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How a new understanding of warfare can help the military fight
today's conflicts more effectively The way wars are fought has
changed starkly over the past sixty years. International military
campaigns used to play out between armies at central fronts.
Today's conflicts find major powers facing rebel insurgencies
deploying elusive methods, from improvised explosives to terrorist
attacks. Presenting a transformative understanding of these
contemporary confrontations, Small Wars, Big Data shows that a
revolution in the study of conflict yields new insights into
terrorism, civil wars, and foreign interventions. Modern warfare is
not about struggles over territory but over people; civilians-and
the information they might provide-can turn the tide at critical
junctures. Drawing lessons from conflicts in locations around the
world, Small Wars, Big Data provides groundbreaking perspectives
for how small wars can be better strategized and favorably won.
How a new understanding of warfare can help the military fight
today's conflicts more effectively The way wars are fought has
changed starkly over the past sixty years. International military
campaigns used to play out between large armies at central fronts.
Today's conflicts find major powers facing rebel insurgencies that
deploy elusive methods, from improvised explosives to terrorist
attacks. Small Wars, Big Data presents a transformative
understanding of these contemporary confrontations and how they
should be fought. The authors show that a revolution in the study
of conflict--enabled by vast data, rich qualitative evidence, and
modern methods-yields new insights into terrorism, civil wars, and
foreign interventions. Modern warfare is not about struggles over
territory but over people; civilians-and the information they might
choose to provide-can turn the tide at critical junctures. The
authors draw practical lessons from the past two decades of
conflict in locations ranging from Latin America and the Middle
East to Central and Southeast Asia. Building an information-centric
understanding of insurgencies, the authors examine the
relationships between rebels, the government, and civilians. This
approach serves as a springboard for exploring other aspects of
modern conflict, including the suppression of rebel activity, the
role of mobile communications networks, the links between aid and
violence, and why conventional military methods might provide
short-term success but undermine lasting peace. Ultimately the
authors show how the stronger side can almost always win the
villages, but why that does not guarantee winning the war. Small
Wars, Big Data provides groundbreaking perspectives for how small
wars can be better strategized and favorably won to the benefit of
the local population.
The most common image of world politics involves states
negotiating, cooperating, or sometimes fighting with one another;
billiard balls in motion on a global pool table. Yet working
through local proxies or agents, through what Eli Berman and David
A. Lake call a strategy of "indirect control," has always been a
central tool of foreign policy. Understanding how countries
motivate local allies to act in sometimes costly ways, and when and
how that strategy succeeds, is essential to effective foreign
policy in today's world. In this splendid collection, Berman and
Lake apply a variant of principal-agent theory in which the
alignment of interests or objectives between a powerful state and a
local proxy is central. Through analysis of nine detailed cases,
Proxy Wars finds that: when principals use rewards and punishments
tailored to the agent's domestic politics, proxies typically comply
with their wishes; when the threat to the principal or the costs to
the agent increase, the principal responds with higher-powered
incentives and the proxy responds with greater effort; if interests
diverge too much, the principal must either take direct action or
admit that indirect control is unworkable. Covering events from
Denmark under the Nazis to the Korean War to contemporary
Afghanistan, and much in between, the chapters in Proxy Wars engage
many disciplines and will suit classes taught in political science,
economics, international relations, security studies, and much
more.
The most common image of world politics involves states
negotiating, cooperating, or sometimes fighting with one another;
billiard balls in motion on a global pool table. Yet working
through local proxies or agents, through what Eli Berman and David
A. Lake call a strategy of "indirect control," has always been a
central tool of foreign policy. Understanding how countries
motivate local allies to act in sometimes costly ways, and when and
how that strategy succeeds, is essential to effective foreign
policy in today's world. In this splendid collection, Berman and
Lake apply a variant of principal-agent theory in which the
alignment of interests or objectives between a powerful state and a
local proxy is central. Through analysis of nine detailed cases,
Proxy Wars finds that: when principals use rewards and punishments
tailored to the agent's domestic politics, proxies typically comply
with their wishes; when the threat to the principal or the costs to
the agent increase, the principal responds with higher-powered
incentives and the proxy responds with greater effort; if interests
diverge too much, the principal must either take direct action or
admit that indirect control is unworkable. Covering events from
Denmark under the Nazis to the Korean War to contemporary
Afghanistan, and much in between, the chapters in Proxy Wars engage
many disciplines and will suit classes taught in political science,
economics, international relations, security studies, and much
more.
Applying fresh tools from economics to explain puzzling behaviors
of religious radicals: Muslim, Christian, and Jewish; violent and
benign. How do radical religious sects run such deadly terrorist
organizations? Hezbollah, Hamas, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Taliban
all began as religious groups dedicated to piety and charity. Yet
once they turned to violence, they became horribly potent,
executing campaigns of terrorism deadlier than those of their
secular rivals. In Radical, Religious, and Violent, Eli Berman
approaches the question using the economics of organizations. He
first dispels some myths: radical religious terrorists are not
generally motivated by the promise of rewards in the afterlife
(including the infamous seventy-two virgins) or even by religious
ideas in general. He argues that these terrorists (even suicide
terrorists) are best understood as rational altruists seeking to
help their own communities. Yet despite the vast pool of potential
recruits-young altruists who feel their communities are repressed
or endangered-there are less than a dozen highly lethal terrorist
organizations in the world capable of sustained and coordinated
violence that threatens governments and makes hundreds of millions
of civilians hesitate before boarding an airplane. What's special
about these organizations, and why are most of their followers
religious radicals? Drawing on parallel research on radical
religious Jews, Christians, and Muslims, Berman shows that the most
lethal terrorist groups have a common characteristic: their leaders
have found a way to control defection. Hezbollah, Hamas, and the
Taliban, for example, built loyalty and cohesion by means of mutual
aid, weeding out "free riders" and producing a cadre of members
they could rely on. The secret of their deadly effectiveness lies
in their resilience and cohesion when incentives to defect are
strong.These insights suggest that provision of basic social
services by competent governments adds a critical, nonviolent
component to counterterrorism strategies. It undermines the violent
potential of radical religious organizations without disturbing
free religious practice, being drawn into theological debates with
Jihadists, or endangering civilians.
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