Bøger af Stephen M. Saideman

Adapting in the Dust is a vital evaluation of how well Canada's institutions, parties, and policy makers responded to the need to oversee and sustain a military intervention overseas.

Modern warfare is almost always multilateral to one degree or another, requiring countries to cooperate as allies or coalition partners. Yet as the war in Afghanistan has made abundantly clear, multilateral cooperation is neither straightforward nor guaranteed. Countries differ significantly in what they are willing to do and how and where they are willing to do it. Some refuse to participate in dangerous or offensive missions. Others change tactical objectives with each new commander. Some countries defer to their commanders while others hold them to strict account. NATO in Afghanistan explores how government structures and party politics in NATO countries shape how battles are waged in the field. Drawing on more than 250 interviews with senior officials from around the world, David Auerswald and Stephen Saideman find that domestic constraints in presidential and single-party parliamentary systems--in countries such as the United States and Britain respectively--differ from those in countries with coalition governments, such as Germany and the Netherlands. As a result, different countries craft different guidelines for their forces overseas, most notably in the form of military caveats, the often-controversial limits placed on deployed troops. Providing critical insights into the realities of alliance and coalition warfare, NATO in Afghanistan also looks at non-NATO partners such as Australia, and assesses NATO's performance in the 2011 Libyan campaign to show how these domestic political dynamics are by no means unique to Afghanistan.

The collapse of an empire can result in the division of families and the redrawing of geographical boundaries. New leaders promise the return of people and territories that may have been lost in the past, often advocating aggressive foreign policies that can result in costly and devastating wars. The final years of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, the end of European colonization in Africa and Asia, and the demise of the Soviet Union were all accompanied by war and atrocity.These efforts to reunite lost kin are known as irredentism-territorial claims based on shared ethnic ties made by one state to a minority population residing within another state. For Kin or Country explores this phenomenon, investigating why the collapse of communism prompted more violence in some instances and less violence in others. Despite the tremendous political and economic difficulties facing all former communist states during their transition to a market democracy, only Armenia, Croatia, and Serbia tried to upset existing boundaries. Hungary, Romania, and Russia practiced much more restraint. The authors examine various explanations for the causes of irredentism and for the pursuit of less antagonistic policies, including the efforts by Western Europe to tame Eastern Europe. Ultimately, the authors find that internal forces drive irredentist policy even at the risk of a country's self-destruction and that xenophobia may have actually worked to stabilize many postcommunist states in Eastern Europe.Events in Russia and Eastern Europe in 2014 have again brought irredentism into the headlines. In a new Introduction, the authors address some of the events and dynamics that have developed since the original version of the book was published. By focusing on how nationalist identity interact with the interests of politicians, For Kin or Country explains why some states engage in aggressive irredentism and when others forgo those opportunities that is as relevant to Russia and Ukraine in 2014 as it was for Serbia, Croatia, and Armenia in the 1990s.

Ethnic conflicts have created crises within NATO and between NATO and Russia, produced massive flows of refugees, destabilized neighboring countries, and increased the risk of nuclear war between Pakistan and India. Interventions have cost the United States, the United Nations, and other actors billions of dollars.While scholars and policymakers have devoted considerable attention to this issue, the question of why states take sides in other countries' ethnic conflicts has largely been ignored. Most attention has been directed at debating the value of particular techniques to manage ethnic conflict, including partition, prevention, mediation, intervention, and the like. However, as the Kosovo dispute demonstrated, one of the biggest obstacles to resolving ethnic conflicts is getting the outside actors to cooperate. This book addresses this question.Saideman argues that domestic political competition compels countries to support the side of an ethnic conflict with which constituents share ethnicities. He applies this argument to the Congo Crisis, the Nigerian Civil War, and Yugoslavia's civil wars. He then applies quantitative analyses to ethnic conflicts in the 1990s. Finally, he discusses recent events in Kosovo and whether the findings of these case studies apply more broadly.