Violence or the potential for violence is a fact of human existence. Many societies, including our own, reward martial success or skill at arms. The ways in which members of a particular society use force reveal a great deal about the nature of authority within the group and about its members’ priorities. Martha Finnemore uses one type of force, military intervention, as a window onto the shifting character of international society. She examines the changes, over the past 400 years, in why countries intervene militarily as well as in the ways they have intervened. It is not the fact of intervention that has altered, she says, but rather the reasons for and meaning behind intervention—the conventional understanding of the purposes for which states can and should use force. Finnemore looks at three types of intervention: collecting debts, addressing humanitarian crises, and acting against states perceived as threats to international peace. In all three, she finds that what is now considered "obvious" was vigorously contested or even rejected by people in earlier periods for well-articulated and logical reasons. A broad historical perspective allows her to explicate long-term trends: the steady erosion of force’s normative value in international politics, the growing influence of equality norms in many aspects of global political life, and the increasing importance of law in intervention practices.

We have seen recent massive intervention by the United States and its allies in Europe in internal conflict in Bosnia and Kosovo. In Outside Intervention in Intrastate Conflict, Patrick Regan systematically answers the question about the conditions under which third parties intervene in civil conflicts to stop the fighting. It uses data on all civil conflicts since 1945 to identify those conflicts that are amenable to outside interventions and the types of interventions that are more likely to be successful.Outside Intervention in Intrastate Conflict is a book about how governments can help facilitate the end of civil conflicts. In a time when internal conflicts appear to be increasing in number, and increasingly destabilizing, governments need to know what policies work and when. Interventions are generally of two sorts--unilateral, or when one state takes action, and multilateral, such as UN or NATO action. This book examines the conditions under which each form of intervention is most likely and most effective. The analysis suggests that three conditions associated with multi-lateral interventions will increase the likelihood of success: mutual consent of the parties involved; impartiality on the part of the intervenors; and the existence of a coherent intervention strategy. The questions are posed from the perspective of the decision maker and the answers offered are framed in a language familiar to the decision-making community. The book mixes descriptive case material with systematic statistical analysis of a unique data set of all civil conflicts since World War II, providing contemporary examples to illustrate overall trends in the data. Beyond the policy implications this work is also rich in theoretical development about issues of conflict and conflict management.This book will appeal to students of international conflict, civil war, ethnic conflict, and those who are concerned with developing policy in the post-cold war world to deal with intrastate conflict.Patrick M. Regan is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Binghamton University. (view table of contents)

Product Description: In this significant new book, Vincent Auger uses the case of the neutron bomb to examine the development of a dynamic theory of foreign policy analysis during the Carter Administration. The neutron bomb episode, Auger argues, provides a unique opportunity for an analysis of the evolution of internal executive branch decision making...read more

Product Description: The second of two reports on a RAND study, "Analytic Architecture for Joint Staff Decision Support Activities." The earlier report, MR-511-JS, sought to identify architectures, including the strategy-to-tasks (STT) framework, that could provide an efficient structure and a common tableau...read more

Product Description: This report presents results from the first of a two-part study of the Joint Staff's analytic-support needs.

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Offers revealing insights into the minds of U.S. and Soviet defense policymakers, detailing their thoughts on winning nuclear wars, what shapes their beliefs in general, and how personal beliefs shape strategic thought

Product Description: How are the decisions made which produce the phenomenal arsenals of nuclear weapons in the world today? Who makes them? To whom are they answerable? What role does Parliament play? These questions have until now been shrouded in mystery...read more

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