Although comprising only a tiny proportion of all terrorist plots and attacks, the prospect of terrorists employing chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) weapons has raised substantial concerns among both policymakers and the general public. While CBRN terrorist events do represent a real, asymmetric threat (with at least 558 incidents recorded in extant databases), most of these incidents would not constitute the use of genuine weapons of mass destruction (WMD). This is because, to form a viable weapon, the toxic chemical, biological pathogen, hazardous radioisotope, or fissile material must be combined with an effective delivery system; as the scale of the intended effects of such a weapon increases, so generally does its sophistication and the difficulty of acquiring or producing it. The threat of CBRN terrorism can be parsed into a consideration of both the motivations underlying its pursuit and the capabilities required to successfully deploy a CBRN weapon. A wide variety of factors can prompt terrorists to pursue a CBRN weapon. These can be usefully categorized into ideological or psychological drivers, operational and instrumental purposes, and organizational motives. At the same time, while terrorists can conceivably acquire a CBRN capability via state or nonstate sponsors, theft, or purchase, the most likely avenue is internal development of a weapon or an attack on a nuclear, chemical, or biological facility. Historically, there have been over 200 actual uses by terrorists of CBRN agents, with chemical incidents being the most common type. Most incidents have not resulted in many casualties, although there are a handful of mass-casualty incidents of CBRN terrorism. Past perpetrators reflect a diverse array of ideologies and have selected a wide range of delivery methods. Yet, past trends may not be a reliable indicator of the future threat. While low-end CBRN terrorism events will likely continue to predominate, and the COVID-19 pandemic is unlikely to appreciably increase the threat of bioterrorism, emerging technologies that facilitate acquisition efforts and the precedent set by groups like the Islamic State indicate that the potential for CBRN terrorism to result in a genuine WMD event will persist and might even increase over time. Therefore, while authorities must be careful not to exaggerate or amplify the threat of CBRN terrorism, CBRN terrorism is a phenomenon that requires continued attention, with efforts to prevent it that remain commensurate with the extant level of the threat.
Article
CBRN Terrorism
Markus K. Binder and Gary A. Ackerman
Article
Children in Violent Movements: From Child Soldiers to Terrorist Groups
Mia Bloom and Kristian Kastner Warpinski
While the use of child soldiers has declined in recent years, it has not ended entirely. Children remain front-line participants in a variety of conflicts throughout the world and are actively recruited by armed groups and terrorist organizations. Reports of children involved in terrorism have become all too common. Boko Haram has repeatedly selected women and girls as their primary suicide attackers, and, in Somalia, the United Nations reported that al-Shabaab was responsible for recruiting over 1,800 children in 2019. In Iraq and Syria, children were routinely featured in the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s (ISIS) propaganda, and the group mobilized children as “cubs” to fight for the so-called Caliphate. Unfortunately there is a myriad of reasons why terrorist organizations actively include children within their ranks: children can be proficient fighters, and they are easy to train, cheaper to feed, and harder to detect. Thus, recruiting and deploying children is often rooted in “strategy” and not necessarily the result of shrinking numbers of adult recruits. Drawing from the robust literature on child soldiers, there are areas of convergence (and divergence) that explain the pathways children take in and out of terrorist organizations and the roles they play. Focusing on two cases, al-Shabaab in Somalia and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, we argue that there are three distinct but overlapping processes of child recruitment, including forced conscription (i.e., kidnapping), subtle manipulation and coercion (i.e., cultures of martyrdom), and a process of seemingly “voluntary recruitment,” which is almost always the result of intimidation and pressure given the children’s age and their (in)ability to provide consent. The concepts of consent and agency are key, especially when weighing the ethical and legal questions of what to do with these children once rescued or detained. Nonetheless, the children are first and foremost victims and should be awarded special protected status in any domestic or international court. In 2020, countries were seeking to balance human rights, legal responsibility, and national security around the challenge of repatriating the thousands of children affiliated with ISIS and still languishing in the al-Hol and Al Roj camps.
Article
Civilian Victimization During Conflict
Alexander B. Downes and Stephen Rangazas
Since the end of the Cold War, scholars have increasingly sought to explain the causes of civilian victimization—the intentional use of violence against noncombatants—during armed conflict. The question of the effects and effectiveness of violence against civilians, in contrast, has received less scholarly attention. One strand of research examines the impact of wartime civilian victimization on postconflict political behavior and outcomes. A second strand investigates the effectiveness of violence during the war itself. The principal question this literature asks is: Does civilian victimization “work”? Put more precisely, can intentionally targeting noncombatants help belligerents achieve their wartime objectives, whatever those might be? Civilian victimization takes different forms and serves different purposes in different kinds of conflicts; scholarship on its effectiveness is thus divided into work on irregular (predominantly intrastate) wars versus conventional (predominantly, but not exclusively, interstate) wars. No matter what its particular form or in which type of conflict it is used, however, civilian victimization tends to follow two broad logics: coercive and eliminationist. Most scholarship on irregular wars examines the effectiveness of coercive victimization, whereas studies of conventional war look at the efficacy of both. For example, a key debate in the literature on civilian victimization in irregular wars concerns whether selective or indiscriminate violence is more effective at deterring civilians from shifting their allegiances to the adversary. A broad consensus holds that violence is effective only when selective, but new studies have found that indiscriminate violence can also work under certain circumstances. Similarly, there is broad agreement (with some notable exceptions) in the literature on conventional war that coercive civilian victimization—which is almost by definition indiscriminate—is ineffective. In contrast, scholars have yet to assess systematically the effectiveness of eliminationist victimization in conventional war.
Article
Civil Wars and Displacement
Ayşe Betül Çelik
The growing number of civil wars in the post-Cold War era has been accompanied by a rising number of forcibly displaced people, who either stay within the borders of their own countries, becoming internally displaced persons (IDPs), or cross borders to become refugees. Although many studies have been conducted on the reasons of conflict-induced displacement, various questions remain of interest for the scholars of international relations, especially questions pertaining but not limited to the (a) gendered aspects of conflict, displacement, and peace processes, (b) predicting possible future displacement zones, and (c) best political and social designs for returnee communities in post-civil war contexts.
Most studies still focus on the negative consequences of forced migration, undermining how refugees and IDPs can also contribute to the cultural and political environment of the receiving societies. Considering that there is a huge variation in types of conflict, motivations for violence, and the resulting patterns of displacement within the category of civil war, more research on the actors forcing displacement, their intentions, and subsequent effects on return dynamics can benefit research in this field. Similarly, research on return and reconciliation needs to treat displacement and return as a continuum. Paying attention to conflict parties in civil war bears the potential for new areas of exploration whose outcomes can also shed light on policies for post-civil war construction and intergroup reconciliation.
Article
Civil War Spillover
Tyler Pack
Civil wars are destabilizing and destructive not only for states experiencing conflict, but also for states and other actors nearby and around the world. Civil war spillover includes tangible flows of people and resources, including refugees, government and rebel soldiers crossing borders, and arms and military material. Intangible spillover includes economic effects, learning and emulation mechanisms to outside populations, and changes in incentive and priorities as a result of spillover effects. Different civil war dynamics, including guerilla warfare, irregular warfare, and conventional warfare, lead to variations in spillover type and severity, and externalities also persist in the post-conflict period. Tangible and intangible sources of spillover do not operate in isolation, and the interaction of spillover types can affect states and other actors in different ways, though domestic conditions within a recipient state can either exacerbate or mitigate the effects. Scholars have moved from treating neighbors and regional actors as passive recipients of spillover, and research considers both external and internal policy decisions made in response to civil war externalities. States and other actors suffering the consequences of civil war violence occurring outside their borders or region attempt to influence or mitigate the effects through direct and indirect means of intervention, as well as domestic measures meant to ensure stability and security against current and possible future threats. In both cases the ability of actors to insulate themselves from civil war spillover is contingent on factors related to the spillover as well as domestic factors that constrain or enable certain policy responses.
Article
Conflict and Nationalist Frames
Marie-Eve Desrosiers
In the context of nationalist and ethnic struggles, framing refers to strategic communication aimed at changing perceptions and behavior, such as persuading members of a group to unite and fight or their opponents to demobilize. The concept and theory behind framing stem from sociology, and in particular American social movements theory, where they have helped reconcile an interest in the construction of identities and “meaning work” with the study of structures that favor participation in collective endeavors. Framing not only unpacks the processes behind this form of strategic communication through notions such as alignment and resonance, but it has also produced extensive scholarship on types of frames that foster mobilization and the socio-psychological keys they play upon in so doing. Framing theory has also focused on some of the elements contributing to the success—or lack thereof—of communication aimed at persuasion.
Considering that participation in crises and conflicts is an extreme form of mobilization, framing has, since the mid-2000s, made headway in conflict studies, where scholars have turned to framing processes to shed light on how people can be convinced to rally around the nationalist or ethnic flag and even take up arms in their group’s name. More recently, framing-centric approaches have been used to shed light on frames deployed in conflicts of a religious nature, as well as in the study of radicalization and the ideological or ideational framing behind it. The future of framing theory with regards to identity-based conflicts depends, however, on scholars’ ability to produce framing concepts and theoretical insights specific to conflict studies able to federate the community or researchers adopting the approach to study armed violence. As growing research on armed conflict turns to understanding the links between national and local realities, framing theorists may in addition benefit from greater attention to local frames and framing dynamics, and how they relate to the broader, elite-driven frames more commonly focused on in the study of armed violence. Finally, though so far little explored, framing proponents may stand to gain from engaging with literature using survey experiments or other promising quantitative approaches that have also sought to generate insights into ethnic relations or government representation and policy regarding crises and war.
Article
Contemporary Trends in Militarization and Politics in Africa
Godfrey Maringira
In the formative years of African independence, the assumption was that the military would desist from politics. Even though the military is expected to subordinate itself to a civilian government, the militaries in postcolonial Africa continue to meddle in politics. Hence, when the military acts in politics, it seeks to achieve its desired interests. Whether military intervention and coups in Africa are an alternative means to achieve and attain democracy remains a question for debate. There is no consensus on this issue, as military intervention in politics and coups leads to different and varied consequences. However, recent trends in military coups have been celebrated by ordinary citizens across African countries where authoritarian political elites have been overthrown from power.
Article
Critical Scholarship on Terrorism
Priya Dixit
Understandings of “critical” in critical scholarship on terrorism range from a Frankfurt School–influenced definition to a broader definition that aims to interrogate commonsense understandings of terrorism and counterterrorism. Overall, critical scholarship on terrorism draws on multiple disciplines and methodological traditions to analyze terrorism and counterterrorism. Within these, there have been ongoing debates and discussions about whether the state should be included in research on terrorism and, if so, what the inclusion of the state would do for the understanding of terrorism. Critical scholarship has also outlined the need for further attention to research ethics, as well as urged researchers to acknowledge their standpoints when conducting and communicating research. Some, but not all, critical scholarship has a normative orientation with the goal of emancipation, though the meaning of emancipation remains debated. Methodologically, the majority of critical scholarship on terrorism utilizes an interpretive lens to analyze terrorism and related issues. A central goal of critical terrorism research is to rework power relations such that Global South subjectivities are centered on research. This means including research conducted by Global South scholars and also centering Global South peoples and concerns in analyses of terrorism and counterterrorism. The role of gender, analytically and in practice, in relation to terrorism is also a key part of critical scholarship. Critical scholars of terrorism have observed that race is absent from much of terrorism scholarship, and there needs to be ongoing work toward addressing this imbalance. Media and popular culture, and their depiction of terrorism and counterterrorism, form another key strand in critical scholarship on terrorism. Overall, critical scholarship on terrorism is about scrutinizing and dismantling power structures that sustain commonsense knowledge regarding terrorism.
Article
Drivers of Religious Extremism in South Asia
Zahid Shahab Ahmed
Religious extremism is not a new phenomenon in South Asia but it has certainly grown during the 21st century and that too across the region. While there are historical reasons behind religious divisions and fissures in South Asia (e.g., the two-nation theory with reference to the creation of a separate homeland for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent), religious nationalism is a key driver behind the securitization of religious minorities. Although the existence of Muslim extremists is linked to how religion was used as a tool to recruit and mobilize mujahideen against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1988, the global dynamics after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the “war on terror” have also influenced religious radicalization and extremism in Pakistan. In contrast, Buddhist and Hindu nationalism have been key drivers of religiously motivated extremism targeting religious minorities, especially Muslims, in Sri Lanka and India. There are similarities in terms of how Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim extremist groups have been propagating hate and inciting violence; for instance, many extremist groups now increasingly use social media. As this article argues, the presence of religious extremism in South Asia presents a significant challenge to peace and security. This includes various forms of extremism targeting different religious groups and promoting anti-Western sentiments. International terrorist organizations are active in the region, while Hindu and Buddhist nationalists contribute to the marginalization and violence against Muslims. Creating an environment of tolerance, inclusivity, and respect for all religious communities is crucial to address these complex issues effectively.
Article
Drones in Global Security
Michael J. Boyle
Unmanned aerial vehicles, otherwise known as drones, are one of the most important developments in global security in the 21st century. Drones, which can be operated remotely from ground pilots, are now in use by more than 100 countries and a growing number of non-state actors, such as terrorist groups. Some of this is driven by a booming export market in drones, with countries such as the United States, Israel, China, and Turkey becoming the world’s leading suppliers of the technology. Drones have begun to alter the course of conventional wars, as seen in Nagorno-Karabakh and Ukraine, and also have enabled new practices such as targeted killings of terrorist operatives either on their own territory or, in the case of the United States, on remote battlefields. Drones are also shifting how states attempt to deter and coerce each other and also enabling non-state actors such as terrorist groups to strike at opponents in new and surprising ways. As drones have begun to affect the security of individuals, non-state actors, and states, they have also yielded a number of legal and ethical controversies about when and where they should be used. In particular, the remote nature of the technology raises questions as to whether the distance of their pilots from the battlefields that they fight on is producing the “push-button warfare” mentality or otherwise lowering the barriers to the use of force. Future trends in the technological development of drone warfare, including swarming and the use of artificial intelligence–enabled drones, will only make coming to grips with the impact of drones on global security more important.
Article
The Formation and Success of Peace Agreements in Civil Wars
Gary Uzonyi
Peace agreements are becoming a more common outcome of civil wars in the post–Cold War era. Yet, scholars tend to view this outcome as less stable than military victory. For this reason, much research seeks to explain why some peace agreements remain robust while others fail. From this literature, it is clear that the reason why an agreement is formed greatly influences whether it will succeed. There are four key findings regarding whether an agreement succeeds. First, power-sharing, especially political power-sharing, helps increase the robustness of agreements. Second, provisions that allow for the reporting and verification of compliance with the agreement decrease chances the agreement will fail. Third, various actors—including elites, fighters, and the broader population—must be compensated to some degree to increase the chances that no group seeks to break the agreement in the future. Last, the sequence and steps through which the agreement is implemented help determine whether peace persists following the negotiated settlement.
Article
Geography, Territory, and Conflict
Steven V. Miller, Jaroslav Tir, and John A. Vasquez
Traditional, structural theories of international relations may have eschewed the importance of geography and territory to understanding international conflict, but the past 50 years of quantitative scholarship have returned geography and territory to the fore of the discipline. The importance of geography and territory to the study of international conflict first emerged in the discipline of political geography and the early foundations of peace science. Subsequent empirical analyses demonstrated a robust connection between geography, particularly disputed territory, and all phases of inter-state conflict. Explanations for this robust relationship emerged concurrent to the empirical findings. The theoretical arguments are eclectic and focus on territoriality as human instinct, the tangible and intangible value of territory, and whether conflict over territory conforms well to implications from the bargaining framework. Though traditionally the domain of inter-state conflict scholars, civil conflict scholarship has greatly informed this research program on geography, territory, and conflict by expanding and enriching its theoretical arguments and empirical implications. The future of territorial conflict scholarship should focus on reconciling different theoretical arguments about the emergence of peace after World War II, wrestling with the future of territorial conflict as more territorial disputes are settled, providing richer data on territorial claims, and exploring the implications of global climate change for future conflict over scarce and changing waterways and maritime/river boundaries.
Article
Great-Power Competition
Jonathan M. DiCicco and Tudor A. Onea
Great-power competition (GPC) is a touchstone for strategists and policymakers. Its popularity stems from perceptions of China’s rise, Russia’s resurgence, and the United States’ relative decline. The term’s notoriety in policy circles is related to its use in U.S. national defense and strategy guidance documents. Sometimes GPC is dismissed as a buzzword, but it is a distinctive phenomenon that deserves scholarly investigation.
GPC is a classic feature of modern international relations grounded in a traditional power politics approach. Specifically, GPC is a permanent, compulsory, comprehensive, and exclusive contest for supremacy in a region or domain among those states considered to be the major players in the international system. The contest varies in intensity over time and space but remains a persistent aspect of the international system of sovereign states.
Great powers field uncommonly large, sophisticated, and diversified capabilities and compete for high stakes; their competitive behavior is endemic to a stratified system in which select states are recognized as having special status. That status imparts to members of the great-power club privileges and responsibilities, including collective action to address system-wide problems. However, the competition over power, security, and status among the great powers is always present.
GPC is often parsed into analytically separable dimensions (military, economic, scientific–technological, and so on), but in practice such dimensions are interrelated. Together with the great powers’ extraordinary capabilities and interests, the interdependence of these dimensions of competition tends to push GPC to be comprehensive. GPC is sometimes treated as something other than war, but when GPC intensifies, the possibility of major war looms.
Patterns of GPC are identified through the lens of competing schools of thought on power politics: balance of power and hegemonic–power transition. Each provides a general framework in which GPC may be located. Scholars, however, should not confine their investigations to such frameworks; novel scholarship is warranted to further develop the concept of GPC, to characterize it and theorize about its dynamics, to further study it empirically, and to scrutinize it through critical lenses.
Article
Intelligence in War
John Ferris
A large literature has emerged on intelligence and war which integrates the topics and techniques of two disciplines: strategic studies and military history. The literature on intelligence and war is divided into theory and strategy; command, control, communications, and intelligence (C3I); sources; military estimates in peace; deception; conventional operations; strike; and counter-insurgency and guerilla warfare. Sun Tzu treats intelligence as central to all forms of power politics, and even defines strategy and warfare as “the way of deception.” On the other hand, C3I combines signals and data processing technology, command as thought, process and action, the training of people, and individual and bureaucratic modes of learning. Since 1914, the power of secret sources has risen dramatically in peace and war, revolutionizing the value of intelligence for operations, especially at sea. The strongest area in this study is signals intelligence. Meanwhile, the relationship of intelligence with war, and with power politics, overlaps on the matter of military estimates during peacetime. The literature on operational intelligence is strongest on World War II. However, analysts have particularly failed to differentiate the effect of intelligence on operations, from that on a key element of military power since 1914: strike warfare. In counter-insurgency, many types and levels of war and intelligence overlap, which include guerillas, conventional and strike forces, and politics in villages and capitals.
Article
The International Politics of Memory
Lina Klymenko
Like the contested remembrance of historical events, collective memory shapes interstate relations, foreign and security policy, and global politics. International relations (IR) scholars studying the relationship between collective memory and international politics link the memory concept to the notions of security, power, language, emotions, gender, identity, trauma, justice, law, and the like. The study of the international politics of memory relies on a plurality of theoretical approaches gained from interdisciplinary works on collective memory. Although collective memory is viewed as a variable influencing foreign policymaking in structural terms within a positivist paradigm in IR scholarship, from an interpretive perspective, collective memory is a practice of remembrance that constitutes a state’s foreign and security policy. Following the advances of the interpretive paradigm in the social sciences, it is expected that more interpretive studies on the international politics of memory will appear. .
Article
International Relations, Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence
Ehud Udi Eiran
Scholars and practitioners of international relations (IR) are paying special attention to three significant ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) and big data (BD) are transforming IR, against a background of earlier debates among IR scholars about the effect of technology on the field.
First, AI and BD have emerged as arenas of interstate, mostly great power competition. In this context, scholars suggest, AI and BD are important because an effective use of AI and BD adds significantly to military and economic power. The current competition in these fields, between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, brought scholars to highlight at least four ways in which AI and BD are important: (a) Automating decisions about the use of nuclear force could affect nuclear stability, but scholars still cannot agree in what direction; (b) The central role played by the private sector. This, as opposed to the Cold War era, when the state played the leading role in the development of technology ; (c) the gap between the current two great powers in these technologies is narrow, in contrast to the significant gap in favor of the United States during the Cold War; and (d) the wave of new technologies, including AI, makes weapons systems cheaper and more available for smaller powers and political entities, thus offering a possible curb on the dominance of great powers.
Second, AI and BD are expected to affect national decision-making in the areas of foreign and security policies. Here, scholars highlight three possible transformations: (a) AI will allow states a path for better decision-making on security and foreign policy matters, through the optimization and speeding of existing policy processes; (b) the technology will omit some of the human shortcomings in decision-making, further optimizing the policy process; and (c) AI will be able to offer predictions about policies of other actors in the international system and create effective simulations to help manage crises.
Finally, the inclusion of AI and BD in weapons systems, most notably the development of lethal autonomous weapons systems, brings the promise (or horror) of greater efficiency and lethality but also raises significant ethical questions. AI and BD are also affecting other arenas of interstate conflict including the cyber domain and information warfare.
Article
Israeli Foreign Policy
Aviad Rubin
The main principles of Israeli foreign policy emerged during the pre-state period and were shaped by Zionist ideology and the lessons of the Holocaust. The primary goal of this policy was, and still is, to secure a sovereign Jewish state in the land of Israel, and a safe haven for world Jewry. Another dominant factor in the shaping of the foreign policy of Israel was the need to encounter the country’s challenging geostrategic situation—small territory; lack of natural resources, until the discovery of natural gas depots in water in the Israeli exclusive economic zone during the last decade; fragile Jewish communities around the world; and a hostile neighborhood. Combined together, these considerations are the issues that rank high on the agenda of Israeli foreign policy and affect Israel’s relationship with the international community, ranging from the global superpowers to third world countries. After maintaining a relatively steady foreign policy program throughout the 20th century, in the 21st century the state made some significant policy shifts, especially under Benjamin Netanyahu’s consecutive governments. These included a halt in Israeli–Palestinian negotiations for peace; a high-profile campaign against Iran’s nuclear weapons program; more emphasis on the maritime domain; and strengthening ties with illiberal leaders around the world. In 2021, the seeming epilogue of Netanyahu’s tenure as prime minister leaves an open question about the relative weight of structural and ideational factors vs. powerful political agents in the design of Israel’s foreign policy.
Article
Jihadist Governance in Civil Wars
Aisha Ahmad
Although many nonstate armed groups try to rule over citizens, of special concern are jihadist groups that take power in conflict-affected states. Not only do jihadists espouse an extreme political vision, but these religiously motivated rebels also have an uncanny ability to rout and even overthrow incumbent governments. Whenever possible, jihadists will try to seize control of the entire state and replace incumbents with a new regime. If decisive military victory is not possible, they will seek control over pockets of territory and will build rudimentary proto-states within official state boundaries. Jihadist insurgents are not only motivated to fight, but are also very keen to govern over territory and people. In their mission to build alternative forms of order, they therefore collect taxes, enforce laws, and even offer rudimentary public services. In many conflict zones, jihadists are able to build stronger social contracts with citizens than the official government.
Because of this success, many scholars and practitioners have erroneously assumed that jihadists must be spreading their ideologies to local communities, and thus converting citizens to their extremist beliefs. This analysis fundamentally misdiagnoses why jihadists are able to establish parallel forms of order in civil wars. Jihadists do not succeed in areas where communities have converted to extremism; rather, they thrive in regions where the official government has catastrophically failed to provide citizens with security, order, justice, and other basic services. Evidence from multiple cases shows that government corruption, ineptitude, and abuse—not extremism or ideological radicalization—best explain the rise of jihadist governance in conflict zones. It is not that local communities are enamored with the idea of jihadist rule; rather, they are disgusted and outraged by their incumbent governments.
Article
Kurdish Politics in the Global Context
Serhun Al
Kurds are considered to be one of the largest ethnic groups in the world—with a population of more than 30 million people—who do not have their own independent state. In the Middle East, they are the fourth largest ethnic group after Arabs, Persians, and Turks. The statelessness of such a major group with an increasing ethnic and national consciousness in the post-Ottoman world led to their traumatic insecurities in the hands of majority-led nation-states that used modern technologies of social engineering including displacement, dehumanization, assimilation, and genocidal acts throughout the 20th century. With the memory of such traumatic insecurities, the driving force of contemporary Kurdish nationalism in the Middle East has primarily been the question of state or state-like entities. Yet, Kurds are not a homogeneous group with a collective understanding of security and self-government. Rather, there are political-organizational rivalries within Kurds across Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran. Thus, it is important to understand the multifaceted Kurdish politics in the Middle East within a global-historical perspective where global power rivalries, regional geopolitics, and intra-Kurdish organizational competition are interwoven together. While the opportunities for Kurdish self-determination were missed in the early 20th century, resilient Kurdish political organizations emerged within the bipolar international context of the Cold War. The American hegemony in the post–Cold War era transformed the Kurdish political status in the geopolitics of the Middle East, where the 1991 Gulf War, the 2003 Iraq War, and the broader war on terror provided the Kurds with many political opportunities. Finally, the shifting regional and global alliances in the post–Arab Spring era—where the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has become the global nemesis—created new political opportunities as well as significant threats for the Kurds.
Article
The Latin American Long Peace
Nicolás Terradas
Latin America is often hailed as “the most peaceful region in the world.” In both academic and policy circles, this view has taken root under the common perception of the region as a “zone of peace” where war and interstate armed conflict have largely disappeared and are now unthinkable. The region, however, continues to showcase high levels of intra-state violence despite the absence of war among states. In the IR academic debate of the long peace in Latin America, as well, several areas of discord and intense disagreement among the multiple works continue to challenge any encompassing explanations for this rather paradoxical regional phenomenon. In this context, for those interested in conducting further research in this area, there still is plenty of space for making meaningful contributions to both the theoretical study of regional peace dynamics as well as the unravelling of Latin America’s paradoxical coexistence of intra-state violence amid enduring inter-state peace.
