Articles

150 Items

 workers from the Misr Spinning and Weaving Factory in the northern industrial town of Mahalla el-Kobra, Egypt, beat on makeshift drums

AP/Paul Schemm, File

Journal Article - Journal of Peace Research

A Win or a Flop? Measuring Mass Protest Successfulness in Authoritarian Settings

| 2023

Previously rare events, mass protest movements have become popular vehicles for those seeking political, economic, and social change. How do scholars and policymakers evaluate movement success? Most studies addressing movement outcomes are grounded in the goal attainment approach, where movement success is dependent upon fulfilling one's stated demands. The models derived from this approach heavily rely on visibility and transparency in the policymaking process. These offer limited analytical utility for scholars studying movements in authoritarian states, where policymaking is shrouded and media is state-controlled. Evaluating movements solely on their fulfillment of mission goals is highly problematic, as movements produce more outcomes than their intended goals. Movements also produce unintended benefits: concessions unrelated to the movement's mission. These include negative consequences, or societal costs.

Protesters wave pride flags

AP/John Raoux

Journal Article - Journal of Peace Research

Guest Editors' Introduction: Nonviolent Resistance and Its Discontents

| 2023

In the past decade, myriad studies have explored the effects of nonviolent resistance (NR) on outcomes including revolutionary success (short-term and long-term) and democratization, and how nonviolent mobilization can play a similar role to violence in affecting social change in some settings. This special issue seeks to advance scholars' and policymakers' understanding of the role of nonviolence by tackling some key assumptions in existing work that are complicated by historical and contemporary realities of deepening polarization worldwide. This issue addresses four key areas within conflict and peace research that limit scholars' and policymakers' ability to make sense of NR: (a) the fragmented nature of civil resistance campaigns in terms of supporters and demands; (b) the increasing prevalence of authoritarian or anti-egalitarian nonviolent campaigns; and (c) the complicated nature of revolutionary success. Cutting across all three of these substantive areas is another key area, which is: (d) the United States as an increasingly salient site of conflict and contention.

Protesters walk past a police security line

AP/Emrah Gurel

Journal Article - Journal of Peace Research

Swords into Ploughshares? Why Human Rights Abuses Persist after Resistance Campaigns

| 2023

Human rights abuse tends to increase during national crises, such as civil wars and mass nonviolent uprisings. Under what conditions does this abuse abate or persist? The author argues that violent challenges provoke much more coercive state responses, exposing more personnel within the security forces to extreme forms of repression and priming them (both leaders and followers) to reproduce these behaviors after the conflict has terminated. This effect is mitigated or avoided when challengers rely on nonviolent tactics instead of violence, leading to less post-conflict abuse.

U.S. Army Soldiers share tactics and training with Nigerian Army Soldiers, Nigeria, February 8, 2018.

Capt. James Sheehan, U.S. Army

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

The Cult of the Persuasive: Why U.S. Security Assistance Fails

    Author:
  • Rachel Tecott Metz
| Winter 2022/23

Why does the U.S. Army rely on persuasion to influence military partners to improve their forces despite repeated failures that undermine U.S. foreign policy goals? The army prioritizes its role as a fighting force, not an advisory group. U.S. leaders have developed an ideology—the cult of the persuasive—to advance army bureaucratic interests.

Ukrainian Armed Forces use M777 howitzers donated due to the 2022 Russian invasion

Ukrainian Ground Forces via Wikimedia Commons

Journal Article - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Distressing a system in distress: global nuclear order and Russia’s war against Ukraine

| Nov. 08, 2022

While prosecuting its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has relied heavily on nuclear threats, turning the war in Ukraine into a dangerous nuclear crisis with profound implications for the global nuclear order and its two constitutive systems of nuclear deterrence and nuclear restraint. These two interconnected systems, each aiming to manage nuclear possession and reduce the risk of nuclear use, are at once complimentary and contradictory. While tensions between these systems are not new, the war in Ukraine exacerbates them in unprecedented ways. The system of nuclear deterrence seems to be proving its worth by inducing restraint on Russia and NATO, while the system of restraint is undermined by demonstrating what happens to a country not protected by nuclear deterrence. The latter lesson is particularly vivid given Ukraine’s decision to forgo a nuclear option in 1994 in exchange for security assurances from nuclear powers. Russia’s use of nuclear threats as an enabler for escalation and the specter of Russian tactical nuclear use against Ukraine goes well beyond its declared nuclear doctrine. The outcome of the war in Ukraine thus has critical importance for deciding the value of nuclear weapons in global security architecture and for resolving the conundrum between the systems of deterrence and restraint.

Ugandan Asians have their papers examined by ship's officer of the SS Haryana before they boarded the ship

AP Photo

Newspaper Article - Harvard Crimson

Kennedy School Postdoc Discusses Government-Sanctioned Mass Expulsion at Belfer Center Seminar

    Authors:
  • Cam E. Kettles
  • Jasmine Palma
  • Rysa Tahilramani
| Nov. 04, 2022

Meghan M. Garrity, an International Security Program postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center discussed her research on government-sanctioned mass expulsion events at a virtual seminar on November 3, 2022.

Greek and Armenian refugee children near Athens, Greece, in 1923

Wilimedia/Public Domain

Journal Article - Journal of Peace Research

Introducing the Government-Sponsored Mass Expulsion Dataset

| September 2022

This article introduces the Government-Sponsored Mass Expulsion (GSME) dataset documenting cross-border mass expulsion episodes around the world from 1900 to 2020. This new dataset focuses on mass expulsion policies in which governments systematically remove ethnic, racial, religious or national groups, en masse. The GSME dataset disaggregates mass expulsion from other exclusionary politics concepts to isolate policies of intentional group-based population removal. This allows for a systematic examination of governmental expulsion policies, distinct from policies aimed at annihilation (genocide), control (massacre) or cultural elimination (coercive assimilation).

North Korea celebrates Victory Day in 2013

Stefan Krasowski

Journal Article - Intelligence and National Security

Countering a Technological Berlin Tunnel: North Korean Operatives, Helicopters, and Intelligence in the Cold War Illicit Arms Trade, 1981-1986

| Apr. 04, 2022

This article considers the relationship between intelligence and the arms trade by examining North Korea’s procurement of 86 Hughes helicopters in the 1980s. Using recently declassified documents, the article contextualises the case using US intelligence assessments of North Korea’s procurement, and considers the role of the DPRK’s diplomats in Berlin, and the Western powers’ response. This history provides insights into the use of intelligence operatives for arms procurement, the role of intelligence agencies in monitoring the illicit arms trade, and the challenges in collection, analysis and acting on the intelligence surrounding arms trafficking.