Reliable Allies Research Articles

Local Public Opinion: The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures and the Fight against Film Censorship in Virginia, 1916–1922

This article examines the conflict that ensued when the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures (a New York City-based organization that opposed any form of legal film censorship) entered the debate over Virginia's state film censor board. Virginia's engagement with film censorship emerged out of its history and politics, particularly in regard to race relations. Elite white Virginians lived in fear both of federal intervention (with the specter of Reconstruction not far behind them) and of a local usurpation of political power by black Virginians. The National Board of Review (NBR) was largely ignorant of this situation, which worked against their goals and ability to cultivate reliable allies. In the 1910s and 1920s, film raised issues about authorities – locally based and oriented versus nationally oriented authority, private authority and municipal, state, and/or federal authority.

Democratic Reliability, Precommitment of Successor Governments, and the Choice of Alliance Commitment

AbstractGiven frequent leadership turnover and leaders' need to appeal to voters, democracies should face difficulties in maintaining their alliance commitments. Yet the empirical evidence predominantly shows that they do make reliable allies. Democratic governments can increase reliability by binding future administrations through the choice of alliance commitment. While defense pacts precommit future leaders to close military cooperation with an ally, consultation pacts leave more room for discretion. This research note examines when precommitment through a defense pact is likely to occur. A government should be more likely to conclude a defense pact if potential successors have different preferences regarding the alliance, if the government believes that it will lose power soon, and if the costs of precommitment are not too high. I test the theoretical expectations using the Alliance Treaty Obligations and Provisions (ATOP) data between 1945 and 2003. The findings support the argument and suggest an answer to the puzzle of why states sometimes conclude whole-hearted commitments and other times seemingly half-hearted ones.

Reducing Meat Consumption in Today’s Consumer Society: Questioning the Citizen-Consumer Gap

Our growing demand for meat and dairy food products is unsustainable. It is hard to imagine that this global issue can be solved solely by more efficient technologies. Lowering our meat consumption seems inescapable. Yet, the question is whether modern consumers can be considered as reliable allies to achieve this shift in meat consumption pattern. Is there not a yawning gap between our responsible intentions as citizens and our hedonic desires as consumers? We will argue that consumers can and should be considered as partners that must be involved in realizing new ways of protein consumption that contribute to a more sustainable world. In particular the large food consumer group of flexitarians offer promising opportunities for transforming our meat consumption patterns. We propose a pragmatic approach that explicitly goes beyond the standard suggestion of persuasion strategies and suggests different routes of change, coined sustainability by stealth, moderate involvement, and cultural change respectively. The recognition of more routes of change to a more plant-based diet implies that the ethical debate on meat should not only associate consumer change with rational persuasion strategies and food citizens that instantiate “strong” sustainable consumption. Such a focus narrows the debate on sustainable protein consumption and easily results in disappointment about consumers’ participation. A more wide-ranging concept of ethical consumption can leave the negative verdict behind that consumers are mainly an obstacle for sustainability and lead to a more optimistic view on modern consumers as allies and agents of change.

Finding Your Allies Where You Can: How Canadian Courts Drive Aboriginal Policy in Canada

While it has been valuable to Aboriginal peoples to have the courts as allies in their fight for state recognition, it is worth asking whether the slow, expensive, incremental process of achieving recognition through litigation is really the most efficient, let alone just, policy development process. Metis, Non-Status Indians, and Aboriginal women have all determined that litigation can be a useful strategy for achieving state recognition of their Aboriginality in the face of government intransigence. Yet the courts have proven to be imperfect, inconsistent, and not always reliable allies. This article reviews the cases in which Aboriginal women, Non-Status Indians, Metis, and urban Aboriginal people have sought to use litigation to drive the reform of rules for state recognition of Aboriginal peoples in Canada. These cases include not only successful litigation, but also occasions of which last resort to the courts has failed, revealing the difficulties and frustrations that Aboriginal peoples can face in having to rely on litigation to change government policy.

The Iran-Iraq War: A Reassessment

The Iran-Iraq war remains one of the longest conflicts in the history of the modern Middle East. The war would define Iran's foreign policy orientation, as the exigencies of the conflict conditioned its approach to the United States, the Arab world, and even Israel. Along the way, Iran's leaders made a series of mistakes and miscalculations that ensured a stalemated conflict. Subordinating strategy to ideology and misplaced hopes that Iraq's population would rise to welcome Iranians as liberators contributed to prolonging a devastating war. This year will mark the 30th anniversary of one of the most important and peculiar conflicts in the history of modern Middle East, the Iran-Iraq war. The Islamic Republic of Iran's ritual celebration of its martyrs obscures a more deliberate and dispassionate assessment of the conflict. Iran fought the war with remarkable disadvantages, as it lacked reliable allies, a dependable supply of arms, and superpower goodwill. Along the way, Iranian leaders perceived that they would be welcomed as liberators and believed that no detailed occupation policy was necessary. Still, the regime's ability to sustain an eight-year conflict reflected its resilience and ability to mobilize society and consolidate its power under duress. The state that was often viewed as a passing and transient phenomenon proved that it could deal with domestic challenges and international isolation while waging a total war. Iran's conduct in the war reflected its militancy and revolutionary fervor. This was not an interstate conflict fought for territorial adjustment or limited political objectives. At stake was a contest of ideologies and a competition for power. The clerics whose revolution had succeeded against great odds assumed that spiritual valor would compensate for Iraq's technological edge. Military planning and issues of strategy and tactics were cast aside for the sake of martyrdom and sacrifice. The war and revolution had somehow fused in the clerical imagination. To wage the war was a way of demonstrating one's commitment to the divine mission launched by the Imam Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979. In one of the paradoxes of Iran, the war that Ayatollah Khomeini hoped would realize his ideological values ended up undermining the transnational mission of the state. After an inconclusive but costly struggle, Iran failed to defeat Iraq, transform the Middle East, or project its Islamist template beyond its boundaries. The Islamic Republic would now have to rest its legitimacy on factors other than its religious imperatives or revolutionary aspirations. A state that had so long resisted mundane considerations uneasily became another government preoccupied with providing services to its constituents and achieving its objectives within the prevailing international system. Redemption of God's Will On September 22, 1980, Saddam Husayn made the catastrophic decision to launch an invasion of Iran. The persistent border clashes, Iran's propaganda campaigns, and Saddam's opportunism finally led the Iraqi strongman to provoke one of the longest conflicts in the annals of the modern Middle East. Iraq's invasion initially scored impressive gains, as the city of Khurramshahr fell and the important industrial cities of Abadan and Ahvaz were besieged and isolated. Saddam flamboyantly proclaimed his desire to fight until every inch of usurped land was restored to Arab control, an unsubtle claim on the oil-rich Khuzistan province.1 Nonetheless, Saddam's ambitions outstripped his military acumen, as his forces soon encountered logistical difficulties resulting from poor planning and unexpectedly stiff Iranian resistance. Even at the early stages of the conflict, Saddam's misjudgments were becoming obvious, as the notion of Iraq's battlefield successes leading to a mass uprising grossly misunderstood the mood of the Iranian people. Moreover, the notion that a revolutionary regime claiming to be in command of a new epoch would quickly cede vast portions of its territory and resettle itself in a truncated terrain was a misperception of how militant leaders behave during times of national crisis. …

Showing that you care: The evolution of health altruism

Human behavior regarding medicine seems strange; assumptions and models that seem workable in other areas seem less so in medicine. Perhaps, we need to rethink the basics. Toward this end, I have collected many puzzling stylized facts about behavior regarding medicine, and have sought a small number of simple assumptions which might together account for as many puzzles as possible. The puzzles I consider include a willingness to provide more medical than other assistance to associates, a desire to be seen as so providing, support for nation, firm, or family provided medical care, placebo benefits of medicine, a small average health value of additional medical spending relative to other health influences, more interest in public that private signals of medical quality, medical spending as an individual necessity but national luxury, a strong stress-mediated health status correlation, and support for regulating health behaviors of the low status. These phenomena seem widespread across time and cultures. I can explain these puzzles moderately well by assuming that humans evolved deep medical habits long ago in an environment where people gained higher status by having more allies, honestly cared about those who remained allies, were unsure who would remain allies, wanted to seem reliable allies, inferred such reliability in part based on who helped who with health crises, tended to suffer more crises requiring non-health investments when having fewer allies, and invested more in cementing allies in good times in order to rely more on them in hard times. These ancient habits would induce modern humans to treat medical care as a way to show that you care. Medical care provided by our allies would reassure us of their concern, and allies would want you and other allies to see that they had pay enough to distinguish themselves from posers who didn't care as much as they. Private information about medical quality is mostly irrelevant to this signaling process. If people with fewer allies are less likely to remain our allies, and if we care about them mainly assuming they remain our allies, then we want them to invest more in health than they would choose for themselves. This tempts us to regulate their health behaviors. This analysis suggests that the future will continue to see robust desires for health behavior regulation and for communal medical care and spending increases as a fraction of income, all regardless of the health effects of these choices.

Plain Folk Reconsidered: Historiographical Ambiguity in Search of Definition

STUDENTS OF SOUTHERN HISTORY ARE FAMILIAR WITH THE TERMS PLANTER, plain folk, and poor white. Most will acknowledge an understanding of who enjoyed status as a planter and who was a poor white, but the characteristics of plain folk are neither as clearly defined nor as well understood. This article examines the ambiguity surrounding the term plain folk, considers the reasons that its precise definition has remained elusive, and analyzes the historiographical usage that has perpetuated the imprecision. Then, after demonstrating the persistence of ambiguity and imprecision, the article employs statistical data derived from the 1850 census to suggest a precise definition of plain folk, a definition designed to advance the research on social groupings in the antebellum South. Many historians resist the idea that class is a useful category of analysis for the history of the United States and the American South. For the in particular, race is often assumed to trump class as a marker of group identity. Scores of southern historians, inspired by such studies as Edmund S. Morgan's groundbreaking American Slavery, American Freedom, identify events like Nathaniel Bacon's 1676 rebellion in Virginia as critical determinants in the departure from old-world class identity to new-world racial divisions. While Morgan's perspective on the dominance of race among social characteristics remains open to debate, few would dispute that class differences among antebellum white southerners were muted by the presence of African slaves. (1) Racism was the flux that melded rich and poor whites together into a classless blend defined by their common whiteness. More than sixty years ago W. J. Cash labeled this racial affinity the bond. As Cash interpreted it, proto-Dorian pride provided the white elite with reliable allies in the effort to subjugate and exploit blacks, while, in turn, the common man became an extension of the ruling class simply because his skin was white. According to Cash, grand outcome was the almost complete disappearance of economic and social focus on the part of the masses. (2) Such conditions, augmented by the non-elite white's blindness to his real interests, his lack of class feeling and of social and economic focus, led, in Cash's view, to a South where farmer and white-trash were welded into an extraordinary and positive unity of passion and purpose with the planter.... (3) These observations help to explain not only the forces motivating the average Confederate soldier but also the resistance to social change common in much of the twentieth-century South. However, these assertions of a solid obfuscate the social and economic complexities present in the antebellum South. Racially inspired unity did not contribute to the emergence of a homogeneous identity among antebellum white southerners. But emphasis on white racial unity has ensured that social distinctions among white southerners were only a secondary focus of scholarship. This study neither seeks to qualify the power of racial solidarity as a social determinant nor claims that something other than race-based polemics forged the southern political character. Instead, it focuses on identity among antebellum white southerners, suggesting that, even if class divisions were muted, social and economic distinctions were real and are now imprecisely defined for a variety of reasons. The difficulties of social identitification--whether in reference to class, culture, or political condition--focus on the middling group of southerners. So, who were the plain folk? asked a member of the audience during a session on southern plain folk at a recent meeting of the Southern Historical Association. The question clearly challenged those assembled; the blunt query virtually silenced the panelists and aroused only a few speculations from the large audience. This meager response demonstrated the lack of consensus with regard to the characteristics of the common folk of the Old South. …

Why Democracies May Actually Be Less Reliable Allies

Why Democracies May Actually Be Less Reliable Allies

Why Democracies May Actually Be Less Reliable Allies

Recent research builds on the observation that democracies have more durable alliances to argue that democracies make more reliable allies. This need not be the case. Alliances serve as commitment devices, adding ex ante credibility to states' claims about ex post behavior. Variation in alliance durability must reflect differences in the desirability of formalizing alignments. Put simply, democracies are “most improved” by formal commitments. We offer two related explanations for why democracies might actually be less reliable alliance partners. Information costs for participating in policymaking and the advantages of organized interest groups combined with distributional incentives generated by the periodic turnover of governments may conspire to make informal commitments on the part of democracies problematic. Determining the net effect of democratic virtue and vice is best done empirically. We test alliance reliability by focusing on intervention, rather than on the duration or the number of commitments. Our results suggest that democracies make less reliable allies.

Veiled empire: gender & power in Stalinist Central Asia

Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender & Power in Stalinist Central Asia. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004. xvii, 392 pp. Appendix. Glossary. Note on Sources. Bibliography. $25.95, paper. $57.50, cloth.Communist party leaders engaged in a furious, albeit confused and ultimately self-defeating effort to transform inner workings of Uzbek culture and society in period between Bolshevik revolution and Second World War. Douglas Northrop argues that failed efforts to gain either loyalty or compliance of local population, even at height of Stalinism, demonstrate limits of state power in early Soviet era. He also highlights paradoxes in Soviet strategies and tactics to transform Central Asia, many stemming from basic contradiction of attempting to pursue colonialist aims under veil of an anti-colonial, liberationist ideology. This failure of coercive modernization has relevance for other western empires, past and present, in their encounter with Islamic world.The Communist drive to end veiling of Uzbek women began only after unsuccessful efforts to identify and isolate Muslim clerics and wealthy landowners as class enemies. Party leaders, driven by Marxist ideology to root out exploiters and develop an egalitarian society, became convinced by Zhenotdel activists' arguments that Uzbek society was structured along lines of gender. Lifting Uzbek women from oppression would end Central Asian backwardness and provoke the complete and immediate transformation of everyday life (p. 12). The effort to remove veil, a potent symbol of dark past against inevitable victory of culture and light, became centrepiece in this campaign, which also targeted practices such as polygyny and bride-price. Northrop deftly identifies numerous pitfalls, some self-created and some unanticipated, that befell this effort. The 1927 hujum, campaign to remove to veil, came on heels of a Soviet effort to create new nations for peoples of Central Asia. Soviet nation-builders considered female dress and veiling practices crucial determinants of national identities. They successfully convinced peoples who were now to be called that veil was a central symbol of national tradition. The hujum made veil into a symbol of resistance to Soviet rule. Uzbek men, and many women, considered those who unveiled as prostitutes, figuratively as well as literally, selling themselves to infidel conqueror.Northrop demonstrates how Uzbek resistance foiled Soviet efforts at every turn, due principally to two factors: first, Uzbeks saw these campaigns as an effort to destroy their most deeply-held cultural and religious beliefs; second, Soviets lacked funds or reliable allies among Uzbek population. Uzbek Communists continued, even under threat of purges, to insist their wives remain veiled, and ignored or subverted laws banning polygyny and bride-price. Punishments ranging from insults to ostracization to murder led most unveiled women to re-veil cither permanently or temporarily, whenever or wherever they felt threatened. …

Religious Liberty in America: Political Safeguards. By Louis Fisher. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. xii, 266 pp. Cloth, $35.00, isbn 0-7006-1201-7. Paper, $16.95, isbn 0-7006-1202-5.)

The aim of Louis Fisher's briskly paced and lucid study is relatively simple: he seeks to puncture the notion “that courts, not the political process, protect individual rights” (p. 1). Using detailed and compelling examples that range from Jehovah's Witnesses and Orthodox Jews to Native Americans and evangelical Protestants, he demonstrates that members of numerous religious faiths sometimes have had more reliable allies in legislators and executive officers than in judges. Indeed, this provocative work—one that is both accessible to general readers and weighty enough for scholars—suggests that the judiciary has played a somewhat limited role in shielding the right of Americans to worship freely. Part of the strength of Fisher's analysis lies in its scope. Without skimping on substance, he deftly covers a great deal of territory. Included in his study are numerous examples of “how Supreme Court rulings on religious liberty have been challenged and countermanded by public pressure, legislation, and independent state action” (p. 2). Individual chapters are devoted to detailed studies of controversies surrounding conscientious objection to military service, school prayer, and Native American religious freedom. Fisher (senior specialist in separation of powers at the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress) tackles these debates in a lively and broad-ranging manner, providing a wealth of specific information on how elected bodies have often taken the lead in erecting safeguards for religious liberty—and how the courts frequently have failed to do so.

(Re)Constructing Men's Interests

Do men have too much to lose to be reliable allies with women in challenging patriarchy? This article addresses this question by exploring feminist views about the “man question” and reflecting on a dialogue in a pro-feminist electronic discussion group about whether it is men's interests to change. It challenges the view that men, as individuals, have objective interests that arise as a consequence of being men in a patriarchal society and argues that while men may construct interests toward their own material well being, they may also construct ideal interests that are formed by support for more abstract principles. It is thus suggested that men formulate a sense of having particular interests and that they behave on the basis of this formulation. The implications of this view for reconstructing men's interests toward support for feminism are discussed.

Can East Timor be a blueprint for burden sharing?

The international intervention in East Timor, led by Australia, may serve as a model for how the United States can turn over leadership of regional interventions to reliable allies. Here are the ingredients for success and the other states that might play Australia's role.

The Attending Veterinarian's Contract of Employment: Curse or Blessing for Animals in Research Institutions?

When attending veterinarians are not provided adequate job security by research institutions, there is no guarantee that they are reliable allies of nonhuman animals and implement the provisions set forth in the federal animal welfare regulations.

Missionaries, Church Movements, and the Shifting Religious Significance of the State in Zambia

In Zambia, where church membership was estimated to embrace 75 percent of the country's ten million people, Christianity has been as central to the country's political evolution as it has been to its religious evolution. European mission churches, which provided bridges for co lonial expansion into the country in the late 1800s and early 1900s, also served frequently as training grounds and institutional launching pads for the African nationalist leaders that led the way toward indepen dence. Moreover, since Zambia gained its independence in 1964, Ken neth Kaunda, who was president until 1991, and Frederick Chiluba, who unseated Kaunda, have gone to greater lengths than most regimes in post-colonial Africa to insure political loyalty on the part of churches. Nevertheless, responses to the colonial and post-colonial state have been far from uniform among Zambian churches. While the historic, Protestant mission churches have been fairly reliable allies of the state, the Catholics (during the latter twentieth century)1 and a rapidly ex panding third wing of African Christianity referred to as African Initi ated Churches (AIC's), have proven to be a much more difficult political challenge. AIC's, typically characterized by creative blends of Christian supernaturalism and African traditionalism, have been products of two historical moments of missionary ferment and African political intentionality in Zambia (and across sub-Saharan Africa). An initial period of missionary ferment, lasting into the mid-1990s, was dominated largely by European mission churches, although, in Zambia, American-based Watchtower churches were an important factor as

To Intervene or Not to Intervene

Alliances are related to the occurrence of conflict. A theoretical model predicts how alliance reliability affects the occurrence of conflict in the international system. Suppose that two nations are at war. The intervention of a third nation into this war affects the likely outcome. Nations prefer to fight wars that they expect to win. Nations are more likely to involve themselves in wars in which they anticipate allied support. Estimates of alliance reliability are obtained and used to demonstrate that nations consider alliance reliability when deciding whether to become involved in conflict. For example, nations with unreliable allies are more likely to surrender if attacked than are nations with reliable allies. Alliance reliability affects the occurrence of war. Unfortunately, whether an alliance is honored is only observable when a war actually occurs. The author discusses the sampling bias that this creates.

Defense Planning for the Late 1990s: Beyond the Desert Storm Framework

How does the United States fashion a defense policy for a world in which it has no major enemies, strong and reliable allies, and the best military in history; and yet at the same time has a bevy of worries about its future security and a strong sense that the world is anything but safe and secure? At a time when all of government is being asked to become more efficient, Michael O'Hanlon shows how the United States could prudently cut defense spending by as much as ten percent without risking its ability to respond to regional crises or maintain global commitments. O'Hanlon summarizes the military doctrine and budgetary dimensions of the Clinton administration's Bottom-Up Review plan for U.S. defense forces. He argues that U.S. strategists have not yet adjusted defense planning to the post-Soviet world and are focusing excessively, if somewhat understandably, on the vestiges of the cold war in places such as the Korean peninsula. He calls for western support of more innovative approaches to UN peace operations and a reorientation of the NATO alliance away from conflict with Russia and toward other combat scenarios.

Modernization from above versus reform from below: U.S. policy toward Latin American agricultural development

Summary This article distinguishes two tendencies in United States policy towards Latin American agriculture: a redistributionist tendency, favouring the break‐up of large private estates into small peasant plots; and a productionist tendency, favouring technical efficiency on existing holdings as the key to successful development. It is shown that this latter tendency has come increasingly to prevail in U.S. Government circles over the past decade, a shift in policy which is assumed to reflect political as well as strictly economic considerations. The endorsement of land reform, at least on the level of declared policy, in the early years of the Kennedy administration, has been followed by a reappraisal which brings U.S. policy more in line with the preferences of the large landowners who are among the most reliable political allies of the United States. (Ed.)

The Aspiration for Economic Development

Although generalization about Latin America as a whole should be avoided, most of the countries of the area have variously underdeveloped economies. These are theaters of rapid economic development, which is defined primarily as technological change. Thus conceived, economic growth has a universal character, both as to time and as to place. However, social scientists in the United States are now especially inter ested in this change process because of the current place of the underdeveloped areas in the foreign policy concerns of this country and because of the peculiar nature of economic devel opment theory as an intellectual problem. The political impli cations of economic development in Latin America are not clear. During World War II, it was generally believed that this proc ess would strengthen the American republics as reliable wartime allies. It is likely, however, that the political significance of economic growth is more complex than that, extending to such matters as the functions performed by the political structures within the Latin-American countries, the nature of their politi cal parties and party systems, and the attitudes toward change of their governing elites.

Economic Aspects of Coalition Diplomacy—the NATO Experience

The very notion that coalition diplomacy possesses economic aspects implies a concept of coalition as a form of international organization reaching well beyond the classical political and military alliance. An alliance normally commits each member to join with its partners if any of them is involved in hostilities. It may be solely defensive or both offensive and defensive. Whatever its scope, it takes as given the military establishment of each member and the economic resources each is prepared to devote to building its military strength. A government may feel that possession of reliable allies permits the meeting of its security interests with less effort and at less cost than being entirely on its own, but this is a matter for independent decision by each member, calling neither for consultation nor for planned joint effort.