Untitled Quiz

Civil War

• An event involving the organized use of military force by at least two parties, reaching a minimum threshold of severity.
• Civil war occurs between a state and an organized rebel group fighting for political goals.

What Groups Want to Achieve

• Territory
• Governmental control
• Irredentism

Why Civil Wars Occur

• Opportunity + Willingness: The combination of favorable circumstances and the will to fight.
• Grievances: Discrimination, ideological differences, and environmental factors.
• Greed: Economic gain (individual and leader levels), and incentives for soldiers.

Looking at Individual Incentives for Civil War

• Supporting the group's goals: 70.4%
• Retaliation: 5.0%
• Better living conditions inside the group than outside: 2.3%
• Fear of consequences if they don't join: 51.2%
• Offered money to join: 0.4%
• Social pressure to join: 1.4%
• Protecting their community: 15.8%
• Kidnapped/abducted: 2.0%
• Total respondents: 557

State Weakness

• County-level factors: State capacity, geography, governmental structure and stability.

Rebel Group Strength

• Group-level factors: Committed recruits, organizational capacity.
• International factors: Financing.

Recap: Why Civil Wars Occur

• Opportunity + Willingness: State weakness + Rebel strength + Greed + Grievances

Week 9: Tools to Maintain Peace

• Actions short of force
• Peace enforcement (More recent from: Humanitarian intervention)
• Peacekeeping (More recent from: Peace building)
• Classic peacekeeping steps
• When will this work best?
• The peace process: Goal to achieve positive peace; hard to do; get to a yes

Difficulties in Finding Agreement

• Veto players, mistrust

To Decrease Mistrust, Bring In Institutions

• Short-term: Third-party guarantors
• Long-term: Power-sharing arrangements, address factors related to recurrence

Terrorism

• Why study terrorism in an IR class?: Most attacks are domestic, groups, targets, location; transnational
• Civil War & Terrorism: Connections between the two types of violence

What is Terrorism?

• The premeditated use of threatened use of violence against non-combat targets by individuals or non-state groups for political ends, through the intimidation of a larger audience.

Why Use Violence?

• Weak actors, military, politically

When Will Attacks Happen?

• Civil war
• Opportunity + Willingness + Motivations
• Permissive conditions, related to terrorism

Week 10: Human Security

• What is security?: Alleviation of threats to cherished values.
• Whose security?: The state above all else.
• What are cherished values?: Sovereignty.
• What is a security threat?: Anything that threatens states and their sovereignty; has changed over time.
• How to achieve security?: Traditionally the military; today, military plus a wide range of tools
• Threats & values: What counts as a cherished value depends on who you ask.
• What is Human Security?: Vast scope; virtually any kind of unexpected or irregular discomfort could constitute a threat to one's human security. Human security is a powerful alternative; remove focus on states; focus on individuals; consider their safety, health, environment, etc.

International Norms

• Why no nuclear weapons in Vietnam?: Levels of analysis: Domestic, interstate, transnational.
• System level norms.
• What are International norms?: Shared standards of behavior for actors with a given identity. Rights and obligations
• Types of norms: Constitutive (Example: IS is a state?), Procedural (Example: Who makes the rules?), Regulative (Example: Nuclear taboo)
• The norm cycle: Emergence. Cascade and Internalization.

Do Norms Matter?

• How norms can shape behavior; can change what is acceptable, interactions of states.

What are international laws?:

• Are a body of rules that bind states and other agents in world politics.
• Secondary Rules
• Primary Rules
• Sources of international law: Customary law, International treaties

Variations in International Laws

• Obligation: How legally bound agents are

Types of International Laws

• Hard law: obligatory, precise delegate adjudication; soft law: aspirational, imprecise; no delegation

Restrictions on War

• Legal restrictions on wars

Jus in Bello

• Laws that regulate actions during war (limits on weapons, treatment of certain groups)

Human Rights

• What are human rights? Set of ideals, a legal regime, UDHR (International Bill of Human Rights), 9 core UN treaties

• Types of protections: Negative and Positive Rights, ICESCR, ICCPR, Non-derogable Rights

• Three questions on human rights Law:

• Why do states sign HR treaties?, Why do states repress (violation of human rights)?, Do HR treaties constrain behavior?

• Why do states sign HR treaties?: Tie your hands, practice what you preach and camouflage

• Why do states avoid signing HR treaties?: Signed?, Ratified?

• What about extreme violations?: Genocides, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity

Environmental Security

• A focus area within human security; relevant to traditional security studies; OR maybe we should protect the environment for the environment's sake?

Why do Collective Security Organizations Fail?

• Effort to maintain peace and how these efforts often fall short.
• Why are peace missions underfunded?

Factors that influence cooperation,

• Actors (group size, partnerships, leadership), The Problem (complexity), Institutions (standards, disputes, compliance)
• International Political Economy (Trade, finance, monetary policy, relevant for traditional and human security, International trade),

Comparative Advantage

• Imports (domestic purchases)
• Exports (sales)
• Self sufficiency vs specialization
• Comparative advantage: Producing good/service at lower opportunity cost than other countries
• Absolute advantage: Producing something more efficiently than other countries
• The Heckscher-Ohlin Theory: Human and material endowments, export and import goods.
• Following comparative advantage: using the best resource or comparative advantage

Protectionism

• Free trade (absence of political barriers)
• Protectionism (measures to shield domestic products)
• Tariffs, quotas, nontariff barriers
• Why put up barriers to trade? (resource endowments, Stolper-Samuelson Theorem, Political systems, Domestic-level actors, Industry-level preferences, Ricardo-Viner model, chances of retaliation, strategic partnerships)
• Explaining trade cooperation: Factors that facilitate trade cooperation (role of institutions, economic benefits, market stability, political benefits)

World Trade Organization (WTO)

• Facilitating trade
• Non-discrimination (MFN, national treatment)
• Reciprocity
• Safety valves

Regional Trade Organizations

• NAFTA/USMCA, Mercosur, European Union
• Types of investment: Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), Sovereign lending

FDI: International Investments

• Multinational Corporations (MNCs)
• FDI: A less controversial space (why allow in MNCs?)
• International Controversies (host-MNC interactions)
• The controversy behind sovereign lending
• Creditor interest, Debtor interest, What if they can't pay back?, and crisis support

Exchange Rates

• The price of one currency relative to another
• Fixed exchange rate (currencies kept to a value)
• Floating exchange rate (traded on open market)
• International Monetary System (Gold Standard, Bretton Woods, Today)

Bringing in Monetary Policy

• Fixed rate: Maintain value of currency
• Floating rate: Use tools to influence
• Monetary policy: Tools for influencing macro, usually managed by a country's central bank

Domestic Factors & Institutions

• Domestic factors that facilitate economic activity, Public goods & infrastructure, Policies that promote trust in the system, Regime type
• What undermines this?

History

• Colonialism (From divergent interests to predatory relationships, Arbitrary maps, Extractive colonies).
• More Recent History (Neocolonial and/or dependent relationships, LDCs primary products, Developed countries: secondary/tertiary products, Biased international institutions? Attempts to balance influence)

Economic Policies

• Import-substituting Industrialization (ISI): Reduce imports, encourage manufacturing; trade barriers; external borrowing; subsidies; state-owned industries
• Export-oriented Industrialization (EOI): Reduce imports, encourage manufacturing, trade barriers, external borrowing
• Geography- Landlocked, Climate