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Civilian control over the military is widely hailed as among the biggest successes of India’s democracy. This is a rarity, especially among postcolonial states, and is rightfully celebrated. But has this come at a cost? The Absent Dialogue argues that the pattern of civil–military relations in India has hampered its military effectiveness. Indian politicians and bureaucrats have long been content with the formal and ritualistic exercise of civilian control, while the military continues to operate in institutional silos, with little substantive engagement between the two. In making this claim, the book closely examines the variables most associated with military effectiveness—weapons procurement, jointness (the ability of separate military services to operate together), officer education, promotion policies, and defense planning. India’s pattern of civil–military relations—best characterized as an absent dialogue—adversely affects each of these processes. Theoretically, the book adopts the “unequal dialogue” framework proposed by Eliot Cohen but also argues that, under some conditions, patterns of civil–military relations may more closely resemble an “absent dialogue.” Informed by more than a hundred and fifty interviews and recently available archival material, the book represents a deep dive into understanding the power and the limitations of the Indian military. It sheds new light on India’s military history and is essential reading for understanding contemporary civil–military relations and recurring problems therein. While the book focuses on India, it also highlights the importance of civilian expertise and institutional design in enhancing civilian control and military effectiveness in other democracies.

Situated at the intersection of democratic theory and international studies, Accountability and Democracy provides an in-depth critical analysis of the concept “democratic accountability.” The book proceeds with separate chapters on accountability as found in the U.S. Ratification debates, agency theory, ancient Athenian democracy, theories of deliberative democracy, capitalist markets, and cosmopolitan democracy. Through an engagement with these different traditions and contexts, the book paints a picture of democratic accountability as a multidimensional concept harboring competing imperatives and diverse instantiations. It both engages conventional electoral models of accountability and moves beyond them by situating democratic accountability within more deliberative, participatory and agonistic contexts. Contrary to dominant views that emphasize discipline and control, the book describes democratic accountability as a source of mutuality, community, and political transformation. The book also challenges deep-seated understandings of democratic accountability as an expression of popular sovereignty. It instead argues that accountable governance is incompatible with all claims to ultimate authority, regardless of whether they refer to the demos, the state, or cosmopolitan public law. Rather than conceiving of democratic accountability as a way to legitimize a secure and sovereign political order, the book contends that destabilization and democratic insurgence are indispensable and often neglected facets of democratic accountability practices.

United States officials argued during America’s post-9-/11 wars that the US took every precaution to prevent unintended civilian death and injury — known as collateral damage — due to US military operations. Yet, during the first years of the wars, officials accepted the inevitability of the harm, and tens of thousands of civilians were killed and injured by the US and its allies. The book explores moral responsibility for three kinds of collateral damage incidents. Accidents were unforeseen and sometimes unforeseeable, and arguably they were comparatively rare. More numerous were systemic collateral damage deaths, the foreseeable consequence of rules of engagement, weapons choices, standard operating procedures and military doctrine. Proportionality/double effect collateral damage is foreseeable, and foreseen, yet anticipated military advantages are said to excuse this unintentional killing. Both systemic collateral damage, and proportionality/double effect collateral damage are produced in part by expansive and permissive conceptions of military necessity. The other causes of systemic collateral damage are found in the organization of warmaking — the institutionalized rules, procedures, training, and stresses of war. Depending on choices that are made at the organizational and command level, the likelihood of causing civilian casualties may rise or fall. When those factors, including beliefs about military necessity, change the incidence of collateral damage also changes. This book offers a new way to think about moral agency and accountability. The dominant paradigm of legal and moral responsibility in war stresses both intention and individual accountability. Yet that framework is inadequate for cases of systemic and proportionality/double effect collateral damage because the causes of those deaths and injuries lie at the organizational level — where doctrine, tactics, and weapons are decided. The author supplements theories of individual agency and accountability with a theory of collective moral responsibility, treating organizations as imperfect moral agents. The US military exercised moral agency when it began, mid-way through the Post-9/11 wars, to change its organizational procedures in order reduce collateral damage deaths. The book offers ways to increase political and public moral responsibility for conduct in war.

How can international organizations (IOs) like the United Nations (UN) and their implementing partners be held accountable if their actions and policies violate fundamental human rights? Political scientists and legal scholars have shed a much-needed light on the limits of traditional accountability when it comes to complex global governance. However, conventional studies on IO accountability fail to systematically analyze a related, puzzling empirical trend: human rights violations that occur in the context of global governance do not go unnoticed altogether; they are investigated and sanctioned by independent third parties. This book puts forward the concept of pluralist accountability, whereby third parties hold IOs and their implementing partners accountable for human rights violations. We can expect pluralist accountability to evolve if a competitive environment stimulates third parties to enact accountability and if the implementing actors are vulnerable to human rights demands. Based on a comprehensive study of UN-mandated operations in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Kosovo, the European Union Troika’s austerity policy, and global public–private health partnerships in India, this book demonstrates how competition and human rights vulnerability shape the evolution of pluralist accountability in response to diverse human rights violations, such as human trafficking, the violation of the rights of detainees, economic rights, and the right to consent in clinical trials. While highlighting the importance of studying alternative accountability mechanisms, this book also argues that pluralist accountability should not be regarded as a panacea for IOs’ legitimacy problems, as it is often less legalized and might cause multiple accountability disorder.

This book advances our understanding of the global dimension of social policy by applying the notion of global social governance to actors, their relationships to each other, and their pathways, as well as their footprints of influence in the specific policy fields of social concern in which they are active. Focusing on a broad array of individual and corporate global social policy actors, ranging from international organizations to state formations and NGOs, the chapters in this book draw a fuller picture of agency in global social policy than what current accounts provide. It considers the multiple facets of individual actors’ scope and legitimacy for a particular actor in conjunction with the configuration of global social governance as characterized by multi-centred and multi-scaled obstacles, as well as diverse forms of collaboration. The book studies the contextualised actors’ range and power in designing, shaping, and facilitating various global social policies. Thus, the chapters discuss the role of particular (corporate) actors within global social policy structures and assess the impact of a number of key organizations, states, groups, and individuals in the governance of global social policy. At the same time, a variety of social policy fields in which these actors are involved are addressed, including the labour market issues, family policy, health policy, and education policy, migration issues, and global (re)distribution via various forms of development aid or remittances.

Adaptation under Fire looks at the essential importance of military adaptation in winning wars. Every military must prepare for future wars despite inevitably having little confidence about the precise shape that those wars will take. As former US secretary of defense Robert Gates once noted, the United States has a perfect record in predicting the next war: “We have never once gotten it right.” Despite this uncertainty, military organizations still must make choices. They must determine the nature of doctrine they will need to fight effectively, the type of weaponry and equipment they must procure to defeat their potential foe, and the kind of leaders they must select and develop to guide the force to victory. Since the US military has global security responsibilities, it will have to make these choices without knowing when, where, or how the next war will unfold, or even who the enemy may be. It will need to adapt quickly and successfully in the face of the unexpected in order to prevail. The book starts by providing a framework for understanding adaptation and includes several historical examples of success and failure. The second part examines US military adaptation during the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and explains why certain forms of adaptation have proven so problematic. The final part argues that the US military must become more adaptable in order to successfully address the fast-changing security challenges of the 21st century, and concludes with some recommendations on how it should do so.

The governance of the modern corporation is broadly understood as the mechanisms, relations, and processes for balancing the interests of stakeholders. It spells out the rules and procedures for decision-making, accountability and transparency, and distributional rights. Corporate governance thus provides the framework in which corporate objectives are set, the means of attaining them, the kind of performance monitoring required, and by whom. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis and large-scale corporate failures, the issue of corporate governance has repeatedly received the attention of policy-makers and the wider public. Extending the study of corporate governance beyond that of listed corporations sheds new light on the overall performance of corporations in market economies. These include small and medium-sized corporations, non-profit organisations and philanthropic foundations, public corporations and public–private partnerships, social enterprises and cooperatives, international organisations, and corporations in cyberspace. A decade after the massive failures in the governance of financial corporations, and with continued governance failures in other parts of the economy since then, this volume takes stock and asks: what has been the performance of corporate governance regimes, and have regulatory changes and corporate governance codes made a difference? What are the strengths and weaknesses of current corporate governance systems and codes? How do corporate forms differ in their governance performance, and what have been the experiences across countries? And, finally, what implications for understanding governance behaviour and for policy-makers and regulators come to mind?

What does China’s rise mean for transnational civil society? What happens when global activist networks engage a powerful and norm-resistant new hegemon? This book combines detailed ethnographic research with cross-case comparisons to identify key factors underpinning variation in the results and processes of advocacy on a range of issues affecting both China and the world, including global warming, intellectual property rights, HIV/AIDS treatment, the use of capital punishment, suppression of the Falun Gong religious movement, and Tibetan independence. Built on an innovative blend of comparative and international theory, it advances a theory of “advocacy drift”—a process whereby the objectives and principled beliefs of activists are transformed through interaction with the Chinese state. The book is a timely reassessment of transnational civil society in the era of an ascendant China, and is essential reading for scholars and practitioners of civil society organizations.

This book explores the evolving African security paradigm in light of the multitude of diverse threats facing the continent and the international community today and in the decades ahead. It challenges current thinking and traditional security constructs as woefully inadequate to meet the real security concerns and needs of African governments in a globalized world. The continent has becoming increasingly integrated into an international security architecture, whereby Africans are just as vulnerable to threats emanating from outside the continent as they are from home-grown ones. Thus, Africa and what happens there, matters more than ever. Through an in-depth examination and analysis of the continent’s most pressing traditional and non-traditional security challenges—from failing states and identity and resource conflict to terrorism, health, and the environment—it provides a solid intellectual foundation, as well as practical examples of the complexities of the modern African security environment. Not only does it assess current progress at the local, regional, and international level in meeting these challenges, it also explores new strategies and tools for more effectively engaging Africans and the global community through the human security approach.

While Buddhists all over the world were celebrating 2,500 years of Gautama Buddha’s passing in 1956, Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was called then) was sowing the seeds of an ethnic conflict. To begin with, language became the source of conflict between the Sinhalese majority and the minority Tamils, until violence itself became the language of discourse between the two ethnic groups. After the Fall shows how Sri Lanka’s post-independence exercise in nation formation was beset with using language domination as an instrument of partisan power and racial memories as the way to define nationhood. That resulted in an escalating conflict through half a century of ethnic violence—giving rise to one of the world’s most fearsome militant movements and the cult of the suicide bomber. It analyzes how Eelam war four (2006–9), which came like a tornado crashing through all the red-lines of a war (even a guerrilla war), succeeded—and at what cost and consequences. The book argues how the ‘success’ of this war, in which tens of thousands of civilians were killed, was the product of a unique combination of domestic and international factors. And why it cannot be replicated elsewhere as an example of fighting the ‘war against terror’.

Over the past century, democracy spread around the world in turbulent bursts of change, sweeping across national borders in dramatic cascades of revolution and reform. This book offers a new global-oriented explanation for this wavelike spread and retreat—not only of democracy but also of its twentieth-century rivals, fascism, and communism. The book argues that waves of regime change are driven by the aftermath of cataclysmic disruptions to the international system. These hegemonic shocks, marked by the sudden rise and fall of great powers, have been essential and often-neglected drivers of domestic transformations. Though rare and fleeting, they not only repeatedly alter the global hierarchy of powerful states but also create unique and powerful opportunities for sweeping national reforms—by triggering military impositions, swiftly changing the incentives of domestic actors, or transforming the basis of political legitimacy itself. As a result, the evolution of modern regimes cannot be fully understood without examining the consequences of clashes between great powers, which repeatedly—and often unsuccessfully—sought to cajole, inspire, and intimidate other states into joining their camps.

Age of Iron attempts to describe the past, present, and possible future of conservative nationalism in American foreign policy. It argues that a kind of conservative US nationalism long predates the Trump presidency, and goes back to the American founding. Different aspects of conservative American nationalism have been incorporated into the Republican Party from its creation. Every Republican president since Theodore Roosevelt has tried to balance elements of this tradition with global US foreign policy priorities. Donald Trump was able to win his party’s nomination and rise to the presidency in part by challenging liberal internationalist assumptions. Yet in practice, he too has combined nationalist assumptions with global US foreign policy priorities. The long-term trend within the Republican party, predating Trump, is toward political populism, cultural conservatism, and white working-class voters—and this has international implications. Republican foreign policy nationalism is not about to disappear. The book concludes with recommendations for US foreign policy, based upon an understanding that the optimism of the post–Cold War quarter-century is over.

This book reveals the pernicious effects of aid dependence and its perversion of Cambodian democracy. It analyzes the period since international intervention liberated Cambodia from pariah state status in the early 1990s and shows how the country’s social indicators and the integrity of its political institutions declined rapidly within a few short years, while inequality grew dramatically. It argues that international intervention and foreign aid resulted in higher maternal mortality rates and unprecedented corruption by the mid-2000s. Similarly it shows that the more aid-dependent a country is, the more distorted its incentives to develop sustainably become. Contrasting Cambodia’s clothing sector with its rice and livestock sectors and its internal handling of the avian flu epidemic, the book showcases the international community’s role in preventing Cambodia from controlling its national development. It argues that as Cambodia is a post-conflict state that is unable to refuse aid, it is rife with trial-and-error donor experiments and their unintended consequences, such as bad governance and poor domestic and tax revenue performance—a major factor curbing sustainable, nationally owned development. By outlining the terms through which countries can achieve better ownership of their development, the book offers alternatives for governments that are on the brink of collapse and dependent on foreign intervention and aid.

The al-Qaeda Franchise asks why al-Qaeda adopted a branching-out strategy, introducing seven franchises spread over the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. After all, transnational terrorist organizations can expand through other organizational strategies. Forming franchises was not an inevitable outgrowth of al-Qaeda’s ideology or its US-focused strategy. The book argues that al-Qaeda’s branching-out strategy was not a sign of strength, but instead a response to its decline in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Franchising reflected an escalation of al-Qaeda’s commitments in response to earlier strategic mistakes, leaders’ hubris, and its diminished capabilities. Although the introduction of new branches helped al-Qaeda create a frightening image far beyond its actual capabilities, ultimately this strategy neither increased the al-Qaeda threat, nor enhanced the organization’s political objectives. In fact, the rise of ISIS from an al-Qaeda branch to the dominant actor in the jihadi camp demonstrates how expansion actually incurred heavy costs for al-Qaeda. The al-Qaeda Franchise goes beyond explaining the adoption of a branching-out strategy by exploring particular expansion choices. Through nine case studies, it analyzes why al-Qaeda formed branches in some arenas but not others, and why its expansion in some locations, such as Yemen, took the form of in-house franchising (with branches run by al-Qaeda’s own fighters), while other locations, such as Iraq and Somalia, involved merging with groups already operating in the target arena. It ends with an assessment of al-Qaeda’s future in light of the turmoil in the Middle East, the ascendance of ISIS, and US foreign policy.

All Is Well attempts to answer one of the most urgent questions of our time: What is the relationship between modern states and the disasters they claim to manage? Disasters are commonly understood as exceptional occurrences that ruin societies and inspire ad hoc rituals of legal, administrative, and scientific control called “disaster management.” States and the international institutions perform disaster management to protect society. The book challenges this traditional narrative. It interprets “disaster management” as a historical struggle to conservate the existence and experience of catastrophes and produce idealized authorities capable of protecting society from uncertainty. It examines the emergence of this struggle in the eighteenth century and reveals how rulers and experts struggling to master God, nature, and each other inaugurated modern meanings of risk, normalcy, power, and responsibility. By recovering this history of disaster management, the book reveals underlying knowledge structures and political economies that smuggle the unspoken costs of modernity inside the rationalized representation of past catastrophes and future risks. Catastrophes, put bluntly, are not occurrences. They are inventions. Even in their most destructive forms, catastrophes are the stigmata through which the modern state renews itself. The book develops this argument by examining the Marseille plague (1720), the Lisbon earthquake (1755), and the Bengal famine (1770) and showing how eighteenth-century beliefs reverberate in structure and policies of “global” disaster management today. It concludes that climate change and the national and international authorities designed to fight it are products of three centuries of disaster management, and civilizational survival depends on reckoning with this past.

If states are not to go to war, what should they do instead? In The Alternatives to War: From Sanctions to Non-violence, James Pattison considers the case for the alternatives to military action to address mass atrocities and aggression. He covers the normative issues raised by measures ranging from comprehensive economic sanctions, diplomacy, and positive incentives, to criminal prosecutions, non-violent resistance, accepting refugees, and arming rebels. For instance, given the indiscriminateness of many sanctions regimes, are sanctions any better than war? Should states avoid ‘megaphone diplomacy’ and adopt more subtle measures? What, if anything, can non-violent methods such as civilian defence and civilian peacekeeping do in the face of a ruthless opponent? Is it a serious concern that positive incentives can appear to reward aggressors? Overall, Pattison provides a comprehensive account of the ethics of the alternatives to war. In doing so, he argues that the case for war is weaker and the case for many of the alternatives is stronger than commonly thought. The upshot is that, when reacting to mass atrocities and aggression, states are generally required to pursue the alternatives to war rather than military action. Pattison concludes that this has significant implications for pacifism, Just War Theory, and the responsibility to protect doctrine.

Following 9/11 the United States faced a situation of exceptional insecurity. In that period the Bush administration argued that certain international norms did not apply to US conduct. Its argument was underpinned by the claim that the United States was in a state of armed conflict or ‘war’ with ‘a new kind of enemy’. The purpose of this book is to examine whether this approach outlasted the moment of insecurity that gave rise to it. More than a decade on from those attacks, and following a change of administration, what influence do these arguments have on American policy? To answer this question it focuses on four areas of policy: the use of force and the prosecution, detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists. It demonstrates how the Bush policy programme was contested by liberals and realists from the outset. Any expectation that the war on terror would end following the election of President Obama has, however, proven unfounded. Obama consolidated the liberal pushback against aspects of the Bush programme but the US has continued to argue a state of armed conflict exists. The scope of the battlefield and the definition of the enemy has been a source of intense debate but the fact that the Guant00E1namo Bay detention facility remained open long after the President promised to close it is indicative of the underlying continuity. It is argued that this is driven in part by domestic politics and in part by an understanding of how the terrorist threat is evolving.

This book analyses the political and social problems that arise when American forces are stationed in other countries. The United States, although critical of the British Empire during World War II, found itself playing an imperial role in the postwar era in order to safeguard the security of the West. In building up a global security system, with American troops in Europe, the Far East, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean and the Pacific, the United States came to resemble the former colonial powers. But whereas the colonial empire had established garrisons on territory acquired by force, the United States was obliged to negotiate basing rights for its troops by negotiating with independent sovereign states. The result was a variety of arrangements with different host nations, in which the American position, and the use America could make of its troops overseas, was critically dependant on America's political and historical relationship with the country concerned. The United States has based more troops overseas than any of the colonial empires. However, the terms of the leasehold empire have imposed severe constraints on America's freedom of manoeuvre.

This book focuses on military cooperation between the United States and its allies in times of war and asks: why are allies so unpredictable? It shows that alliance demands related to military cooperation cannot always be fulfilled by democratic allies due to domestic political constraints. Additionally, concerns over military feasibility can further constrain governments in committing resources to war. Taking these constraints into account is key to explain the varying levels of military cooperation between democratic allies. This book also explains how American allies can turn down US requests for political and military support. It shows how these allies can deploy strategies to overcome power asymmetries by resorting to leveraging, hedging and compensation tactics. While they can rarely influence their dominant alliance partner decisively, they are successful in resisting pressures exerted by the US. The argument builds on three central claims. First, power asymmetries between allies translate into different assessments of international threats. Second, when disagreements over threats arise, the outcome of intra-alliance bargaining is not necessarily dictated by the stronger power. Third, secondary states face a policy trade-off between establishing a reputation as a reliable alliance partner and pursuing politically-safer alternatives. The empirical focus of the book is on formal US allies, as they have the most to gain or lose by going along with American plans. The case studies are the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia's response to the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq during the period from 2001 to 2003.