Download or read book Covert Regime Change written by Lindsey A. O'Rourke and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: O'Rourke's book offers a onestop shop for understanding foreignimposed regime change. Covert Regime Change is an impressive book and required reading for anyone interested in understanding hidden power in world politics.― Political Science Quarterly States seldom resort to war to overthrow their adversaries. They are more likely to attempt to covertly change the opposing regime, by assassinating a foreign leader, sponsoring a coup d'état, meddling in a democratic election, or secretly aiding foreign dissident groups. In Covert Regime Change, Lindsey A. O'Rourke shows us how states really act when trying to overthrow another state. She argues that conventional focus on overt cases misses the basic causes of regime change. O'Rourke provides substantive evidence of types of security interests that drive states to intervene. Offensive operations aim to overthrow a current military rival or break up a rival alliance. Preventive operations seek to stop a state from taking certain actions, such as joining a rival alliance, that may make them a future security threat. Hegemonic operations try to maintain a hierarchical relationship between the intervening state and the target government. Despite the prevalence of covert attempts at regime change, most operations fail to remain covert and spark blowback in unanticipated ways. Covert Regime Change assembles an original dataset of all American regime change operations during the Cold War. This fund of information shows the United States was ten times more likely to try covert rather than overt regime change during the Cold War. Her dataset allows O'Rourke to address three foundational questions: What motivates states to attempt foreign regime change? Why do states prefer to conduct these operations covertly rather than overtly? How successful are such missions in achieving their foreign policy goals?

Download or read book Overthrow written by Stephen Kinzer and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-02-06 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning author tells the stories of the audacious American politicians, military commanders, and business executives who took it upon themselves to depose monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers of other countries with disastrous long-term consequences.

Download or read book Regime Change written by Robert S. Litwak and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2007-01-30 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 9/11 terrorist attacks starkly recast the U.S. debate on "rogue states." In this new era of vulnerability, should the United States counter the dangers of weapons proliferation and state-sponsored terrorism by toppling regimes or by promoting change in the threatening behavior of their leaders? Regime Change examines the contrasting precedents set with Iraq and Libya and provides incisive analysis of the pressing crises with North Korea and Iran. A successor to the author's influential Rogue States and U.S. Foreign Policy (2000), this compelling book clarifies and critiques the terms in which today's vital foreign policy and security debate is being conducted.

Download or read book Catastrophic Success written by Alexander B. Downes and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-15 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Catastrophic Success, Alexander B. Downes compiles all instances of regime change around the world over the past two centuries. Drawing on this impressive data set, Downes shows that regime change increases the likelihood of civil war and violent leader removal in target states and fails to reduce the probability of conflict between intervening states and their targets. As Downes demonstrates, when a state confronts an obstinate or dangerous adversary, the lure of toppling its government and establishing a friendly administration is strong. The historical record, however, shows that foreign-imposed regime change is, in the long term, neither cheap, easy, nor consistently successful. The strategic impulse to forcibly oust antagonistic or non-compliant regimes overlooks two key facts. First, the act of overthrowing a foreign government sometimes causes its military to disintegrate, sending thousands of armed men into the countryside where they often wage an insurgency against the intervener. Second, externally-imposed leaders face a domestic audience in addition to an external one, and the two typically want different things. These divergent preferences place imposed leaders in a quandary: taking actions that please one invariably alienates the other. Regime change thus drives a wedge between external patrons and their domestic protégés or between protégés and their people. Catastrophic Success provides sober counsel for leaders and diplomats. Regime change may appear an expeditious solution, but states are usually better off relying on other tools of influence, such as diplomacy. Regime change, Downes urges, should be reserved for exceptional cases. Interveners must recognize that, absent a rare set of promising preconditions, regime change often instigates a new period of uncertainty and conflict that impedes their interests from being realized.

Download or read book Losing the Long Game written by Philip H. Gordon and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foreign Affairs Best of Books of 2021 "Book of the Week" on Fareed Zakaria GPS Financial Times Best Books of 2020 The definitive account of how regime change in the Middle East has proven so tempting to American policymakers for decades—and why it always seems to go wrong. "It's a first-rate work, intelligently analyzing a complex issue, and learning the right lessons from history." —Fareed Zakaria Since the end of World War II, the United States has set out to oust governments in the Middle East on an average of once per decade—in places as diverse as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan (twice), Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The reasons for these interventions have also been extremely diverse, and the methods by which the United States pursued regime change have likewise been highly varied, ranging from diplomatic pressure alone to outright military invasion and occupation. What is common to all the operations, however, is that they failed to achieve their ultimate goals, produced a range of unintended and even catastrophic consequences, carried heavy financial and human costs, and in many cases left the countries in question worse off than they were before. Philip H. Gordon's Losing the Long Game is a thorough and riveting look at the U.S. experience with regime change over the past seventy years, and an insider’s view on U.S. policymaking in the region at the highest levels. It is the story of repeated U.S. interventions in the region that always started out with high hopes and often the best of intentions, but never turned out well. No future discussion of U.S. policy in the Middle East will be complete without taking into account the lessons of the past, especially at a time of intense domestic polarization and reckoning with America's standing in world.

Download or read book Regime Change written by Rein Mullerson and published by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. This book was released on 2013 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking a historical and comparative perspective, the book analyses current attempts of regime change in various parts of the world, their intended and unintended consequences, as well as moral, legal and political aspects of external interference in internal processes.

Download or read book The Regime Change Consensus written by Joseph Stieb and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-08 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the United States pivoted from containment to regime change in Iraq between the Gulf War and September 11, 2001.

Download or read book Toppling Foreign Governments written by Melissa Willard-Foster and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-01-11 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2011, the United States launched its third regime-change attempt in a decade. Like earlier targets, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi had little hope of defeating the forces stacked against him. He seemed to recognize this when calling for a cease-fire just after the intervention began. But by then, the United States had determined it was better to oust him than negotiate and thus backed his opposition. The history of foreign-imposed regime change is replete with leaders like Qaddafi, overthrown after wars they seemed unlikely to win. From the British ouster of Afghanistan's Sher Ali in 1878 to the Soviet overthrow of Hungary's Imre Nagy in 1956, regime change has been imposed on the weak and the friendless. In Toppling Foreign Governments, Melissa Willard-Foster explores the question of why stronger nations overthrow governments when they could attain their aims at the bargaining table. She identifies a central cause—the targeted leader's domestic political vulnerability—that not only gives the leader motive to resist a stronger nation's demands, making a bargain more difficult to attain, but also gives the stronger nation reason to believe that regime change will be comparatively cheap. As long as the targeted leader's domestic opposition is willing to collaborate with the foreign power, the latter is likely to conclude that ousting the leader is more cost effective than negotiating. Willard-Foster analyzes 133 instances of regime change, ranging from covert operations to major military invasions, and spanning over two hundred years. She also conducts three in-depth case studies that support her contention that domestically and militarily weak leaders appear more costly to coerce than overthrow and, as long as they remain ubiquitous, foreign-imposed regime change is likely to endure.

Download or read book Regime Change in the Yugoslav Successor States written by Mieczysław P. Boduszyński and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2010-04-26 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1990s, amid political upheaval and civil war, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia dissolved into five successor states. The subsequent independence of Montenegro and Kosovo brought the total number to seven. Balkan scholar and diplomat to the region Mieczyslaw P. Boduszynski examines four of those states—Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia—and traces their divergent paths toward democracy and Euro-Atlantic integration over the past two decades. Boduszynski argues that regime change in the Yugoslav successor states was powerfully shaped by both internal and external forces: the economic conditions on the eve of independence and transition and the incentives offered by the European Union and other Western actors to encourage economic and political liberalization. He shows how these factors contributed to differing formulations of democracy in each state. The author engages with the vexing problems of creating and sustaining democracy when circumstances are not entirely supportive of the effort. He employs innovative concepts to measure the quality of and prospects for democracy in the Balkan region, arguing that procedural indicators of democratization do not adequately describe the stability of liberalism in post-communist states. This unique perspective on developments in the region provides relevant lessons for regime change in the larger post-communist world. Scholars, practitioners, and policymakers will find the book to be a compelling contribution to the study of comparative politics, democratization, and European integration.

Download or read book State Formation Regime Change and Economic Development written by Jørgen Møller and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-19 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Failed or weak states, miscarried democratizations, and economic underdevelopment characterize a large part of the world we live in. Much work has been done on these subjects over the latest decades but most of this research ignores the deep historical processes that produced the modern state, modern democracy and the modern market economy in the first place. This book elucidates the roots of these developments. The book discusses why China was surpassed by Europeans in spite of its early development of advanced economic markets and a meritocratic state. It also hones in on the relationship between geopolitical pressure and state formation and on the European conditions that – from the Middle Ages onwards – facilitated the development of the modern state, modern democracy, and the modern market economy. Finally, the book discusses why some countries have been able to follow the European lead in the latest generations whereas other countries have not. State Formation, Regime Change and Economic Development will be of key interest to students and researchers within political science and history as well as to Comparative Politics, Political Economy and the Politics of Developing Areas.

Download or read book Overreach written by Michael MacDonald and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-10 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a fair number of Americans thought the idea was crazy. Now everyone, except a few die-hards, thinks it was. So what was going through the minds of the talented and experienced men and women who planned and initiated the war? What were their assumptions? Overreach aims to recover those presuppositions. Michael MacDonald examines the standard hypotheses for the decision to attack, showing them to be either wrong or of secondary importance: the personality of President George W. Bush, including his relationship with his father; Republican electoral considerations; the oil lobby; the Israeli lobby. He also undermines the argument that the war failed because of the Bush administration’s incompetence. The more fundamental reasons for the Iraq War and its failure, MacDonald argues, are located in basic axioms of American foreign policy, which equate America’s ideals with its interests (distorting both in the process) and project those ideals as universally applicable. Believing that democratic principles would bring order to Iraq naturally and spontaneously, regardless of the region’s history and culture or what Iraqis themselves wanted, neoconservative thinkers, with support from many on the left, advocated breaking the back of state power under Saddam Hussein. They maintained that by bringing about radical regime change, the United States was promoting liberalism, capitalism, and democracy in Iraq. But what it did instead was unleash chaos.

Download or read book Incarceration and Regime Change written by Christian G. De Vito and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-10-01 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political instability is nearly always accompanied by fuller prisons, and this was particularly true during the “long” Second World War, when military mobilization, social disorder, wrenching political changes, and shifting national boundaries swelled the ranks of the imprisoned and broadened the carceral reach of the state. This volume brings together theoretically sophisticated, empirically rich studies of key transitional moments that transformed the scope and nature of European prisons during and after the war. It depicts the complex interactions of both penal and administrative institutions with the men and women who experienced internment, imprisonment, and detention at a time when these categories were in perpetual flux.

Download or read book Dictators and Democrats written by Stephan Haggard and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rigorous and comprehensive account of recent democratic transitions around the world From the 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, the spread of democracy across the developing and post-Communist worlds transformed the global political landscape. What drove these changes and what determined whether the emerging democracies would stabilize or revert to authoritarian rule? Dictators and Democrats takes a comprehensive look at the transitions to and from democracy in recent decades. Deploying both statistical and qualitative analysis, Stephen Haggard and Robert Kaufman engage with theories of democratic change and advocate approaches that emphasize political and institutional factors. While inequality has been a prominent explanation for democratic transitions, the authors argue that its role has been limited, and elites as well as masses can drive regime change. Examining seventy-eight cases of democratic transition and twenty-five reversions since 1980, Haggard and Kaufman show how differences in authoritarian regimes and organizational capabilities shape popular protest and elite initiatives in transitions to democracy, and how institutional weaknesses cause some democracies to fail. The determinants of democracy lie in the strength of existing institutions and the public's capacity to engage in collective action. There are multiple routes to democracy, but those growing out of mass mobilization may provide more checks on incumbents than those emerging from intra-elite bargains. Moving beyond well-known beliefs regarding regime changes, Dictators and Democrats explores the conditions under which transitions to democracy are likely to arise.

Download or read book Regime Change and Succession Politics in Africa written by Maurice Nyamanga Amutabi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together scholars from a wide array of disciplines - including anthropology, economics, history, sociology, and political science - this volume addresses the problems of the regime change and state failure in Africa in the context of the global economy, but from a specifically African perspective, arguing that the underdevelopment of the African economy is linked to the underdevelopment of the continents' nation states.

Download or read book Regime Change written by Christopher Hitchens and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Nobody is entitled to view this battle as a spectator . . .' Regime Changeis the one essential book for anyone who wants to understand the greatest global crisis of the past decade, one that has bitterly divided public opinion across Britain - and around the world. Watching events unfold in the US and writing directly from Iraq, Christopher Hitchens cuts through the spin and slogans shaping popular through and tackles the fundamental questions. What was the true nature of Saddam's regime? Was this really Bush's war for oil? Was Blair principled or a poodle? Will our military action spark more terrorist attacks? Hitchens reports on the current crisis while at the same time emphasizing the historical perspective - that this war began when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, only a few months after the fall of the Berlin wall. In this polemical, incendiary account, Hitchens offers hindsight on the rights and wrongs of an epochal war.

Download or read book Branding Democracy written by Gerald Sussman and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2010 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Branding Democracy: U.S. Regime Change in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe is a study of the uses of systemic propaganda in U.S. foreign policy. Moving beyond traditional understandings of propaganda, Branding Democracy analyzes the expanding and ubiquitous uses of domestic public persuasion under a neoliberal regime and an informational mode of development and its migration to the arena of foreign policy. A highly mobile and flexible corporate-dominated new informational economy is the foundation of intensified Western marketing and promotional culture across spatial and temporal divides, enabling transnational interests to integrate territories previously beyond their reach. U.S. «democracy promotion» and interventions in the Eastern European «color revolutions» in the early twenty-first century serve as studies of neoliberal state interests in action. Branding Democracy will be of interest to students of U.S. and European politics, political economy, foreign policy, political communication, American studies, and culture studies.

Download or read book Authoritarian Russia written by Vladimir Gel'man and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia today represents one of the major examples of the phenomenon of "electoral authoritarianism" which is characterized by adopting the trappings of democratic institutions (such as elections, political parties, and a legislature) and enlisting the service of the country's essentially authoritarian rulers. Why and how has the electoral authoritarian regime been consolidated in Russia? What are the mechanisms of its maintenance, and what is its likely future course? This book attempts to answer these basic questions. Vladimir Gel'man examines regime change in Russia from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the present day, systematically presenting theoretical and comparative perspectives of the factors that affected regime changes and the authoritarian drift of the country. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia's national political elites aimed to achieve their goals by creating and enforcing of favorable "rules of the game" for themselves and maintaining informal winning coalitions of cliques around individual rulers. In the 1990s, these moves were only partially successful given the weakness of the Russian state and troubled post-socialist economy. In the 2000s, however, Vladimir Putin rescued the system thanks to the combination of economic growth and the revival of the state capacity he was able to implement by imposing a series of non-democratic reforms. In the 2010s, changing conditions in the country have presented new risks and challenges for the Putin regime that will play themselves out in the years to come.