis of foreign interventions in the Congo Wars show that FIRC damages relations between intervener and target state more often than it improves them.

William G. Nomikos responds to Alexander B. Downes and Jonathan Monten's Spring 2013 International Security article, "Forced to Be Free?: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization."

Is military intervention effective in spreading democracy? Existing studies disagree. Optimists point to successful cases, such as the transformation of West Germany and Japan into consolidated democracies after World War II. Pessimists view these successes as outliers from a broader pattern of failure typified by cases such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

This policy brief is based on “Testing the Surge: Why Did Violence Decline in Iraq in 2007?” which appears in the summer 2012 issue of International Security.

Dan Reiter and Allan Stam respond to Alexander Downes's Spring 2009 article "How Smart and Tough Are Democracies? Reassessing Theories of Democratic Victory in War."

New evidence challenges the near-conventional argument that democracies are more likely than nondemocracies to win wars they start. A reanalysis of original data on war outcomes and an in-depth case study of the Johnson administration's decisions regarding Vietnam in 1965 demonstrate that democracies of all types are not significantly more likely to win wars. Furthermore, they are constrained by domestic politics and are often pressured into unwinnable wars.

Accidental harm to civilians in warfare often becomes an occasion for public outrage, from citizens of both the victimized and the victimizing nation. In this vitally important book on a topic of acute concern for anyone interested in military strategy, international security, or human rights, Alexander B. Downes reminds readers that democratic and authoritarian governments alike will sometimes deliberately kill large numbers of civilians as a matter of military strategy. What leads governments to make such a choice?