This book addresses a range of issues surrounding the search for scientific truths in the study of international conflict and international political economy. Unlike empirical studies in other disciplines, says Seung-Whan Choi, many political studies seem more competent at presenting theoretical conjecture and hypotheses than they are at performing rigorous empirical analyses. When we study global issues like democratic institutions, flows of foreign direct investment, international terrorism, civil wars, and international conflict, we often uncritically adopt established theoretical frameworks and research designs. The natural assumption is that well-known and widely cited studies, once ingrained within the tradition of the discipline, should not be challenged or refuted. However, do such noted research areas reflect scientific truth? Choi looks closely at ten widely cited empirical studies that represent well-known research programs in international relations. His discussions address such statistical and theoretical issues as endogeneity bias, model specification error, fixed effects, theoretical predictability, outliers, normality of regression residuals, and choice of estimation techniques. In addition, scientific progress made by remarkable discoveries usually results from finding a new way of thinking about long-held scientific truths, therefore Choi also demonstrates how one may search for novel ideas at minimal cost by developing new research designs with original data. Here is a valuable resource for students, scholars, and policy makers who want to quickly grasp the evolutionary pattern of scientific research on democracy, foreign investment, terrorism, and conflict; build their research designs and choose appropriate statistical techniques; and identify their own agendas for the production of cutting-edge research.

This book looks into four areas of our world's international security crisis: the growing threat of America's homegrown jihadists, the continuing rise of terrorism, the causes of gross violations of human rights, and the pervasiveness of civil war. When American jihadists join such international terrorist organizations as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and Al Qaeda, the danger to security and stability is often magnified on both global and domestic fronts. The global rise of terrorism in turn causes a deterioration in the quality of human rights for politically disadvantaged people or minority groups within a national territory; meanwhile, the internal crisis created by terrorist violence and human rights violations can expedite the development of civil war, which is likely to endanger domestic and international stability. Taking a consistent theoretical and empirical approach, Emerging Security Challenges: American Jihad, Terrorism, Civil War, and Human Rights explicates the relationships among these four closely related areas of concern for national security. Each chapter presents systematic, empirical evidence of security trends for more than 100 sample countries, determined using the most current statistical methods. Given that security studies should provide practical policy recommendations, this book also offers potentially effective policy suggestions at the end of each chapter.