Reviews for Military Integration after Civil Wars: Multiethnic Armies, Identity and Post-Conflict Reconstruction

The average rating for Military Integration after Civil Wars: Multiethnic Armies, Identity and Post-Conflict Reconstruction based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-02-11 00:00:00 Nicholas Samson This is a well-organized work. Many interesting findings throughout this research. It lacks a condensing theory, though. The main argument of this work is that domestic politics are the main element that predetermine the result of an interstate armed conflict. This is not a new idea; However, it is a novelty only in the sense that it challenges presuppositions of Realism and Neo-realism. After a long list of thinkers that have considered war as a strategy of the state to guarantee internal stability that runs through my head, George Orwell is an author that mentions it; Orwell suggests perpetuating war to provide the state with permanent internal peace. Stam's book tests hypotheses related to the internal dynamics of the state, the state's leaders' decisions, and the balance of power to forecast if in a conflict the state will win, lose or draw (in a period between the 1800s and 1985). One of Stam's main ideas sustains that war equals degrees of coercion and that because of it, a state's capacity to intimidate another one, depends on the relationship cost-benefit, between the involved actors. To prove his idea, his method is statistical; He uses diverse IV to determine outcomes in his model; some of these IV are internal (domestic) and other are external (inter-nations). His utilization of over twenty IV include the state's conflict decisions, such as tactical and strategic alternatives, mobilization of troops, development of alliances, or internal repression (of opposition, as with the Vietnam War or the Iraq invasion, to name two examples), but also other IV as terrain, military advances and implicitly, culture (Sun Tzu came to mind). The first critique that I had, was that his chosen IV were insufficient, however, I changed my mind towards the end of the book where he acknowledges this. Some of Stam's findings are not surprising; e.g. the fact that not only IV such as military investments, the capacities of the industrial-military complex, state-of-the-art military technologies, and manpower numbers influence the outcome of war, are expected results, but e.g. the case of the idea of repression (towards the opposition) as an IV (which also plays a determinant role in the results) is more interesting; However In his analysis, he could have applied as well soft-power elements to test his ideas; That would have been enlightening. Stam puts to test even Sun Tzu's thesis, since he affirms that some traditionally considered factors of success, such as the ones the Chinese general bases his theory on, can be of secondary importance when compared to the result of his thesis. For Stam, Internal factors are of the gravest relevance; Not so external ones. An idea of the author that I do not agree with is that nuclear power does not represent a major change in the practice and ideologies of warfare. Nuclear capability in fact, is responsible for a relative, long period of peace since 1945, without considering Stam's external and internal factors that affect the happening and outcomes of (conventional) war. Another argument of Stam's is that according to his conclusions, leaders of (mostly) democracies, must choose "popular" internal decisions, versus "effective, but unpopular, international ones", which I think is relative to the state's interest. e.g. If the Vietnam War was to stop the communist threat in Southern Asia, the desired outcome was the total victory on the Vietcong; But, if the idea was to prolong war as much as possible for industrial-economic reasons, "victory" responds to another definition; In both cases the outcome is predictable applying the author ideas, one way or the other, however, my doubt is about how to determine an outcome if it was a combination of those two (or more) ideas, just to simplify my point? What if his argument does not include elements such as third parties' interests, internal and external (China? Malaysia?)? What about elements of trans-governmentalism that he never mentions? His puzzle: Can the internal dynamics of the state change its own fortune in war? The answer is almost obvious. In contrast, his analysis on draws is more interesting; Stam's work is the first one I have read in which he tests the idea that draws are more common that perceived (interesting!). Particularly in the scenario of draw, the domestic situation seems crucial. The implications of his work applied to the security dilemma can apply to the study of war, regionally, such as with the Middle East (for a case of abundant conflict) or with Latin America (for a case of scarce war); The problem with this point of view is that he mentions the implication, but he never explains how it does affects the notion. I had the impression that some of his findings are not enough justified, but only frivolously mentioned. I understood that democracies with high levels of positive, popular participation and authoritarian (if not totalitarian) states that repress their opponents, increase their chances of winning a war, but I did not understand thoroughly why or how. According to the author, his conclusions are rational and overwhelming, but they are more analytical and less determinant. His initiative to challenge Realism and Neorealism is very appealing, but I missed the proposed alternative to those. Also, since I don't know the Correlates of War project (interstate wars occurring between 1816 to the late 1980s), I couldn't say if other pertinent data could test his ideas. A major confusion that I found in the book is that his hypothesis on the outcomes of war, seems a part of his findings in the form of cost-benefit of war. Another problem I identified is that I could never find an explanation for is what the author calls "the potential problem of multicollinearity" (p. 130). What is that problem? Where is it? And how does it affect his conclusions? I never found the answers to this; It's my understanding that he doesn't mention it afterwards. References: Stam, A. 1999. Win, Lose or Draw. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-07-08 00:00:00 Mike Sommers 3.5/5 Really enjoyed this book. Although it is a bit dated, the theory applied here has been accepted as paradigmatic of the literature in security studies in terms of defining strategy in a way that makes the strategic studies part of me cringe. Numerous studies before, and since, have reinforced the categories of maneuver, attrition, and punishment strategies; and it's time for a theoretical update on several grounds. First, and most importantly, the coding rules are very subjective and slippery. Generally, what Stam suggests is "doctrine" is really just a matter of who attacked who first, and this tends to make a caricature of the offense/defense literature, at least as I understand it. Specifically, there is a problem with the operationalization of different strategies, especially between punishment and attrition--that seems to deviate from their strategic purpose. The myth of blitzkrieg also features significantly as a strategy in how maneuver is coded in this study. Second, there is an area, thanks to work by scholars like Stathis Kalyvas, Nick Prime, and Lukas Milevski who look beyond a predominant logic of destruction towards characterizations and categories of control. This is an area I hope to exploit in future research, in this case relying on the strategic theory of J.C. Wylie, especially in simplifying the coding and eliminating the aforementioned slippery coding. Third, while the methodology of this effort was generally well done, there are further innovations--particularly in the duration analysis--that could be exploited in research that could deviate from and complement Stam's work. Finally, the substantive interpretations were fairly superficial, especially because the work lacked any rigorous examination of the cases where prediction failed, nor the hard cases where prediction worked. Generally, there is a tremendous convincing benefit to studies that rely on mixed methods, if even Stam had considered greater detail in analytical narratives that served as the underlying basis of the coding rules for the strategies in Win, Lose, or Draw.