Articles

Whichever party controls the capital city in a civil war is recognized by the international community, but this can weaken the state in the long term.

During the 1971 Bangladesh war for independence from Pakistan, the Pakistan army carried out a genocide that killed hundreds of thousands of Bengalis in what was then East Pakistan. The perpetrators never faced trial. Archival documents reveal how India and Bangladesh sacrificed the opportunity for war crimes trials to gain Pakistan’s agreement on key security goals—the Simla peace agreement and recognition of Bangladesh’s independence. The legacy of this decision continues to blight Bangladesh’s politics.

In The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide,Gary Bass argues that both the Nixon administration and the global community purposely ignored Pakistan’s genocide of civilians in East Pakistan. Sumit Ganguly reviews the book and reflects on the significance of the 1971 genocide.

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.

"In our view, the field has moved away from a careful reliance on theory, and is just mindlessly going out and testing hypotheses without thinking very hard about what's really causing what."

"Iran has always been a major power in that region. Under Saddam however, Iran and Iraq were bitter enemies who fought a long war and were strongly opposed to one another. There was almost a rough balance of power between the two countries. By reducing Iraq's power and by allowing the Shia to become the dominant political force in Iraq, the US removed the main country balancing Iran, and helped bring to power a government that has at least some sympathies and links to Iran. So, Iran is by far the main strategic beneficiary of the Iraq War, which made it even more difficult for the US and its allies to deal with the country."

Realist scholars have long debated the question of how much power states need to feel secure. Offensive realists claim that states should constantly seek to increase their power. Defensive realists argue that accumulating too much power can be self-defeating. Proponents of hegemonic stability theory contend that the accumulation of capabilities in one state can exert a stabilizing effect on the system. The three schools describe different points along the power con­tinuum. When a state is weak, accumulating power increases its security. This is approximately the situation described by offensive realists. A state that con­tinues to accumulate capabilities will eventually triggers a balancing reaction that puts its security at risk. This scenario accords with defensive realist as­sumptions. Finally, when the state becomes too powerful to balance, its oppo­nents bandwagon with it, and the state’s security begins to increase again. This is the situation described by hegemonic stability theory. These three stages delineate a modified parabolic relationship between power and secu­rity. As a state moves along the power continuum, its security increases up to a point, then decreases, and finally increases again. This modified parabolic re­lationship allows scholars to synthesize previous realist theories into a single framework.

"If the Pakistani authorities cannot or will not play their part, a way should be found to scale back significantly the U.S. and NATO military commitment in Afghanistan. Our fundamental problem, it should be emphasized, is with Al Qaeda, and secondarily with the Taliban, who sheltered Al Qaeda. We cannot be perceived as moving toward a colonial war, as happened in Vietnam...."

The historical record indicates that nonviolent campaigns have been more successful than armed campaigns in achieving ultimate goals in political struggles, even when used against similar opponents and in the face of repression. Nonviolent campaigns are more likely to win legitimacy, attract widespread domestic and international support, neutralize the opponent's security forces, and compel loyalty shifts among erstwhile opponent supporters than are armed campaigns, which enjoin the active support of a relatively small number of people, offer the opponent a justification for violent counterattacks, and are less likely to prompt loyalty shifts and defections. An original, aggregate data set of all known major nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006 is used to test these claims. These dynamics are further explored in case studies of resistance campaigns in Southeast Asia that have featured periods of both violent and nonviolent resistance.