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). Downes correctly points out that my argument assumes that machines feature strong civilian control of the military.

The key fact that makes Imperial Japan from 1889 to 1941 a hybrid regime with civilian leaders and a military audience, and which Weeks mentions only in passing, is that under the Meiji Constitution of 1889, the military had the power to bring down any civilian government by withdrawing—or refusing to name—the Army or Navy Minister. Nonetheless, I agree that there is still much to be learned by linking monadic arguments about regime type to (dyadic) theories of strategic interaction. Goemans advocates building an argument more closely around the bargaining theory of war, which focuses on the puzzle of why states choose war rather than reaching a more efficient peaceful bargain. Thus, even without recourse to force, the Japanese military could topple the regime, a prerogative it exercised on multiple occasions. Weeks deserves much credit for the originality of her contributions, and I hope and am confident that others will follow her lead.Imperial Japan, for example, provides an example of a civilian-led regime where civilians did not have control over the military, and thus the military constituted the key audience that could remove civilian leaders. A preliminary statistical analysis suggests, contrary to this counterargument, that the result is actually being driven primarily by the non-communist Machines (countries like Mexico under the Institutional Revolutionary Party PRI, post-independence Kenya and Tanzania, and Malaysia under Mahathir Mohamad), but disentangling this relationship is not straightforward given the broad overlap. The significant caveat, of course, is that dictatorships such as North Korea that have no significant elite restrictions on their leaders remain dangerous. By focusing on not only domestic accountability but also the predilections of leaders and, crucially, the preferences of the domestic audiences they are accountable to, Weeks shows that some autocrats face incentives much like democracies, and therefore behave much like their democratic counterparts when it comes to questions of war and peace.

In other words, evaluation of the explanatory power of a Boss-type regime’s decisions for the use of force must also compare the Boss’s behavior against the behavior of a democracy, a Strongman-, a Junta-, and a Machine-regime in similar circumstances. Civilians, I argue, would have been more likely to raise the issue in a venue like the United Nations (UN), where many countries supported decolonization. Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Despite this though, I would have loved to have seen the quite placid personalist boss rule regimes of Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan included, even if only to dismiss them as being too under Russia's wing to have much autonomy.With such numbers in recent history, it seems eminently plausible that Galtieri feared an irregular removal from office and subsequent severe punishment. The structure and prose suffered from the author trying so hard to prove her fidelity to her academic discipline. Likely the most important argument and finding in the book is that Machines are functionally equivalent to democracies. Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. The Constitution exempted the military from parliamentary control; the armed services answered only to the emperor, and “[n]o civilian control was ever allowed.