Modern Warfare Institute

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14216/63

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    The Regional Impact of the Abraham Accords
    (Modern War Institute, 2021) Yossef, Amr
    The end of 2020 saw a number of important developments in the long-lasting Arab Israeli conflict. These began in September 2020, with the signing in the White House of the Abraham Accords—formally the Treaty of Peace, Diplomatic Relations and Full Normalization between the United Arab Emirates and the state of Israel (UAE)—which explicitly aimed to foster development and prosperity through cooperation in various civilian fields: health, agriculture, tourism, energy, environment, and innovation. Bahrain would join the Abraham Accords soon after, announcing it as the Declaration of Peace, Cooperation, and Constructive Diplomatic and Friendly Relations. They were followed by announcements in October and December 2020 of similar normalization agreements with Sudan and Morocco, respectively. There are reports in the media that other Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, may follow suit.
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    Urban Warfare Project Case Study #2 – Mosul
    (Modern War Institute, 2021) Spencer, John; Geroux, Jayson
    The Battle of Mosul began on October 16, 2016, ending when a final pocket of defending forces was cleared on July 20, 2017. The city is located in northern Iraq’s Nineveh province. Its seventy square miles are bisected by the Tigris River, which flows through the city from the northwest to the southeast.
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    A Kashmir Peace Deal Now? Ripeness, Readiness, and US Role
    (Modern War Institute, 2021) Biberman, Yelena
    Kashmir has been at the heart of one of the most intractable conflicts in modern history. Although progress may appear unlikely at first glance, there are three important reasons why Washington may make Kashmir peace talks a foreign policy goal over the next four years: reduction in tensions between two nuclear powers; effective withdrawal from Afghanistan; and support for democratic freedoms and human rights. With a new US administration in the White House and China’s recent moves, now is the time for the United States to showcase its principles, priorities, and power in the Indo-Pacific. Facilitating a Kashmir peace deal would do precisely that.
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    The Shape Of Things To Come: Why The Pentagon Must Embrace Soft Power To Compete With China
    (Modern War Institute, 2021) Wolfley, Kyle J.
    Last March, the same week that the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a global pandemic, three thousand Chinese and Cambodian troops began Exercise Golden Dragon, a series of military drills focused on “counterterrorism and humanitarianism.” The exercises marked an expansion over those in 2019, and they came three years after Cambodia abruptly canceled its annual exercises with the United States. “What we are doing here is all about our cooperation and relationship,” declared Cambodia’s defense minister. “I can tell you that the Chinese military is helping our troops to build up their capacity.” As the pandemic forced the United States to scale down its massive Defender exercise in Europe, the Chinese military continued its multinational exercise programs with Russia and Pakistan as well, despite China’s strict domestic lockdowns.
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    The Devil Is In The Data: Publicly Available Information And The Risks To Force Protection And Readiness
    (Modern War Institute, 2022) Littel, Joseph; Smith, Maggie; Starck, Nick
    In the early 2010s, mass protests and riots ripped through the Middle East and North Africa as the Arab Spring gathered support. Longtime authoritarians like Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, and Bashar al-Assad of Syria all struggled to contain the groundswell after decades of rule. The rest of the world watched the human rights atrocities broadcast live on social media directly from those living through it instead of from traditional media institutions or foreign correspondents. The ubiquity of cellular phones and social media had democratized media production and the world had a front-row seat to revolution and upheaval.
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    Issue linkage in security assistance: A pathway to recipient security sector reform
    (Taylor and Francis, 2024-07-22) Margulies, Max; Metz, Rachel
    This article applies the international cooperation concept of issue linkage to identify an overlooked pathway to successful security assistance. We argue that providers can effectively incentivise recipients to implement otherwise undesirable reforms when they explicitly link implementation to another good whose value to the recipient outweighs the costs of the reforms. Drawing on original interviews, we find support for our argument in post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), where the United States used the promise of NATO’s Partnership for Peace program to incentivise BiH to integrate its three armies.
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    Drafting Restraint: Are military recruitment policies associated with interstate conflict initiation?
    (Sage, 2024-09-05) Margulies, Max
    Are countries that use conscription more restrained in their use of military force? A common argument holds that military conscription restrains leaders from using force because it increases the political cost of war and distributes them more evenly and broadly across the population. Despite this intuition, empirical evidence to support it is at best inconclusive. This article introduces a novel perspective on the relationship between military recruitment (MR) policies and conflict initiation (CI) by arguing that the military’s size relative to society – its military participation rate (MPR) – is an important and overlooked part of this story. MPR is a more direct measure of the population’s exposure to the costs of war, but high MPR may also increase CI by enhancing military capacity. By incorporating MPR into the analysis of CI, both independently and in interaction with conscription, this article provides a more comprehensive understanding of how MR practices shape CI. It tests these new hypotheses about the relationship between MPR, conscription and CI using a variety of time-series models that cover all country-years from 1816 to 2011. The findings do not support the conventional wisdom, instead revealing that neither conscription nor volunteerism is independently associated with restrained initiation of military conflicts abroad. On the contrary, these recruitment practices are more likely to be associated with an increase in the likelihood of CI. These findings indicate that we should be skeptical of traditional arguments that assume conscription leads to restraint in the use of force, either independently or conditional on MPR. These counterintuitive results underscore the need for additional research on the complex relationship between MR practices, civil–military relations and foreign policy.