Articles

The fall of Aleppo is a human catastrophe. It’s also a demonstration of the perils of choosing the middle course in a military conflict. Sometimes it’s possible to talk and fight at the same time. But in Syria, the U.S. decision to pursue a dual-track, halfway approach made the mayhem worse.

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.

When do newly independent states employ coercive measures against restive ethnic minorities within their borders rather than offer them concessions? The more vulnerable a state is to a particular minority’s bid for secession, the more likely it is to use coercion against that minority.

Critics of ethnofederalism—a political system in which federal subunits reflect ethnic groups’ territorial distribution—argue that it facilitates secession and state collapse. An examination of post-1945 ethnofederal states, however, shows that ethnofederalism has succeeded more often than not.

"The recent crisis in Abkhazia reveals a fundamental qualitative change in the conflict in which the balance among three main actors is shifting, and increasingly the conflict plays a more important role in the triangular relations between Georgia, Russia and the West. The search for a new equilibrium in the conflict, one that would be an optimal outcome for the actors involved, will require rethinking the mutually constitutive roles (identities) and interests they want to assume with respect to the conflict and the entire South Caucasus...."

This essay explores the impact of the end of the Cold War on the counter-refugee-crisis policies of the United Nations and its strongest member states.

This paper focuses on two rationalist explanations for war: issue indivisibility and time horizons. It argues that both types of bargaining problems have not only been undertheorized in the international relations literature, but that a non-trivial proportion of the violence witnessed since the end of the Cold War may be explained by these obstacles to non-violent conflict resolution. It uses the case of Russia's two most recent wars in Chechnya.

Op-ed by Dr. Ashton B. Carter and Dr. Graham T. Allison in The Washington Post