Deterrent Power Research Articles

‘Smart’ Defense From New Threats: Future War From a Russian Perspective: Back to the Future After the War on Terror

In 2012 Vladimir Putin pledged that Russia would over the next decade invest in a smart defense, embracing new technologies to modernize its conventional forces and its strategic nuclear arsenal to ensure strategic stability in Eurasia. At the core of the demands for Russian military modernization is a very pessimistic appraisal of the current capabilities of Russia’s conventional forces and the future deterrence power of its strategic nuclear forces in the face of emergence US ballistic missile defenses and global precision-strike conventional systems. Driving the Russia’s notion of future war is threat environment that is complex and raises risks of local crises leading to foreign military intervention. These threats include a persistent terrorism within its own territories and Central Asia, an ideological fear of psychological subversion from the “color revolutions” of the last decade, the geopolitical threat of NATO expansion into Post-Soviet territory, and the stated fear that US military modernization will undermine the credibility of Russia’s conventional and nuclear forces. Finally, in spite of the Sino-Russian strategic partnership, there is also an unspoken fear that an emergent China could some day become a threat to Russia’s Eastern Siberia and the Far East.

중․일 영토분쟁과 한국의 대응

This study is to analyze territorial dispute between China and Japan and Korea``s task for national security. This study is eventually to try to find out Korea``s security task for national security after taking a closer look at why and how Senkaku Islands Dispute issue between China and Japan has come about. As the results of study, the researcher found out that the outbreak causes of Senkaku Islands Dispute are three, namely the root cause, the acceleration cause, and strategy cause. And also, the dispute step-by-step has developed, namely exposure stage(1970-1996), issue stage(1996-2010), and acutance stage(2010-present). Moreover, Japan and China, which is directly involved parties, have showed a confrontation phase in respective stands. The controversy over the Senkaku Islands essentially is a dispute originating in this power shift in East Asia. This dispute over the Senkaku Islands makes it more difficult to reach a rational diplomatic solution, considering that the dispute is interspersed with complicated domestic political factors and long-term strategic factors. The Korean government measures(strategies) on territorial dispute over Senkaku Islands must include diplomatic and military preparedness. Korea need to build up sufficient defense and naval deterrence power for its national security and should strengthen the cooperation with its ally, the U.S. Korea also need to search for and promote the establishment of a new multinational security organization for the settlement of marine territorial disputes in East Asia.

A philosophical and evolutionary approach to cyber-bullying: social networks and the disruption of sub-moralities

Cyber-bullying, and other issues related to violence being committed online in prosocial environments, are beginning to constitute an emergency worldwide. Institutions are particularly sensitive to the problem especially as far as teenagers are concerned inasmuch as, in cases of inter-teen episodes, the deterrent power of ordinary justice (i.e. threaten to sue) is not as effective as it is between adults. In order to develop the most suitable policies, institution should not be satisfied with statistics and sociological perspectives on the phenomenon, but rather seek a deep ethical understanding--also referring to the biological and evolutionary past of human beings. The aim of this paper is to show a way to fill this theoretical gap, offering some answers (and some questions too) that can illuminate future policy-oriented research and reflection. In order to do so, we will start by connecting our argument to evolutionary studies carried out in the past two decades, focusing on gossip as a tool for social assortment, thus endowed with a dual function: protect the group from free riders, intruders and bullies but also bully the deviant members. In the "Mediating gossip through social networks" section, we will see which aspects of gossip, vital for bullying, are co-opted by social network scenarios. A fundamental trait of human social life, that is the subdivision in smaller coalitions, or sub-groups, will be shown as missing in social networks (SN) dynamics--therefore constituting themselves as structurally violent. The "Why and how do social networks empower bullying?" section will deal with techno-ethical and epistemological concerns regarding how gossip, mediated by SN, manages to empower cyber-bullying. The "Self-gossip and self-mobbing in the light of the disruption of sub-moralities" section will characterize cyber-bullying as often sparked by self-gossip (soon degrading into self-mobbing) in a scenario where familiar sub-groups, which also mediate defense and mutual understanding, are disrupted. The "Discussion and conclusion" section will consist of a philosophical summary, divided in two parts: a pars destruens analyzing whether SN, in their actual configurations, are fit for being used by humans-like-us, and a pars construens examining the broad potential consequences of highly enforced regulation aimed at contrasting cyber-bullying.

A Double Edged Sword: Nuclear Risk and Nuclear Deterrence

The majority of empirical studies of the various effects of nuclear weapons treat these weapons as a binary variable: what matter is only whether or not a particular state at any given time possesses these weapons or not. There are, however, strong reasons to think that the effect of a state's nuclear arsenal is conditioned by how that state makes a score of consequential decisions regarding how these weapons should be managed, under what circumstances they may be deployed or even used, and so on. I argue that the effect is fundamentally conditioned by something I call nuclear risk: the overall likelihood that these weapons may be used without authorization by the political leaders. I show that higher risk is associated with greater deterrent power. But this deterrence is obtained at a considerable cost: state that have nuclear weapons with higher risks are less assertive in reciprocating militarized disputes when their deterrence fails. I test these two hypotheses using correlates of war data. Not satisfied with a simple index of risk I propose a novel technique that allows us to jointly test the two hypotheses without the need to explicitly provide measures for risk. Both theoretical expectations about the benefit and the cost of risk are corroborated by empirical evidence.

What Does It Take to Deter? Regional Power Nuclear Postures and International Conflict

Existing nuclear deterrence scholarship evinces a pervasive “existential bias,” assuming that once a state merely possesses nuclear weapons, it should be able to deter armed conflict. The empirical literature expresses this bias by simply dichotomously coding a state based on whether it has nuclear weapons, thereby treating all nuclear states as equivalent. Thus, whether nuclear weapons deter conflict, and how much is required to do so, is unclear. This article shifts the unit of analysis away from nuclear weapons to postures, hypothesizing that different nuclear postures are distinct and generate differential deterrent power, particularly amongst the non-superpower states which comprise the lion’s share of nuclear powers. I find that an asymmetric escalation nuclear posture uniquely deters conflict initiation and escalation. Not only do small arsenals have little deterrence success, but I find that even assured retaliation postures fail to deter intense conventional conflict. This suggests that the deterrence dividend is distributed unequally across nuclear powers, and that states may need to do more than simply acquire nuclear weapons to successfully deter conventional attacks.

Structural Remedies in EU Antitrust and Merger Control

In both antitrust and merger cases, remedies serve the same purpose, namely to stop the infringement of competition and restore competition. However, the practice of remedy policy in these two areas is varied, for example, structural remedies are preferred in merger cases but strictly limited in antitrust. This article analyses the extremely different positions of structural remedies in antitrust and merger control. It also reviews the facts and remedies of the E.ON Electricity case, the first antitrust decision with structural remedies adopted or imposed by the European Commission. It argues that EU competition law is not a coherent system for while antitrust enforcement is too weak, merger control is too strong. Furthermore, this article argues that the deterrent power of Article 102 should be reinforced to increase its weight in fighting unilateral anticompetitive behaviours, but merger control should show more tolerance to the efficiency-enhanced mergers.

Criminalizing environmental offences: when the prosecutor’s helping hand hurts

Recent policy initiatives by the European Commission envisage an increased criminalization of offences against the environment, bringing the deterrent power of criminal law to bear on environmental violators in order to increase environmental quality. This paper examines some of the implications of such initiatives from a law-and-economics perspective. We show that increased criminalization does not necessarily lead to higher environmental quality. Budget-constrained regulators mandated with minimizing environmental damages can lose their ability to incentivize violators to report their misconducts in the presence of criminal prosecution. Therefore, some of the damages that otherwise can be remediated go undetected. The mechanism results from the subtle interplay of the current regulatory structure and the incentives of the environmental criminal justice system.

Bare Life: Border-Crossing Deaths and Spaces of Moral Alibi

This paper examines the US border control strategy of ‘prevention through deterrence’ as an instance of biopolitics that has resulted in an alarming increase in migrant deaths over the past sixteen years. I argue that this policy renders unauthorized migrants as ‘bare life’, individuals whose deaths are deemed of little consequence. Geographic space has been an essential aspect of this policy, both for its presumed (though not realized) deterrent power and in the fact that it provides a moral alibi that enables policy makers to deny responsibility for the deaths. This study contributes to recent conversations on biopower and bare life by (1) highlighting the fact that biopower as it pertains to the constitution of ‘the population’ is far from being solely a local or national phenomenon, but rather is inherently connected to drawing distinctions between the national and the international and by (2) arguing for the significance of race in this process.

Investment strategies of criminal organisations

Recent transformations affecting large criminal organisations worldwide point to a mutation towards high internationalisation and management practices similar to incorporated enterprises. This trend brings new issues and questions regarding the effectiveness of policies aimed at eradicating such forms of delinquency. Indeed, if organised crime has the ability to modify its investment portfolio composition to react to an increase in punishment and penalties and of public spending devoted to a generic rise of police activity, the deterrent power of traditional security policy is eroded, or totally nullified if the organised crime is capable of obtaining a risk premium for its illicit activities. Researching into the peculiarities of large criminal organisations and formulating a behavioural model for their investment choices, I propose results to support a policy research aimed at undermining their flexibility in assets allocation, both through demand-side and anti-money-laundering policies, and recognising the existing individual incentive asymmetry in entering and exiting organised crime.

Risk Management and Regulation Compliance with Tradable Permits Under Dynamic Uncertainty

In this paper, we explore the effects of dynamic uncertainty on the risk management of regulated industries and emission market. We consider as major sources of uncertainty the stochastic growth of demand for the industry output (e.g. electric energy) and the ensuing lack of information on the pollution levels of individual firms, their behavior and the behavior of the regulator. These sources of uncertainty are common in pollution permit trading as not only does the market respond to the volatility of fundamentals but also to the vagaries of the institutional structure, created by public policy and enforced through regulation. The paper shows that in the presence of strategic behavior on the part of the agents involved, even though both the level and the volatility of output increases over time, trading of permits is a highly effective instrument of risk management, since it allows the firms to pool the risks arising from the volatile environment, thereby simplifying enforcement, reducing emissions and improving resource allocation. Moreover, uncertainty plays a subtle influencing role, since on one hand it broadens the regulator’s deterrent power over potential polluters, while on the other it reduces the expected value of the sanction for the individual firm.

Review: The Tradition of Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons

THE TRADITION OF NON-USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS T.V. Paul Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. 336pp, US$29.95 PaPer ISBN 978-0804761321In the none-too-long history of nuclear weapons, two facts are striking: first, unlike any other weapon, this one was used only twice, shortly after it became operative, and then not for more than six decades. Second, despite the weapon's apparent non -usability, not only have nuclear talks completely failed, but some nations are still trying to join the nuclear club. The reasons for this are complicated and it is easier to explain why nuclear weapons were not used after August 1945: the horror of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of such magnitude, and the longterm damage from a nuclear attack be so extensive, that over the last 64 years no one has dared to use such a weapon of mass destruction.T.V. Paul accepts these reasons for the non-use of nuclear weapons but argues that there are still questions to be answered. We can understand why the nuclear powers did not use nuclear weapons against each other. Such was the power of deterrence. But why did nuclear powers not use these weapons when they became entangled in bloody conflicts with nonnuclear states? The example of the US in Vietnam is the most notable case. In an attempt to address this problem, and despite the fact that he is a political scientist, Paul rejects the purely paradigm driven an answer (3). The reasons for non-use defy a single explanation, because nuclear weapons were never formally banned in the way that chemical and biological weapons were. Explaining the informal norm of non-use calls for a nuanced approach that takes into account a number of factors that go beyond a single grand theory.One of the explanations that Paul cites is the horrendous impact of nuclear weapons. This is the logic of consequences. With the passing years, non-use also became a matter of tradition. These two forces - the logic of consequences and the tradition of non-use - fixed the nuclear non-use policy even when there seemed to be some logic that called for a nuclear attack. Tradition, continues Paul, was based to great extent on reputation. This is a twofold argument. On the one hand, the non-use of nuclear weapons preserved peace through deterrence and justified the nuclear monopoly of the US and USSR, even these countries campaigned for nuclear nonproliferation. On the other hand, using nuclear weapons would show the use in an excessively bad light in international public opinion (3).Paul bases his case not on primary research but secondary sources. This raises a question of principle: why did he use one source and not another? For example, in discussing the actions of the administration, Paul relies on books that emphasize Truman's idealistic approach to foreign policy and nuclear affairs. His wanted nuclear and took steps to achieve it. Truman became an advocate of international control, he writes, as a result of the devastation of Hiroshima/Nagasaki and the arguments presented by influential scientists and of other peace activists, while his advisors came out with plans for eventual nuclear disarmament (41). …

Risk management and regulation compliance with tradable permits under dynamic uncertainty

In this paper, we explore the effects of dynamic uncertainty on the risk management of regulated industries and emission market. We consider as major sources of uncertainty the stochastic growth of demand for the industry output (e.g. electric energy) and the ensuing lack of information on the pollution levels of individual firms, their behavior and the behavior of the regulator. These sources of uncertainty are common in pollution permit trading as not only does the market respond to the volatility of fundamentals but also to the vagaries of the institutional structure, created by public policy and enforced through regulation. The paper shows that in the presence of strategic behavior on the part of the agents involved, even though both the level and the volatility of output increases over time, trading of permits is a highly effective instrument of risk management, since it allows the firms to pool the risks arising from the volatile environment, thereby simplifying enforcement, reducing emissions and improving resource allocation. Moreover, uncertainty plays a subtle influencing role, since on one hand it broadens the regulator’s deterrent power over potential polluters, while on the other it reduces the expected value of the sanction for the individual firm.

The Ability of the International Criminal Court to Deter Violations of International Criminal Law: ATheoretical Assessment

Many actors within the field of international criminal justice, including those who work for the Court itself, have heralded the deterrent power of the court and its ability to remove impunity for violations of international criminal law. Practitioners and scholars routinely assume a probability at best, to an assumption of sureness, of a powerful deterrent effect. Given the ongoing crimes against humanity that have occurred in the Twenty-First Century, such claims can only be seen as hopeful proclamations. This article examines the potential inhibitory effects that the Court may have on violations of international criminal law, especially international humanitarian law, grounded in criminological insights and explanatory power. To do so, we lay out the current state of thinking in deterrence theory and critically explore how it can, or fails to, generate the effects which so many international public actors, including the court itself, claim.

Criminological analysis on deterrent power of death penalty

Death penalty is the most effective deterrence to grave crimes, which has been the key basis for the State to retain death penalty. In fact, either in legislation or in execution, death penalty can not produce the special deterrent effect as expected. With respect to this issue, people tend to conduct normative exploration from the perspective of ordinary legal principles or the principle of human rights, which is more speculative than convincing. Correct interpretation based on the existing positive analysis and differentiation based on human nature which sifts the true from the false will not only help end the simple, repetitive and meaningless arguments regarding the basis for the existence of death penalty, but also help understand the rational nature of both the elimination and the preservation of death penalty, so as to define the basic direction towards which the State should make efforts in controlling death penalty in the context of promoting social civilization.

The Future of the U.S. Nuclear Deterrent

The United States must maintain an effective nuclear deterrent because, without it, the U.S. could be destroyed as an industrial civilization, and our conventional forces could be defeated by a state with grossly inferior conventional capability but powerful weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Both Russia and China have the nuclear potential to destroy the U.S. (and our allies) and are modernizing their forces with the objective of targeting the U.S. missile defenses and conventional strike capabilities, while critically important elements of deterrence and national power simply cannot substitute for nuclear deterrence. In light of the emerging “strategic partnership” between Russia and China and their emphasis on nuclear weapons, it would be foolish indeed to size U.S. strategic nuclear forces as if the only threat we face is that of rogue states and discard the requirement that the U.S. nuclear deterrent be “second to none.”

Never Again? The Legacy of the Argentine and Chilean Dictatorships for the Global Human Rights Regime

Widespread forced disappearances, summary executions, and torture practiced by the military regimes in Argentina and Chile came to define human rights abuse during the 1970s and 1980s. Opposition to these practices and their parent regimes helped to shape the contemporary human rights movement and, by extension, human rights norms and institutions. Thomas C. Wright's State Terrorism in Latin America contends that the movement's struggle with the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships resulted in an era of greater deterrence and enforcement power for human rights institutions. Sonia Cardenas' Conflict and Compliance, however, maintains that despite the advance in norms and the creation of supranational structures to promote accountability for human rights abuse, the mechanisms for changing state practice have remained remarkably constant throughout the past three decades. Both in Latin America and elsewhere, domestic forces and cost-benefit analysis—at times aided by international pressure—continue to be the principal determinants of state behavior in the field of human rights.

The Great Global Vitamins Conspiracy: Sanctions and Deterrence*

When they were discovered in 1999, the 16 vitamins cartels were probably the largest, most harmful, and harshest sanctioned international cartels of the late 20th century. Still today, the vitamins cartels are cited by antitrust authorities as the outstanding example of an enforcement action likely to deter cartel formation; this episode is also often mentioned by other legal experts as an egregious example of cartels subject to supra-optimal penalties. This paper summarizes the structural conditions and price effects of the global vitamins conspiracy and analyzes the deterrence power of world-wide monetary penalties paid by the corporate members of these cartels. The paper concludes that only in North America did monetary antitrust penalties exceed the monopoly profits of the vitamins cartel, principally because of huge private settlements. Penalties in the EU were a small percentage of European overcharges, and penalties in the rest of the world were negligible. On a global basis, deterrence was sup-optimal for three major reasons: low penalties outside North America, delays in the collection of fines and private settlements (i.e., the absence of court-awarded prejudgement interest), and the low probability of discovery of hidden cartels.

The Death Penalty as a Penological Policy under the Nigerian Criminal Law: An Appraisal

‘‘All nations seem to have had supreme confidence in the deterrent power of threatened and inflicted pain. They have regarded punishment as the shortest road to reformation. Imprisonment, torture, death, constituted a trinity under whose protection society might feel secure. In addition to these, nations have relied on confiscation and degradation, on maiming, whippings, brandings, and exposures to public ridicule and contempt. Connected with the court of justice was the chamber of torture. The ingenuity of man was exhausted in the construction of instruments that would surely reach the most sensitive nerve. All this was done in the interest of civilization - for the protection of virtue, and the well-being of states. Curiously enough, the fact is that, no matter how severe the punishments were, the crimes increased’’. — R. G. Ingersoll in ‘The liberty of man’.

Institutions influence preferences: Evidence from a common pool resource experiment

We model the dynamic effects of external enforcement on the exploitation of a common pool resource. Fitting our model to experimental data we find that institutions influence social preferences. We solve two puzzles in the data: the increase and later erosion of cooperation when commoners vote against the imposition of a fine, and the high deterrence power of low fines. When fines are rejected, internalization of a social norm explains the increased cooperation; violations (accidental or not), coupled with reciprocal preferences, account for the erosion. Low fines stabilize cooperation by preventing a spiral of negative reciprocation.

France's new nuclear doctrine

The new nuclear deterrence doctrine announced by President Jacques Chirac in January 2006 has rightly been recognized as a milestone, although in fact several of the key changes in policy were set forth in June 2001. While France remains determined to deter major power threats, its main new preoccupation is deterring regional powers by making clear that it has developed more employable nuclear options. The innovations announced in January 2006 include the focus on deterring state sponsors of terrorism, the threat to attach an enemy's ‘capacity to act’, the more discriminate and controllable employment options, the willingness to launch ‘final warning’ strikes, the description of ‘strategic supplies’ as a potential vital interest, and the presentation of nuclear deterrence as the foundation of a strategy of prevention and, when necessary, conventional military intervention. Several factors may have led Chirac to make the speech at this juncture. These include maintaining the credibility of deterrence and presidential power, sustaining the budgetary effort required for the nuclear posture, clarifying French deterrence doctrine for external and internal audiences, and sending a message of autonomy to Iran's and France's key European partners. The new doctrine's implications include its significance for deterrence and non-proliferation and for France's relations with its partners in NATO and the European Union.