We hope you enjoy this virtual space, which showcases our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of International Studies at SUP.
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP International Studies titles with discount code S23XISA-FM through our virtual exhibit ».
To capture some of the spirit of gathering together in the ISA exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space, showcasing our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of International Studies at SUP.
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP International Studies titles with discount code S22XISA-FM through our virtual exhibit ».
Continue reading "International Studies Association Conference 2022" »
University Presses strive to publish titles of relevance, that advance scholarship and expand horizons. As a publisher of history, politics, and security studies, with a strong focus on Russia, Central Asia, and nuclear weapons, the Stanford University Press list is often starkly relevant to current affairs. The current war in Ukraine has revealed a broad lack of understanding of the region, its history, and its politics. It has also heightened concerns around authoritarianism, regional security, and the potential fragility of weapons treaties. Included here is a range of Stanford titles from the past decade that address various aspects of the current situation, ranging from studies of war in all its forms (Kaldor), Russian attitudes to religion and weapons (Adamsky), through to the development and fate of post-Soviet states (Kassenova).
The Bleeding Wound: The Soviet War in Afghanistan and the Collapse of the Soviet System »
"Yaacov Ro'i had the prescience to study the Soviet-Afghan War's effect on veterans and civilians at a time when most observers could only speculate about how the war would affect the USSR and the newly independent states. This book brings his original research into dialogue with new work and materials that have become available in intervening decades. An important and timely study that anyone interested in the region should read."
—Artemy Kalinovsky, Temple University
By the mid-1980s, public opinion in the USSR had begun to turn against Soviet involvement in Afghanistan: the Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989) had become a long, painful, and unwinnable conflict, one that Mikhail Gorbachev referred to as a "bleeding wound" in a 1986 speech. The eventual decision to withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan created a devastating ripple effect within Soviet society that, this book argues, became a major factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In this comprehensive survey of the effects of the war on Soviet society and politics, Yaacov Ro'i analyzes the opinions of Soviet citizens on a host of issues connected with the war and documents the systemic change that would occur when Soviet leadership took public opinion into account. The war and the difficulties that the returning veterans faced undermined the self-esteem and prestige of the Soviet armed forces and provided ample ammunition for media correspondents who sought to challenge the norms of the Soviet system. Through extensive analysis of Soviet newspapers and interviews conducted with Soviet war veterans and regular citizens in the early 1990s, Ro'i argues that the effects of the war precipitated processes that would reveal the inbuilt limitations of the Soviet body politic and contribute to the dissolution of the USSR by 1991.
Read Yaacov Ro'i's New Op-Ed on Politico EU,"Russia risks another ‘bleeding wound’ in Ukraine" »
Continue reading "Recommended Resources for Understanding Russia's Invasion of Ukraine" »
Risk management, warfare and the unmeasured gaps.
Studies show that states expose their own civilians and soldiers and enemy noncombatants to varying levels of risk. The most known is sociologist Martin Shaw's argument that the new Western way of war in the post-Vietnam era is characterized by the transfer of risk from soldiers to enemy noncombatants to reduce the military casualties and, by implication, the political costs stemming from the growing social sensitivity to casualties domestically.1
However, scholarly gaps still remain. Among them, variations in risk transfer have not been sufficiently measured and therefore conclusions—whether militaries shift or take risks— are largely unsupported empirically.
I tried to partly bridge this and other gaps in my new book, Whose Life Is Worth More?. Using empirical data drawn from the US, Britain, and Israel—democracies involved in prolonged warfare, in which policy-makers confront domestic constraints on the use of force—the book shows how states develop hierarchies of risk and death, an ordered scale of value that they apply to the lives of their soldiers relative to the lives of their civilians and enemy noncombatants. In the most interesting circumstances, states compensate for the aversion to sacrifice by attempting to increase the legitimacy of using aggressive fire to shift risk from their own soldiers onto enemy civilians.
Transfer of risk occurs when forces attack the enemy from a distance by using excessive lethality through artillery, aircraft, drones, and other means, sometimes with limited discrimination between combatants and noncombatants. Alternatively, exercising greater caution to avoid civilian casualties, for example, by adopting more restrictive rules of engagement to better discriminate between combatants and noncombatants, will likely increase the danger to soldiers.
Continue reading "Challenging the Myth of Respecting Noncombatant Immunity" »
Given the mixed results of the past, could sanctions work on North Korea moving forward?
Following the Mar-a-Lago summit, President Trump touted his cooperation with President Xi Jinping on North Korea as a diplomatic win. In the weeks since the summit, the outlines of the administration’s policy toward the peninsula have become more clear. Under the name of “maximum pressure and engagement,” Secretary Tillerson has outlined a strategy that includes more aggressive sanctions, while leaving military options open. Yet at the same time, he has promised that the United States would be willing to engage in negotiations—long a Chinese demand—were North Korea to express a willingness to discuss denuclearization. He has even stated that the United States is not seeking regime change nor unification and could provide North Korea security guarantees.
The history of such two-track efforts, which have resurfaced repeatedly since the first North Korean nuclear crisis some 25 years ago, are often plagued by complications that undermine the strategy. In Hard Target: Sanctions, Inducements, and the Case of North Korea, we investigate the history of these efforts, which are dogged by two problems. The first is that sanctions require coordination. At various times the United States has faced difficulty aligning not only China, but South Korea as well, around more robust pressure on the North. Since the onset of the second nuclear crisis in 2002, multilateral and other sanctions have had the perverse effect of pushing North Korea’s trade toward China, which now accounts for nearly 90 percent of bilateral merchandise trade. The changing geography of trade compounds these coordination problems. Getting North Korea to move has increasingly become a question of how to get China to move.
Xi Jinping’s decision to cooperate with the United States with respect to North Korea was also influenced in part by US sticks and carrots. Military blandishments might have helped spur China’s new engagement on the issue, reminding Beijing that North Korea is a strategic liability. The decision to abjure naming China a currency manipulator and threats of secondary sanctions—placing sanctions on Chinese entities doing business with North Korea—also might have had some effect. But the basis of cooperation with China undoubtedly rests on US commitments to re-enter negotiations if North Korea signals interest, with the inevitable discussion of quid-pro-quos and inducements that such negotiations necessarily entail.
Fear of instability in Northeast Asia mounts as US intentions in the region remain unclear.
To depict President Trump’s rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as the functional equivalent of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union would be an exaggeration, but because trade is the primary instrument of regional integration in Northeast Asia, its implications are more worrisome than those of Brexit. While Europe has cultivated a system of shared values and made conscious efforts to overcome historical animosities and reduce the risks of war by building interlocking institutions and fostering a “European” identity, Northeast Asia has eschewed integrating mechanisms and the dilution of national identities. What integration has been achieved is the result of market-based economic decisions and American engagement. Trump’s rejection of TPP and repudiation of Obama’s “rebalance” to Asia undercuts both pillars of regional stability and prosperity.
Trump’s actions would be cause for concern under any circumstances, but they are especially worrisome because the region is more unsettled than it has been for several decades. North Korea is adding to its nuclear arsenal. China’s economy is slowing but Beijing’s military buildup and use of economic and political leverage to pressure its neighbors have intensified. South Korea’s president has been impeached and imprisoned; her approach to North Korea and “Comfort Women” agreement to reduce tensions with Japan might be repudiated after the upcoming special election. Japan’s modest adjustments to military policy in response to threats from North Korea and Chinese pressure over disputed islands have unsettled domestic constituencies and enraged Chinese and Korean politicians.
Trump’s actions would be cause for concern under any circumstances, but they are especially worrisome because the region is more unsettled than it has been for several decades.
Unofficial dialogues can open up new approaches to intractable conflicts.
Track Two Diplomacy is a method of bringing together influential people from different sides of a conflict, on an unofficial basis, to talk and try to jointly develop new ideas as to how the conflict may be better managed or resolved. There are those who regard Track Two with suspicion. Proponents of Track Two believe that it can help to break through the barriers that official diplomacy can sometimes place on talks. This often means entering the grey area between what governments will talk about (and who they will talk to), and what they often know must be discussed if a problem is to be addressed.
Track Two diplomacy often demonstrates that new ways of approaching problems are possible.
One example, is the question of talking with those designated as terrorists. Many governments have firm policies against such talks. This view was summed up by then British Prime Minister John Major in a response to a question in the House as to whether he would talk with the IRA while fighting was still underway; “If the implication of his remarks is that we should sit down and talk to Mr. Adams and the Provisional IRA, I can say only that it would turn my stomach, and those of most Hon. Members; we will not do it. . . . I will not talk to people who murder indiscriminately.”
When it comes to adversarial states, diplomatic aims are better served by engagement, not isolation.
The current heated, even toxic, debates in the United States about the Iran nuclear deal and President Obama’s agreement with Raul Castro to restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba reflect what has long been a core US policy issue: Should the United States directly engage its adversaries? Or should it seek to isolate them.
Other Western democracies place more faith than the United States in diplomacy’s capacity to mitigate bad behavior by recalcitrant states.
For nearly a century this issue has been central to US foreign policy. Isolating an adversarial state can, of course, be expressed through trade embargoes and economic sanctions, but the United States has often also imposed a form of symbolic and formal isolation by refusing to have diplomatic relations with the state. Instead of engaging—typically through recognition and the mutual exchange of embassies and ambassadors—the path of isolation has been taken.
There are many examples of this “traditional” US refusal to establish full formal diplomatic relations with adversarial states: the Soviet Union (1917–33), the People’s Republic of China (1949–79), Cuba (1959–2015), and Vietnam (1975–95); this approach has also been applied to Libya under Qadhafi (1969–2003) and to Iran (1979–present) and North Korea (1948–present)—and more often than not, this policy has frustrated US foreign policy goals.
From Japan, to Cuba, to Iran—three snapshots of a world changed by nuclear weapons.
William J. Perry, who served as Secretary of Defense during President Bill Clinton’s administration, is regarded as one of the five “Cold Warriors”—along with Henry Kissinger, George P. Schultz, Sam Nunn, and Sid Drell—who, together, have formed an influential group whose activism has profoundly impacted nuclear security. From his role in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, to his stint as Defense Secretary, to his more recent involvement in Track 2 talks facilitating the recent Iran deal, minimizing the nuclear threat—introduced to the world stage 70 years ago today—has been one of Perry’s chief preoccupations. The following post was adapted from his forthcoming memoir, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink.
I.
“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”
—Albert Einstein; 23 May 1946
My journey at the nuclear brink began well before the Cuban Missile Crisis, on an infamous Sunday in 1941, four years before the first atomic bomb was dropped. These were the first stirrings that would lead me to a life encompassing military service, development of Cold War reconnaissance systems, government service, university teaching, and diplomacy—much of it focused on the goal of reducing the nuclear threat.
On the intersections of civil rights, anticolonialism, and nuclear disarmament.
On February 6, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stepped up to the pulpit to warn against the use of nuclear weapons. Addressing the second mobilization of the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, King urged an end to the war, and warned that if the United States used nuclear weapons in Vietnam the earth would be transformed into an inferno that “even the mind of Dante could not envision.” Then, as he had done so many times before, King made clear the connection between the black freedom struggle in America and the need for nuclear disarmament:
These two issues are tied together in many, many ways. It is a wonderful thing to work to integrate lunch counters, public accommodations, and schools. But it would be rather absurd to work to get schools and lunch counters integrated and not be concerned with the survival of a world in which to integrate.
On apathy and the nuclear threat.
Nuclear arms hold an exceptional place in the gamut of weapons technology. Their entrance onto the world stage has consolidated global hierarchies, intensified state rivalries, stymied foreign interventions, and, on occasion, brought the world perilously close to an as yet unprecedented level of destruction. In light of this last in particular, it comes as little surprise that the debut of the atomic bomb also precipitated the birth of the Doomsday Clock and introduced the phrase “five minutes to midnight” into our cultural lexicon—all this even though, in the entirety of their nearly 60-year lifespan they’ve only been detonated in an act of war twice.
Recently, California governor, Jerry Brown, joined Stanford professors Martin Hellman, David Holloway, and Jean-Pierre Dupuy in a panel moderated by Jon Christensen to discuss the nature of the nuclear threat and what current world conditions could portend for the future use or non-use of such weapons.
"The first step is to break open denial and bring awareness that the threat of nuclear menace is real."
“The first step is to break open denial and bring awareness that the threat of nuclear menace is real,” said Governor Brown—whose comments set much of the tone for the hour-long panel. While panelists devoted attention to both well- and lesser-known close-calls with the nuclear brink in recent decades, much of the conversation zeroed in on the tenuous insurance of nuclear deterrence and the prospects of moving toward disarmament at a moment of political and popular apathy on the subject of nuclear arms.
From the outset, ISIL intended to be more than simply a franchisee of the al-Qaeda organization or yet another radical Islamic movement.
The Islamic State today consists of an arc of towns and cities spanning the Syrian and Jazeera deserts, an archipelago coming increasingly and perilously close to Baghdad (as shown in the map below). Moving from its base in Fallujah and in eastern Syria, in the last few days ISIL has stormed Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, and taken Tikrit, midway on the highway to Baghdad. Meanwhile, Iraq’s security forces have crumbled. ISIL fighters looted hundreds of millions of bank deposits and seized untold quantities of weapons and supplies, including U.S.-supplied HUMVEES. Government troops, supplemented by the paramilitary wings of the major Shi’i parties, are trying to re-muster a defense at Samarra, just 70 miles outside of Baghdad, and are appealing to the U.S. for air support.
ISIL is probably the scariest of the many radical Islamist groups to surface in Iraq since 2003. First under the leadership of the Jordanian Abu Musab az-Zarqawi, the group was so violently anti-Shi’i that even al-Qaeda’s central command deemed them over zealous. Changing the organization’s name to Islamic State of Iraq did little to dampen its penchant for brutality. When the Syrian civil war erupted, ISI turned eastward, adding the Levant to its moniker and mandate. After a public spat with Ayman az-Zawahiri over its well-deserved reputation for abusing civilians, though, ISIL formally severed ties with al-Qaeda in 2013. Since then it has fought pitched battles with other rebel factions, including the Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s new designee for the Syrian region.
Why Gulf nations are pressuring Qatar to distance itself from the Muslim Brotherhood.
In the fallout of al-Sisi’s military takeover in Egypt, members of the Muslim Brotherhood have scattered in search of refuge, with many ducking under the protective arm of Qatar. This tiny, predominantly Sunni Gulf nation has little military clout to speak of, and is rated by the Global Peace Index as the 19th most peaceful country in the world. Despite this generally non-aggressive stance, its long-standing policy of embracing the Muslim Brotherhood—which includes providing them a save haven—has rankled Qatar’s neighbors, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE—stirring so much ire that the Riyadh-led bloc recalled its ambassadors from Doha last month.
Facing so much heat, so close to home, Qatar agreed to make a number of changes to its foreign and domestic policies. Purportedly, concessions included preventing Doha-based Muslim Brotherhood leaders from appearing on Al Jazeera, deporting the Brotherhood-sympathizer, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and restricting Al Jazeera’s criticism of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other states. To what extent Qatar will comply with this Kuwait-brokered reconciliation—sometimes referred to as the Riyadh Agreement—remains to be seen, but in the interim, the much-discussed accord raises crucial, if fundamental, questions for analysts of international politics.
First, why would Saudi Arabia, with its deep Islamic roots, oppose the Muslim Brotherhood—the same organization it protected during the 1950s and 1960s? Second, why do these states—and particularly the regional hegemon, Saudi Arabia—feel threatened by the actions of a country, like Qatar, with a very small population occupying a tiny geographic area?
The answer to both questions underscores the role of ideology, and more broadly, ideas, in international politics. It is about how ideas can be a national security threat and a different type of power wielded by states. In 2011, the idea that the status quo was no longer possible and that political change was necessary brought together disparate groups across the political spectrum. Ideas about how individuals were connected across political borders through their shared experiences and identities also facilitated the transnational diffusion of these protests—protests that led to the overthrow of a number of highly entrenched regimes backed by powerful coercive apparatuses, and the world’s strongest power, the United States. In some places, such as Syria and Yemen, the fires are still burning, in other places, such as Libya, the embers may flare up at any time.
Whether you're at ISA 2014 or you wish you were, we've got some discounts to hand out: take 20% off paper and 30% off cloth and ebooks on any and all of the 53 International Studies books listed below.
In Toronto for ISA 2014? Make sure to pencil in a visit to SUP's booth where you can say hello to our International Studies & Politics editor, Geoffrey Burn (he's a delight, and he has an accent to boot).
You can also browse through our offerings in International Studies titles, and grab a few discounted books—20% off paper, 30% off cloth and ebooks. We're also honoring that discount right here. Gathered below are the titles we're featuring at ISA 2014—click on any cover that grabs your interest to learn more. If you like what you see, add it to your cart and enter this promo code at checkout: S14XISA.
(Psst—have you heard about our March Madness sale? There's one week left to grab $1o cloth and $5 paperbacks and over 600 titles from which to choose . . .)
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