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

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Goemans raises different questions about the conclusions I draw from the Argentine case. He argues that I do not engage enough with an alternative diversionary explanation for the war, namely that that General Galtieri had reason to fear severe punishment (such as death, imprisonment, or exile) if he lost office, which he expected would come at the hands of naval minister Jorge Anaya if he did not make progress on the Falklands. [44] This, he points out, is different from the more common diversionary interpretation, in which the junta went to war because it feared a domestic revolt. As with any collection of case studies, one can always ask 'but what about...?' I personally understand what it is like to write about IR and history and know that there is no way in hell you can cover every base-nor should you. Despite this though, I would have loved to have seen the quite placid personalist boss rule regimes of Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan included, even if only to dismiss them as being too under Russia's wing to have much autonomy. Like the leaders of machines, the leaders of juntas, such as the infamous Argentine military junta of the late 1970s and early 1980s, face much greater domestic accountability than is commonly assumed. But in contrast to machines, the core domestic audience in juntas is composed of other military officers, often those at the junior and middle level. These military officers tend to have substantially more hawkish preferences than the civilian audiences in machines. Why? Career military service tends to select for certain types of individuals and then further socialize them into a military mindset in which force is seen as a necessary, effective, and appropriate policy option. Often, militaries also have narrow parochial interests that cause them to prioritize force over diplomacy. Leaders of juntas therefore initiate more conflicts than leaders of machines and enjoy somewhat less successful outcomes. Yet, because they are ultimately accountable to other regime insiders, they tend to be punished domestically after military defeat. Autocracies are surprisingly resilient in the modern era. Despite a trend toward political and economic liberalization, many of the most important actors in contemporary world politics remain nondemocratic. Among their ranks are countries with massive economic and military power, such as China and Russia; countries with important natural resources, such as Iran and some Arab nations; and economically fragile countries that have nonetheless managed to develop potent weapons, such as North Korea. This book owes its existence to the help and support of a large number of advisors, colleagues, friends, and members of my family.

Downes’s commentary raises an important question about the theory, and I appreciate the opportunity to clarify how I conceptualized and coded regime type. While the term “junta” typically evokes a team of military officers, I use the term slightly differently in the book. When leaders are constrained by a domestic audience, I code the regime as military versus civilian, based on whether the domestic audience was composed primarily of civilians (machines) or military officers (juntas). Therefore, by my definition, Japan is considered a junta regime when it went to war against China in 1937, even though the leader at the time, Prime Minister Konoe, was a civilian. It is clear that by that time, civilian leaders knew that their survival in office depended on the support of the military. In 1932, the civilian prime minister had been assassinated by a radical group of junior naval officers, and in early 1936, 1400 military officers attempted a takeover of the government, resulting in the death of several top civilian leaders. Although the rebellion failed, it demonstrated the domestic coercive power of the military. Moreover, civilians were outnumbered by military officers in important ministries, and were increasingly excluded from important political and military decisions. [41] For these reasons, I coded the domestic audience in Japan as stemming primarily from the military. While the book does not delve into Wilhemine Germany, Downes’s description suggests that the leadership of this period might, like Japan, be coded as a junta because of the domestic power of the military. But it seems entirely plausible to propose that leaders value the same good differentially because it brings them different private benefits [27] of war, thereby eliminating the bargaining range. Alternatively, variation in regime type could be linked to variation in private information, incentives to misrepresent, or commitment problems. It could be argued that personalist regimes, in particular Bosses like Saddam Hussein or Stalin, make decisions in such isolation that information about their preferences and calculations is limited to a very few individuals, leaving the dictator with more private information than other authoritarian leaders. In turn, the international opponent of such a leader might also have `more’ private information about his capabilities and resolve. Any information that contradicts the leader’s beliefs about the international opponent may never reach a personalist leader who is surrounded by sycophants. Thus, even when dealing with a complicated four-way regime typology it seems by no means necessary to bypass the bargaining model of war. 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. Weeks writes that while “autocratic audiences may approve of the use of force if the benefits outweigh the costs, they are no less wary of the possibility of defeat than they democratic counterparts and do not see systematically greater gains from fighting” (22). In her view, such audiences by and large restrain leaders from going to war or initiating a dispute (22-23). Weeks differentiates authoritarian regimes that do not have an audience that can potentially punish the leader (personalist dictatorships) from authoritarian regimes that do have such audiences, but ignores the strategic interactions between domestic actors. As Giacomo Chiozza and I argue, it is the time-varying (an issue to which I return below) threat of domestic punishment that can make war a rational gamble for resurrection. [28] If the peacetime threat of domestic punishment is high, the use of force with the potential for political domestic rewards in the case of victory can be a rational gamble, even if defeat carries a high concomitant likelihood of punishment. The truncation of punishment is key. This suggests that the presence of an audience might prod leaders into wars they would not have selected if they had not had such an audience. Why do some autocratic leaders pursue aggressive or expansionist foreign policies, while others are much more cautious in their use of military force? The first book to focus systematically on the foreign policy of different types of authoritarian regimes, Dictators at War and Peace breaks new ground in our understanding of the international behavior of dictators.A second problem with using selectorate theory to explain differences among authoritarian regimes is its assumption that, conditional on coalition size, all actors perceive the world in the same way. ¹⁴ This assumption overlooks the great uncertainty that exists in decisions about international relations. If different types of regimes systematically empower actors with different perceptions of the costs and benefits of war, this could affect international bargaining in ways not explained by selectorate theory. Existing scholarship, which tends to focus on differences between democracies and dictatorships rather than variation among dictatorships, provides relatively few answers. It is widely accepted that democratic leaders use force more cautiously than authoritarian leaders because for democrats, policy failures or unpopular campaigns can lead to punishment at the hands of the demos. ¹ In contrast, because dictators are much less accountable to ordinary citizens, they are typically seen as willing to undertake much riskier uses of force. However, the domestic factors scholars usually invoke to explain differences between democracies and dictatorships—such as free and fair elections or the strength of democratic norms—do not vary greatly among authoritarian regimes. Existing scholarship cannot therefore provide direct insight into differences among the Husseins, Galtieris, and Le Duans of the world. An alternative view holds that domestic politics do play an important role in dictatorships, but that the relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy is unique to each country. For example, some have argued that in modern China, public nationalism plays a major role in foreign policy decisions. ⁴ Others have argued that Iranian attempts to pursue nuclear weapons are driven in part by domestic political concerns. Countless country specialists have studied the foreign policies of individual authoritarian states and have provided valuable insights about the specific policies of particular countries.⁵ However, most country-specific analyses treat individual countries as sui generis cases rather than seeking to develop more general insights. Research that focuses on individual countries such as China or Iran is not usually designed to detect patterns in the relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy across different authoritarian regimes. In fact, partly as a result of focusing on individual countries, observers sometimes conclude that the domestic politics of war are mostly idiosyncratic. They dismiss the notion that domestic regime type might systematically shape how states behave. Dictators at War and Peace pushes the domestic politics/international politics research agenda in a new direction. It asks whether different kinds of dictatorships conduct foreign policy differently. 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. Public Opinion and the Democratic Peace” (with Michael Tomz), American Political Science Review November 2013 (107.4)

Autocratic Audience Costs: Regime Type and Signaling Resolve,” International Organization, Winter 2008 (62.1) How Membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Transforms Public Support for War" (with Michael Tomz and Kirk Bansak) PNAS-Nexus 2023 Dan Reiter is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Political Science at Emory University. He is the author of Crucible of Beliefs: Learning, Alliances, and World Wars (Cornell, 1996) and How Wars End (Princeton, 2009), as well as coauthor, with Allan C. Stam, of Democracies at War (Princeton, 2002). He has also authored or coauthored dozens of scholarly and popular publications on international relations and foreign policy.

To develop the argument, I begin by laying out a simple framework that highlights the potential domestic costs and benefits of using—or not using—military force abroad. Although authoritarian leaders are not directly accountable to the public like democratically elected leaders, they nonetheless rely on the support of important domestic audiences. The intensity and source of this accountability vary across autocracies and affect leaders’ costs of using force. These insights lead me to distinguish regimes along two core dimensions: (1) whether the leader faces a powerful domestic audience, and (2) whether the leader or audience stems from the civilian or military ranks. These two dimensions produce four kinds of regimes: nonpersonalist machines, in which the leader faces a powerful domestic audience composed primarily of civilian regime insiders; nonpersonalist juntas, in which the leader faces a domestic audience composed primarily of military officers; and two kinds of personalist regimes without meaningful audiences—personalist regimes led by relatively unfettered civilian bosses and personalist regimes led by military strongmen. ⁸ Weeks, for example, characterizes “nonpersonalist civilian machines” as being governed by “civilian leaders and elites.” (19). Although I was unable to find an explicit statement that the leaders of Juntas must be military officers, Weeks strongly implies this when she writes, “the core domestic audience in Juntas is composed of other military officers” (6). (emphasis added). One could argue that the leader of a junta must, by definition, be a military officer. In her excellent book, Jessica Weeks advances a clear and generally compelling argument about how important variations among autocracies affect decisions about the use of force. International relations scholars have long been interested in the implications of democracy for foreign policy, whether in classical realist arguments that democracies are ill-suited to the effective conduct of power politics or in more recent arguments that democracies are both good at managing their relations with one another and particularly effective at war. [36] In this discussion, non-democracies have constituted a residual category, collecting together countries as varied as Tsarist Russia, communist China, and contemporary Somalia. It is only recently, however, that systematic analyses of variation among autocracies have emerged. What explains these divergent paths? Why do some dictators make such risky, and in some eyes foolhardy, decisions about the use of force, whereas others are much more cautious in their decisions to exercise military power? Why do some authoritarian leaders limit themselves to winnable wars, whereas others embroil their countries in defeats that could surely have been avoided? And why do some dictators weather defeat, whereas others are ousted within days of losing a war? Lost in Translation: Academics, Policymakers, and Research about Interstate Conflict” (with Sarah Kreps)

I will begin by responding to comments about the theory. Alexander Downes focuses much of his discussion on the book’s typology of authoritarian regimes. As he notes, I differentiate regimes around two dimensions: first, whether or not the leader faces a powerful domestic audience, and second, whether the key decisionmakers in the regime are civilians or military officers. Leaders of personalist boss and strongman regimes do not face powerful domestic audiences and therefore face relatively few domestic constraints in their foreign policy decisions, while leaders of nonpersonalist civilian machines and military juntas are accountable to politically important domestic groups that shape their decisions about war and peace. Statement on language in description Princeton University Library aims to describe library materials in a manner that is respectful to the individuals and communities who create, use, and are represented in the collections we manage. Weeks argues that we can best understand the foreign policies of these regimes by considering the implications of two central axes along which they vary: whether the leader is accountable to a domestic audience with the capacity to punish him, and whether the key policymakers are civilians or members of the military. At one extreme, Machines like contemporary China, in which leaders are accountable to a civilian audience, are effectively indistinguishable from democracies, if anything more cautious about the use of force and more likely to win the wars that they fight. Because leaders of juntas also must worry about punishment in the event of foreign policy failure, they too are relatively cautious about the use of force, though their military outlook leaves them more likely to see resort to violence as appropriate. By contrast, personalist leaders, both civilian Bosses and military Strongmen, face little prospect of punishment for foreign policy failure, and thus can afford to engage in speculative gambles. In August of 1990, Saddam Hussein sent Iraqi tanks rumbling into neighboring Kuwait, announcing that Iraq had regained its nineteenth province and sparking a conflict with the United States and its allies. In April of 1982, General Leopoldo Galtieri, the military dictator of Argentina, sent his forces to occupy the Falkland/Malvinas Islands, a forlorn piece of British territory that had long inspired acrimony between the two nations, and declared that the Malvinas had been restored to its rightful owners. Through the early 1960s, the communist dictatorship in North Vietnam intensified its campaign to reunify North and South, pulling the United States deeper into what would become a full-fledged international war. The Generalizability of IR Experiments Beyond the U.S." (with Lotem Bassan-Nygate, Chagai Weiss, and Jonathan Renshon)

The first is the idea that all authoritarian regimes are similar in that their leaders face few domestic constraints when making decisions about war and peace. This perspective, which typically concludes that democracies as a group are less warlike than dictatorships, dominates the existing international relations scholarship on regime type and foreign policy. The core of this view, introduced by Immanuel Kant, is that nondemocratic leaders are freer to choose war than leaders who must answer to the public. ² This assessment rests in part on the assumption that citizens find it difficult to punish dictators who subject them to the ravages of war.³ Dictators internalize fewer of the costs of war and are therefore more likely to use military force, whereas democratic leaders have incentives to choose less costly, and hence more peaceful, options. The insights of this book thus have important implications for both theory and policy. For example, the findings suggest that conventional views of the relationship between regime type and war, including the argument that democracies are more selective than any other kind of regime about initiating international conflict, are either incomplete or wrong. I show that by obscuring differences among dictatorships, the usual dichotomy between democracy and authoritarianism leads to faulty conclusions about the effects of democracy on foreign relations. Surprisingly, many autocratic leaders face a realistic possibility of punishment by a civilian domestic audience; they confront many of the same domestic pressures as democratic leaders, only in a different guise. Similarly, leaders of military juntas face a form of domestic accountability—but due to the preferences of the audience, this does not lead to peace. Only some extraordinarily centralized regimes behave in a way that resembles the conventional view of dictatorships. Hawks, Doves, and Peace: An Experimental Approach”(with Michaela Mattes), American Journal of Political Science January 2019 (63:1) Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-04-17 16:00:32 Boxid IA40089823 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

Authoritarian regimes and the domestic politics of war and peace -- Audiences, preferences, and decisions about war -- Hypotheses, implications, and cases -- Initiating international conflict -- Measuring authoritarian regime type -- Modeling the initiation of international conflict -- Results -- Winners, losers, and survival -- Selecting wars -- War outcomes in the past century -- Outcomes of militarized interstate disputes, 1946-2000 -- The consequences of defeat -- Personalist dictators: shooting from the hip -- Saddam Hussein and the 1990 invasion of Kuwait -- Josef Stalin: a powerful but loose cannon -- Juntas: using the only language they understand -- Argentina and the Falklands/Malvinas war -- Japan's road to World War II -- Machines: looking before they leap -- The North Vietnamese wars against the US, South Vietnam, and Cambodia -- The Soviet Union in the post-Stalin era -- Conclusion: dictatorship, war, and peace Lccn 2014021002 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-10-g1236 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9796 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000274 Openlibrary_edition Alexander B. Downes (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2004) is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at The George Washington University. His book Targeting Civilians in War was published by Cornell University Press in 2008 and won the Joseph Lepgold Prize awarded by Georgetown University for best book in international relations published in that year. His work has been funded by the Eisenhower Institute, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Answering these questions is important for those tasked with understanding the behavior of authoritarian regimes. Yet current scholarship provides few systematic answers. As a result, scholars and policymakers have several competing but incorrect views of how domestic politics affect the foreign policy behavior of dictatorships.One issue that these three essays skirt, and which I wish to touch on here, concerns the policy ramifications of Weeks’s argument. Especially since the end of Cold War, American foreign policy has stressed the importance of converting dictatorships into democracies, in part because, as Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush reiterated, democracies do not fight each other, and dictatorships are belligerent. Weeks’s book challenges this assumption, noting that some types of dictatorships, especially ‘Machine’ regimes led by civilian dictators who have to answer to elites, can be as peaceful as democracies. The key fact that makes Imperial Japan from 1889 to 1941 a hybrid regime with civilian leaders and a military audience, and which Weeks mentions only in passing, is that under the Meiji Constitution of 1889, the military had the power to bring down any civilian government by withdrawing—or refusing to name—the Army or Navy Minister. [10] The Constitution exempted the military from parliamentary control; the armed services answered only to the emperor, and “[n]o civilian control was ever allowed.” [11] Thus, even without recourse to force, the Japanese military could topple the regime, a prerogative it exercised on multiple occasions. [12] As a result, as Weeks notes, Japan’s civilian prime ministers were unable to prevent the military from starting or escalating wars, making Japan’s hybrid government much more warlike than Machines with civilian control of the military. Finally, personalist bosses and strongmen such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Kim Jong Il, Idi Amin, or (some argue) Vladimir Putin do not face powerful, organized domestic audiences. Instead, these are regimes in which the leader personally controls the state and military apparatuses and can use that control to thwart potential rivals. ⁹ Given these leaders’ personal supremacy in matters of foreign policy, we must inquire into the preferences of the leaders themselves. I draw on research from psychology, history, and political science to argue that the challenges of attaining and maintaining absolute power mean that personalist boss and strongman regimes tend to feature leaders who are particularly drawn to the use of military force and often have far-ranging international ambitions. Moreover, the sycophants who surround these leaders have few incentives to rein in their patrons’ impulses, to correct any misperceptions they may have about the likely outcome of a war, or to try to oust them if things go poorly. Compared to leaders of other kinds of regimes, then, leaders of personalist boss and strongman regimes initiate conflict more frequently, lose a higher proportion of the wars they start, and yet survive in office at a remarkable rate even in the wake of defeat. In short, I argue that there are two types of civilian-led authoritarian regimes with audiences that vary depending on whether civilians control the military. In the first, civilian control is firm enough that military actors play no role in decisions to remove the executive. These are the restrained Machines depicted by Weeks. In the second, the hybrid type I have been describing, the military is outside civilian control and has the ability to remove the leader. These regimes are likely to be more aggressive, since civilian leaders may be removed for opposing the use of force rather than for going to war unsuccessfully, and civilian elites cannot prevent the military from taking action. 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.e., violent) means, slightly more than half were removed by military actors, [19] and (2) military Juntas are the least common type of regime in Weeks’s typology, [20] which implies that these coups are probably not limited to military-led regimes. Nonetheless, I agree that there is still much to be learned by linking monadic arguments about regime type to (dyadic) theories of strategic interaction. My aim was to characterize the domestic politics of making decisions about war in non-democracies and to develop some core hypotheses, none of which are inconsistent with the bargaining model. Of course, that still leaves many future steps. One is to understand how the politics of different kinds of authoritarian systems might compensate for a small bargaining range, or lead to war even when the bargaining range is large. Another is to investigate how different types of regimes interact. Another, as Goemans points out, is to integrate time-varying factors into the model, allowing for within-regime variation rather than the across-regime variation on which I focus. I hope my book will spur future scholarship to engage in those theoretical tasks, whether by building on my work or critiquing it.