Dictators at War and Peace (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

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The book constitutes a major leap forward in the study of authoritarian regimes and international security, and deserves the broadest possible readership both in academia and the policy community. Even more valuable is her finding that certain types of dictatorships are as pacific and as competent at war as democracies. In this cogent analysis of the important variation among autocratic regimes when it comes to decisions about war and peace, Jessica L. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Since the four factors mentioned earlier neatly organize themselves into four regime types, it is not really possible to evaluate which factors drive decisions for conflict.

Civilians, I argue, would have been more likely to raise the issue in a venue like the United Nations (UN), where many countries supported decolonization.

Case studies of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s decision to invade Finland and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s decision to invade Kuwait make the case that each was a personalist leader who undertook a risky gamble that less megalomaniacal leaders with more concerns about possible punishment would have eschewed. Explicitly building on the bargaining model of war and taking account of strategic interaction at both the domestic and international level, I would argue, might also lead to some countervailing hypotheses. Case studies are a useful tool in tracing causal mechanisms, and in her book Weeks innovates relative to her earlier published work not just through an analysis of the factors that influence war outcome and post-conflict punishment in Chapter Three but also through presenting new qualitative evidence. One issue that these three essays skirt, and which I wish to touch on here, concerns the policy ramifications of Weeks’s argument.

Leaving such theoretical issues aside, Weeks’s framework also raises some issues for the empirical sections of her book, especially the case studies which are a significant addition to her previous published work. A recent literature argues that the initiation of a crisis is a poor proxy for threats [31]Moreover, it is not clear that the outcome of ouster means that the audience punishes the leader for failing to carry through on a threat. Since these factors come together coherently, Weeks can use them to rank regimes from least to most likely on each of the proposed dependent variables, with for example Strongmen having the highest, Bosses, the second highest, Juntas the second lowest and Machines the lowest probability of conflict initiation. At a minimum, civilian officials had no input on the formation of military strategy and it was unclear who had the authority to make strategic commitments on behalf of Germany. Within the constrained and unconstrained categories, juntas and strongmen are somewhat more bellicose than their civilian-led counterparts owing to military officers' positive views on force.

In chapter 3, Weeks finds that Machines are just as likely as democracies to prevail in wars and MIDs, whereas Bosses and Strongmen are significantly more likely to lose.

Although I am personally not fond of positivism in the humanities as a methodology, she uses it adequately to show the differences of conflict occurrence between regime types in her admittedly limited example pool. His first book, War and Punishment, was published by Princeton University Press (2000), and focuses on the role of leaders in war termination–with an empirical focus on World War I.Thus, I believe that Downes and I agree that the military can exert influence even when the leader is a civilian. Although it is difficult to say for certain, two pieces of evidence suggest that these types of regimes are not uncommon in authoritarian states: (1) according to the Archigos dataset, of all leaders who were ousted by “irregular” (i. But these leaders may also face threats of removal from the military audience if they do not behave more aggressively.

It is also true that the unit of analysis in Chapter 2 is the directed dyad-year rather than the country-year. It is now well established in the military effectiveness literature, for example, that regimes where the leadership fears a military coup take a number of steps—collectively referred to as ‘coup-proofing,’ and including such measures as purging competent military officers and replacing them with incompetent (but loyal) bunglers; creating multiple independent military and paramilitary forces; prohibiting communication between officers and adjacent units to inhibit anti-regime coordination; and allowing little if any realistic training—that decrease coup risk but vitiate the military’s combat effectiveness. The book proposes that they do, and intriguingly finds that some kinds of dictatorships exhibit foreign policy behavior that converges with democratic foreign policy behavior.Overcoming the societally ingrained belief that all non-democratic regimes are alike, Weeks shows the striking differences between them not just internally, but externally.