Understanding the Conflict Choices of Dictatorships

Abstract

Dictators at War and Peace. By Jessica L. P. Weeks Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2014. 247 pp., $24.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-7982-3). The aggressive acts of dictatorships often dominate news headlines, ranging from Russia's annexation of the Ukraine's Crimea in early 2014 to North Korea's decision to test-fire both short- and medium-range missiles on multiple occasions that same year in violation of UN resolutions. Though we often associate dictatorships with belligerence, many dictatorships are, in fact, peaceful; for example, Malaysia (led by the United Malays National Organisation) or Botswana (led by the Botswana Democratic Party). Broad statements about the international conflict behavior of dictatorships are unlikely to be accurate, simply because there is enormous variation across dictatorships in how politics works within them. In the last decade, this insight—that dictatorships often differ from one another as much as they do from democracies—has led to an explosion of research in the comparative politics literature emphasizing the importance of disaggregating dictatorships for understanding political outcomes. This research has demonstrated that systematic differences among dictatorships help to explain important variations in the ways they repress (Davenport 2007), their use of foreign aid (Wright 2008), their prospects for democratization (Geddes 2003), and more (see Ezrow and Frantz 2011 for a review of this literature). One of the central messages to emerge is that lumping all dictatorships into one category can lead to misunderstandings of authoritarian politics. A few studies in the international …