Articles

In an interview with Amin Arefi of French magazine Le Point, Ambassador (ret.) Nicholas Burns reflects on the first ten days of the Trump administration and the trajectory of American foreign policy going forward. Burns explains the fundamental differences between Donald Trump and George W. Bush, and the  worrying implications of Trump's indifference towards the US-backed system of alliances that has upheld the liberal world order for the past seven decades.   

Blood revenge is a crucial yet understudied contributor to many insurgencies and civil wars. Interviews with participants in and witnesses to the First and Second Chechen Wars reveal how a desire to avenge dead or injured relatives drove many Chechens to join insurgent groups.

Many academics and policymakers argue that the removal of leaders is an effective strategy in combating terrorism. Leadership decapitation is not always successful, however. A theory of organizational resilience explains why some terrorist organizations survive decapitation. Application of this theoretical model to the case of al-Qaida reveals that the deaths of Osama bin Laden and other high level al-Qaida operatives are unlikely to cause significant organizational decline.

Existing scholarship assumes that transnational insurgents strengthen domestic rebels. Analysis of transnational insurgents’ participation in the Chechen wars, however, reveals that foreign fighters can weaken a domestic opposition movement by introducing goals and tactics that divide the movement and alienate the local community. To avoid this outcome, domestic resistance leaders must adapt the foreigners’ ideas to the local context.

Following Kosovo's declaration of independence in February 2008, the European Union deployed a rule of law mission in Kosovo (EULEX). While EULEX and its supporters have argued that the mission has the potential to succeed, critics claim that the mission has failed to significantly improve Kosovo's rule of law institutions, to address the rule of law vacuum in the north of Kosovo, and to prosecute high-level organized crime and corruption.

States use wedge strategies to prevent hostile alliances from forming or to dis­perse those that have formed. These strategies can cause power alignments that are otherwise unlikely to occur, and thus have significant consequences for international politics. How do such strategies work and what conditions promote their success? The wedge strategies that are likely to have significant effects use selective accommodation—concessions, compensations, and other inducements—to detach and neutralize potential adversaries. These kinds of strategies play important roles in the statecraft of both defensive and offensive powers. Defenders use selective accommodation to balance against a primary threat by neutralizing lesser ones that might ally with it. Expansionists use se­lective accommodation to prevent or break up blocking coalitions, isolating opposing states by inducing potential balancers to buck-pass, bandwagon, or hide. Two cases—Great Britain’s defensive attempts to accommodate Italy in the late 1930s and Germany’s offensive efforts to accommodate the Soviet Union in 1939—help to demonstrate these arguments. By paying attention to these dynamics, international relations scholars can better understand how balancing works in specific cases, how it manifests more broadly in interna­tional politics, and why it sometimes fails in situations where it ought to work well.

Why has transnational war volunteering increased so dramatically in the Muslim world since 1980? Standard explanations, which emphasize U.S.-Saudi support for the 1980s Afghan mujahideen, the growth of Islamism, or the spread of Wahhabism are insufficient. The increase in transnational war volunteering is better explained as the product of a pan-Islamic identity movement that grew strong in the 1970s Arab world from elite competition among exiled Islamists in international Islamic organizations and Muslim regimes.

"...[N]onviolent Islamists might have views that are intolerable, but possess the legitimacy and street credibility to convince radicals not to carry out acts of violence and are therefore necessary counterterrorism assets. Critics of this approach argue that such partnerships' long-term repercussions on social cohesion and integration would be much greater than the yet-to-be-proven short-term gains that can be achieved in preventing acts of terrorism."

Several Muslim countries have formulated various programs to fight extremism. From Saudi Arabia to Indonesia, authorities have devised more or less comprehensive measures to deradicalize committed militants and prevent the radicalization of new ones. This soft approach to counterterrorism has also been adopted by some European governments. The 2004 Madrid and 2005 London attacks, as well as the arrest of hundreds of European Muslims who had been involved in a variety of terrorist activities, have clearly shown that radicalization is a problem in Europe. Over the last few years, various European governments have decided to combat radicalization processes among their Muslim population by enacting various counterradicalization programs, acknowledging that they cannot simply arrest their way out of the problem.