Dictators at War and Peace (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

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In her view, such audiences by and large restrain leaders from going to war or initiating a dispute (22-23). All told, then, even if the Junta’s strategy was risky, it was not unreasonable to believe that when confronted with a bloodless fait accompli the British government would simply walk away, while any attempts at a diplomatic resolution would likely be frustrated by the British government’s refusal to force a transfer on the reluctant islanders. Nor was there good coordination between political and military officials, which is so necessary for effective strategy. P. Weeks explains why certain kinds of regimes are less likely to resort to war than others, why some are more likely to win the wars they start, and why some authoritarian leaders face domestic punishment for foreign policy failures whereas others can weather all but the most serious military defeat.

If it is not, and thus the military constitutes a second audience in Machines, then these regimes may not face the simple incentive structure that Weeks lays out. Downes correctly points out that my argument assumes that machines feature strong civilian control of the military. In Dictators at War and Peace, Weeks categorizes authoritarian regimes based on whether leaders face domestic audiences that can hold them accountable for foreign policy failures—as in democracies—and whether leaders and audiences consist of civilian elites or military officers.International relations scholars have traditionally characterized regime type as dichotomous: democracy versus nondemocracy. For example, Weeks reports that Juntas lost three out of eight wars in which they were involved, a rate that is lower than that for personalist regimes but higher than that for democracies and Machines. These criticisms should in no way detract from the questions Weeks raises and from her insights into the logic of different authoritarian regimes at war and peace. The intellectual depth of the reviewers’ discussions speaks to the magnitude of the contribution of Dictators at War and Peace. Regarding the problem of Russian aggression under President Vladimir Putin, Russian aggression could be substantially constrained if the Russian elite found a means of putting constraints on the power of the Russian president, even if such constraints fall short of effecting a full democratic transition.

Weeks (78) codes Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1967 as a Strongman—a leader with a military background constrained by no audience—but Brooks depicts Nasser as locked in a fierce competition for power with his military chief, Abdel Hakim Amer. Similarly, I agree with Weisiger’s comment that future scholarship should analyze whether the results are robust to controlling for possible confounding variables beyond those I studied.

By contrast, personalist leaders, both civilian Bosses and military Strongmen, face little prospect of punishment for foreign policy failure, and thus can afford to engage in speculative gambles.

Regimes in which leaders are immune from removal differ only in whether the leader has a civilian ( boss) or military ( strongman) background.

The idea that these kinds of governments are slightly less likely than democracies to launch overt conventional aggressive war and also significantly more likely to win their wars than other types of authoritarian governments is an argument which should be looked at more by policy makers. These regimes are likely to be more aggressive, since civilian leaders may be removed for opposing the use of force rather than for going to war unsuccessfully, and civilian elites cannot prevent the military from taking action. In Chapter 5, Weeks dismisses diversionary explanations for Argentine behavior leading up to the 1982 Falklands War. Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases.

Finally, there is the difficulty of sorting out the independent effect of regime type given possible confounds. E. Goemans, War and Punishment: The Causes of War Termination and the First World War (Princeton, N. Bosses and Strongmen, by contrast, should exhibit behavior quite different from democracies—and from their more constrained autocratic peers—because they are largely immune from domestic challenges. But these leaders may also face threats of removal from the military audience if they do not behave more aggressively. Moreover, civilians were outnumbered by military officers in important ministries, and were increasingly excluded from important political and military decisions.If the peacetime threat of domestic punishment is high, the use of force with the potential for political domestic rewards in the case of victory can be a rational gamble, even if defeat carries a high concomitant likelihood of punishment. Downes’s commentary raises an important question about the theory, and I appreciate the opportunity to clarify how I conceptualized and coded regime type. The statistical analysis builds on work by Barbara Geddes on the comparative politics of authoritarian regimes to classify countries in the period since 1945 into relevant categories.