Rival Regimes Research Articles

The instability of the nuclear nonproliferation regime complex

This article theorizes path-dependent changes in the institutional architecture of the nuclear nonproliferation regime complex; it analyses the effects of different regime-complex structures on institutional contestation and policy adjustment. I first offer a general theory of how the preexisting institutional structures of international regime complexes (IRCs) facilitate and constrain subsequent institutional developments in ways that make IRCs prone to endogenous, path-dependent change. Next, I illustrate how strategies of regime shifting and rival regime creation in the nuclear nonproliferation complex have triggered path-dependent ‘reactive sequencing’, resulting in growing institutional fragmentation. To illustrate endogenous dynamics of IRC evolution, I examine the nuclear nonproliferation complex at three ‘critical junctures’: The mid-1970s, the end of the Cold War, and the early-2000s. During each period, exogenous proliferation shocks interacted with pre-existing institutional structures to produce specific patterns of contestation which set in motion a reactive sequence of growing institutional fragmentation. My argument has relevance for global economic governance broadly and for the growing IPE literature which explores reactive sequencing and institutional decay in global governance institutions.

Opportunism for Survival: Steamship Teaboys and China's Wartime Shipping Industry, 1937–1941

AbstractThis article examines the correlation between union activism, crime, and violence in the shipping industry in wartime China. Drawing on diplomatic and police records, shipping manifests, periodicals, and newspapers, the article deals with self-employed unskilled steamship attendants called “teaboys.” With insight into Chinese civilians’ underground struggle, the article contends that, steamship teaboys sustained their livelihoods during World War II by operating as everyday low-level spies for rival regimes. As workers, steamship teaboys pragmatically, without evidence of politico-ideological considerations, accommodated the needs of different belligerents in exchange for their own survival. Moreover, this article argues that the drastic socio-political upheaval in wartime China made these marginally employed shipboard attendants increasingly inclined towards a utilitarian patron-client relationship, originally forged in the mid-1920s when unionization began, and continued at the expense of their native-place ties and fictive family bonds. Impacted by the patron-client relationship in a climate where workers’ interests were protected by the armed forces of various regimes, the teaboys viewed unions as competitive sellers of muscle power in a market for crime and violence in industrial unrest.

State Support for Rebels and Interstate Bargaining

AbstractSince the end of World War II, leaders have frequently supported rebel groups in other countries as a coercive strategy in international disputes. However, the strategic rationale by which rebel groups gain international support is non‐obvious. Many recipient groups are too weak to viably win and are hostile to the sponsoring state's goals. Using a formal model, I explain that the fundamental objective of transnational rebel support is to gain bargaining leverage against a rival state by depleting its resources to counter internal and external challenges. This subversive effect provides a sufficient incentive for sponsoring the rebels even when favourable conditions suggested by previous studies are absent. Sponsoring rebels is attractive even if conventional warfare is not comparatively costly and even if rebel and sponsor preferences diverge. Moreover, given the goal of destabilizing rival regimes, potential sponsors prefer to support weaker rebel groups and provide more support to them.

Data jurisdictions and rival regimes of algorithmic regulation

AbstractThis article aims to characterize and compare some approaches to regulation manifest in distinct yet intersecting domains of data assemblage and algorithmic development and to explore some implications of their operating in concert. We focus on three such types of domain, each oriented toward different purposes: market jurisdictions, public science jurisdictions, and jurisdictions of humanitarianism. These domains we characterize as data jurisdictions because they tend to propagate distinct normative claims and concerns, and authorize particular types of speech and action, through algorithmic operations and data formatting. In this article, we focus on the intersection of these archetypal data jurisdictions in two related initiatives of the United Nations (UN): Haze Gazer and CycloMon. In the context of these projects, the market domain is represented by their incorporation of Twitter and social media data; the public science domain by their use of NASA Earth Observatory data, US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data, and Air Quality Index China (AQICN) air quality data; and the humanitarian domain by their status as UN projects designed to serve the aims and enlarge the capacities of development and humanitarian professionals. We analyze how, and with what ramifications, these domains of algorithmic regulation intersect in Haze Gazer and CycloMon. In so doing, we advance two main arguments. First, we argue that certain normative commitments regarding data, data use, and data users circulate and gain ground through their embeddedness in seemingly benign infrastructures and formats of data handling and representation. Particular (contentious) norms are prioritized, spread, and imbibed as much through day‐to‐day data usage as through explicit argument or endorsement. Second, we argue that blind spots tend to emerge from the intersection of different jurisdictions over, or approaches to, the challenge of responsible algorithmic regulation. The data jurisdictions that we analyze in this article demand quite divergent normative commitments, but the conflicts among these are hard for users to discern in day‐to‐day interactions with the platforms that we describe. We contend that jurisdictional analysis of projects in operation may help data contributors and users take account of, and potentially take a stand on, these important differences.

Counter-Theatre during the 1797 Fleet Mutinies

AbstractIn the spring of 1797, when French invasion appeared likely, the Spithead and Nore mutinies successively immobilized the two Royal Navy fleets responsible for home defence. The Spithead mutineers gained more pay and greater food rations for all Royal Navy sailors, and a general pardon for themselves. The Nore mutiny ended in collapse, courts martial, and the execution of approximately twenty-eight prominent mutineers. In their scale and potential danger, these fleet mutinies rank among the most serious manifestations of collective resistance in eighteenth-century Britain. In complexity, they far exceeded single-ship mutinies like theBountyorHermione. The mutineers deliberately subverted symbols of the legitimate rule of officers and deployed them in support of their own rival regime. “Counter-theatre” allowed the mutineer leaders to perpetuate their rule with minimal recourse to coercion by combining familiar symbols of naval order, new mutineer power structures, and sailors’ traditions of resistance. As such, the mutinies speak to wider literatures: to histories of the age of revolutions, to the revolutionary Atlantic, and to histories of popular protest and resistance.

Data Jurisdictions and Rival Regimes of Algorithmic Regulation

This article aims to characterize and compare some approaches to regulation manifest in distinct yet intersecting domains of data assemblage and algorithmic development, and to explore some implications of their operating in concert. We focus on three such types of domain, each oriented towards different purposes: market jurisdictions; public science jurisdictions; and jurisdictions of humanitarianism. These domains we characterize as data jurisdictions because they tend to propagate distinct normative claims and concerns, and authorize particular types of speech and action, through algorithmic operations and data formatting. In this paper, we focus on the intersection of these archetypal data jurisdictions in two, related initiatives of the United Nations (UN): Haze Gazer and CycloMon. In the context of these projects, the market domain is represented by their incorporation of Twitter and social media data; the public science domain by their use of NASA Earth Observatory data, US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data, and Air Quality Index China (AQICN) air quality data; and the humanitarian domain by their status as UN projects designed to serve the aims and enlarge the capacities of development and humanitarian professionals. We analyse how, and with what ramifications, these domains of algorithmic regulation intersect in Haze Gazer and CycloMon. In so doing, we advance two main arguments. First, we argue that certain normative commitments regarding data, data use, and data users circulate and gain ground through their embeddedness in seemingly benign infrastructures and formats of data handling and representation. Particular (contentious) norms are prioritised, spread and imbibed as much through day-to-day data usage as through explicit argument or endorsement. Second, we argue that blind spots tend to emerge from the intersection of different jurisdictions over, or approaches to, the challenge of responsible algorithmic regulation. The data jurisdictions that we analyse in this article demand quite divergent normative commitments, but the conflicts among these are hard for users to discern in day-to-day interaction with the platforms that we describe. We contend that jurisdictional analysis of projects in operation may help data contributors and users to take account of, and potentially take a stand on, these important differences.

Forest clearance and land use by early farmers in Europe: Insights from north Greek oral history

European prehistorians have long debated whether Neolithic farmers, especially in temperate central and northern Europe, exploited cleared woodland for short-term ‘slash-and-burn’ crop husbandry or for cultivation of ‘permanent’ gardens/fields. Because empirical evidence was scarce and rather indirect, circumstantial arguments based on the relative costs and benefits of the two rival regimes have hitherto dominated this debate, but more direct archaeobotanical proxies for Neolithic crop husbandry (based on weed ecology and crop isotopes) now favour the predominance of intensively cultivated permanent plots. At the same time, it is argued from ongoing experimental cultivation at Forchtenberg in southern Germany that short-term slash-and-burn husbandry offers much better returns on both land and labour, at least on poor soils marginal for Neolithic cereals. This paper presents oral historical evidence for mid-twentieth century clearance and subsequent long-term cultivation of mixed deciduous woodland in the Pieria region of northern Greece. These data extend the sparse European ethnographic and historical record of manual clearance for crop husbandry to deciduous woodland of the northern Mediterranean, while also providing comparative material against which to evaluate experimental results. Pierian farmers achieved good cereal yields for many years on cleared woodland, with very limited use of fire, demonstrating the viability of a permanent-cultivation regime for early farmers in the north Mediterranean, but suitable land was scarce in Pieria and informants had no experience of the alternative slash-and-burn regime. Conversely, the Forchtenberg experiments have effectively tested only the slash-and-burn regime under soil pH conditions hostile to successful long-term cultivation. Evaluation of these experiments in the light of the Pierian data suggests that long-term cultivation of cleared woodland would have offered Neolithic famers better returns than slash and burn under good or neutral soil conditions. Comparison of the likely returns of the two rival regimes thus offers no grounds for questioning archaeobotanical indications of Neolithic permanent cultivation. The Pierian and Forchtenberg data agree, however, in suggesting that the time elapsed between clearance and reliable grain harvests, under either regime, may have been long enough to pose a significant challenge to the survival of pioneer Neolithic farmers, especially if these were colonists settling beyond ‘commuting’ distance from their previous homes.

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Efficient Spectrum Reallocation with Hold-Ups and Without Nirvana

In 2010, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) determined that up to 20 television channels should be shifted to mobile services. If successful, the reform could generate over $1 trillion in social gains. To achieve these efficiencies, regulators rejected traditional tools, which would have terminated existing wireless licenses, as too contentious. Instead, they chose to create a two-sided auction in which incumbent TV licensees state their offer prices to exit (broadcasting), being paid from the winning bids for mobile licenses (granted access to the reallocated TV spectrum). The FCC conducts this “incentive auction” and, importantly, unilaterally reassigns TV channels for stations remaining on the air. These involuntary transfers are designed to eliminate station hold-ups, allowing new blocks of contiguous spectrum (more valuable than scattered frequencies of equivalent bandwidth) to be made available for mobile licenses. A rival policy option – “overlay licenses” – would grandfather existing TV stations and then auction new licenses permitting liberal use of the TV Band (i.e., not restricted to broadcasting). Overlay winners could then bargain with TV stations to make more bandwidth available for mobile broadband. Policy makers rejected this approach on the grounds that incumbent TV licensees would engage in strategic hold-up, pre-empting efficient deals. But so, too, are hold-ups endemic in the design and implementation of incentive auctions; to asymmetrically ignore these costs is to commit the Nirvana Fallacy. This paper offers a template to avoid the Fallacy, evaluating transaction costs across the rival policy regimes. A first order quantification suggests that the costs of incentive auctions have been substantially under-estimated by regulators, perhaps reflecting confirmation bias and a principal-agent conflict in the assessment of policy options.

Guns and Butter? Regime Competition and the Welfare State during the Cold War

Scholars from a number of disciplines have argued that the massive expansion of the welfare state in the postwar period was at least in some part a byproduct of the cold war and the associated political competition between two rival regime blocs. However, the question of whether regime competition fuelled welfare-state growth has never been subject to systematic examination. Applying spatial econometrics, this article offers the first empirical test of this argument. The authors' findings support the notion that regime competition stimulated the expansion of the welfare state on both sides of the Iron Curtain in the postwar period.

‘Enverists’ and ‘Titoists’ – Communism and Islam in Albania and Kosova, 1941–99: From the Partisan Movement of the Second World War to the Kosova Liberation War

‘Enverists’, or supporters of Albanian communist dictator Enver Hoxha, and ‘Titoists’, referring to sympathizers with the architect of communist Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, are terms used in Albanian discourse over Kosova. But they are generally misconstrued to suggest differing orientations towards the rival regimes, when they more properly refer, as Albanian sources demonstrate, to attitudes about the fate of Kosova itself. ‘Enverists’ in Kosova very rarely supported Hoxha and ‘Titoists’ were not necessarily loyalists of Yugoslavia. Rather, the terms signify a distinction between those who saw the Albanian national question as one involving all Albanians, in Albania proper, Kosova, and neighbouring territories (‘Enverists’) and those who viewed the problem of Kosova as a separate question (‘Titoists’).

A New Perspective on an Old Problem: Negligence, Strict Liability, and Non-Legal Sanctions

In this article, I compare negligence and strict liability regimes with respect to their different abilities to generate the imposition of non-legal sanctions on defendants in torts. I evaluate the relative desirability of the two regimes from the perspectives of efficiency, distributive justice, and other justice considerations, while distinguishing between reputation loss produced by the litigation process and that produced by the defendant's underlying activity that caused the accident. My analytical framework is grounded in the following insights: First, non-legal sanctions can be value-destroying, value-preserving, or value-creating. However, it is hard to empirically determine the extent to which a given finding of liability produces any of these effects. This difficulty affects the ability to normatively evaluate the two regimes. Second, non-legal sanctions have a dual character - on the one hand, as a type of sanction imposed in response to the damage caused by the defendant and, on the other hand, as possibly an undesirable social cost (when the non-legal sanctions are value-destroying) or a desirable social benefit (when the non-legal sanctions are value-creating). Third, and most important, any given finding of a defendant as liable in torts is likely to subject her to greater non-legal sanctions if reached under a negligence regime than if reached under a strict liability regime. However, it is not clear which regime will produce greater non-legal sanctions overall, since a strict liability regime is likely to produce more findings of liability. The main distinction between the rival regimes' respective potential to generate non-legal sanctions derives from the fact that, in findings of liability, a strict liability regime pools together negligent and non-negligent defendants. At both the allocative and distributive levels, this pooling effect is likely to lead to a reduction in the investment made by high-risk professionals in precaution costs. Low-risk professionals might either increase their investment in precaution (as the flip-side of this adverse selection coin) or, like the high-risk professionals, reduce that investment in a tragedy-of-the-commons. A strict liability regime might serve as a hedging mechanism for low-risk professionals against the significant reputation loss involved in being found liable under a negligence regime. At the aggregate level, a strict liability regime will produce greater non-legal sanctions if market participants overestimate the proportion of faulty defendants out of the pool of defendants found liable under that regime. Finally, the paper critically examines the assumption that a negligence regime is superior to strict liability in terms of signaling.

Casting American Sunshine on North Korea

IntroductionSouth Korea's of creative engagement with North Korea, designed to bolster a reconciliation process between the two Korean states on the divided peninsula, has been subjected to much criticism because of North Korea's pursuit of its nuclear weapons agenda. The original Policy was launched by South Korea's previous president, Dae-jung, and was subsequently modified as a Policy of Peace and Prosperity by the current president, Roh Moo-hyun. President Roh's already declining domestic poll ratings have been pulled lower by North Korea's provocative actions and American criticism of the Sunshine engagement paradigm as a form of failed appeasement.Given the increased questioning of the salience of the Policy's legacy, the Roh administration continues to adapt its engagement posture to greater realism. South Korean conservative critics of Roh's liberalism clearly doubt his administration's ability to be realistic. Signals emanating from these conservatives unambiguously indicate they would not stay the engagement course defined by Presidents and Roh. Despite their advocacy of changing that course and consideration of tougher minded alternatives, it is doubtful that a successor conservative government in Seoul would be able to totally abandon the legacy of the Kim-Roh approaches to inter-Korean engagement and reconciliation.A South Korean conservative leader in Seoul's Blue House probably would retain some of the sunshine paradigm for several reasons. The most visible reason is the way the ROK has cooperated with China in encouraging North Korea to pursue improved socio-economic policies modeled on some variant of a Sino-South Korean system. Beyond that major factor the costs and risks of a less accommodating South Korean approach to North Korea could easily be formidable in terms of causing a collapse of the North Korean state or a decision by North Korea to retaliate with hawkish aggression. In short, South Korea has ample reason to want to avoid paying the heavy costs of picking up the pieces of a fallen rival regime or the devastating costs of a new Korean War.Sinic SunshineIn this context it is important to note that the ways in which the PRC interacts with North Korea clearly is influenced by South Korea's mixture of a sunshine engagement policy and strategic deterrence designed to encourage North Korea to be flexible about socio-economic institutions and prudent about the risks associated with brinkmanship. The closer China and the ROK become as economic partners the more Beijing and Seoul share a desire to persuade Pyongyang to avoid pursuing a nuclear agenda that might cause the United States to take preemptive military measures against North Korea. In a sense China is adapting a combination of South Korea's sunshine paradigm and what some U.S. security analysts characterize- using a phrase rooted in the Rand Institute-as congagement (a blend of containment and engagement).Both of these approaches are designed to encourage North Korea to be a more reliable and cooperative neighbor between China and South Korea. They also would help induce North Korea's leaders to shift away from their political reliance on the so-called cult of Kim and its ethnocentric nationalism. China's national interests would be endangered if an extremist North Korea became an economically failed state or if North Korea's brinkmanship were to go far over the brink in ways that would cause the United States to take military actions against the DPRK that could entangle the PRC. As positive as that set of PRC policies can be, when they are coupled with its Sino-centric historical legacy that can cause anxiety among its Korean neighbors (North and South), the notion of sunshine emanating from Beijing can cause Koreans to want to avoid getting a Sinic sunburn.Rising SunshineThat positive sunshine metaphor would be even more foreboding were Japan to learn some lessons from what South Korea and China are doing vis-a-vis socioeconomic engagement with North Korea. …

The Troubled Peace: U.S. Policy and the Two Koreas

In A Troubled Peace, Professor Chae-Jin Lee reviews the vicissitudes of U.S. policy toward South and North Korea since 1948 when rival regimes were installed on the Korean peninsula. He explains the continuously changing nature of U.S.-Korea relations by discussing the goals the United States has sought for Korea, the ways in which these goals have been articulated, and the methods used to implement them. Using a careful analysis of declassified diplomatic documents, primary materials in English, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, and extensive interviews with American and Korean officials, Lee draws attention to a number of factors that have affected U.S. policy: the functions of U.S. security policy in Korea, the role of the United States in South Korea's political democratization, President Clinton's policy of constructive engagement toward North Korea, President Bush's hegemonic policy toward North Korea, and the hexagonal linkages among the United States, China, Japan, Russia, and the two Koreas. Drawing on concepts of containment, deterrence, engagement, preemption, and appeasement, Lee's balanced and thoughtful approach reveals the frustrations of all players in their attempts to arrive at a modicum of coexistence. His objective, comprehensive, and definitive study reveals a dynamic-and incredibly complex-series of relationships underpinning a troubled and tenuous peace.

After fifty years: the San Francisco Peace Treaty in the context of Anglo-Japanese relations, 1902–52

The approach of the British government towards Japan in 1950–1 was more negative than that of the United States. The British attitude was influenced by several factors: the ignominy of the surrender of Singapore in 1942, resentment at American domination of the Occupation of Japan, apprehension concerning renewed Japanese competition affecting textiles, potteries and shipbuilding, and bitterness resulting from atrocities inflicted on the prisoners-of-war. For most of the century preceding the Pacific War Britain had been the principal power in Eastern Asia and British policy makers found it difficult to adjust to the reduced role Britain occupied in 1950. Labour cabinet ministers revealed some hostility towards Japan during diplomatic exchanges with John Foster Dulles in 1951. Herbert Morrison, the Foreign Secretary, and Hugh Gaitskell, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, were compelled to accept American decisions except on the limited issue of the Congo Basin treaties where Dulles made a concession to Britain. Significant differences in approach to the rival Chinese regimes also created problems in 1951. British forecasts concerning the future of Japan were negative: it was anticipated that, within a decade, Japan could become assertive, with the risk of reactionary right-wing groups emerging.

The irreconcilable Chinese rival regimes and the weakening of the policies of neutrality of the great powers

Although the outbreak of all‐out military hostilities between the Chinese rival regimes ‐ the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ‐ had been largely avoided during the 1937–45 War of Resistance against Japan thanks to the war itself and the interventions by the great powers, these two domestic foes resumed confrontation, centred on Manchuria, soon after the war due to their long‐term plan to eliminate each other. With their own interests, the US and the USSR intended to continue their wartime policy of neutrality toward the civil strife in the post‐war era and they therefore pressured the leaders of the two rivals to resolve their differences through negotiation. Washington and Moscow initially saw a peaceful resolution to the KMT‐CCP conflict as fitting into their respective post‐war plans. However, the Chinese rivals threatened the neutral policy of the great powers and subsequently dragged the US and the USSR into the domestic conflict. The author attempts to demonstrate that in the Cold War history of East Asia, minor players, the KMT and the CCP in this case, were able to dictate developments of relations between the great powers and domestic actors that paved the way for the later evolution of the Chinese Civil War and the Cold War in East Asia as a whole.

The position of Hong Kong in Britain's policy towards the two rival Chinese regimes during the early years of the cold war

The main purpose of this article is to discuss Britain's relations with the two Chinese rival regimes — the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — by examining Hong Kong's position in the early Cold War. After the Second World War, both Britain and China declared their intention of recovering sovereignty over Hong Kong, and competed in taking over the colony from the Japanese. Britain won the race with the Americans’ acquiescence. During the Chinese Civil War, the Hong Kong administration adopted a neutral policy toward the Chinese Nationalists’ and Communists’ activities in the colony in conformity with the British government's China policy of non‐intervention in the civil strife. However, after the Chinese Communists declared victory on the mainland, Hong Kong still maintained its neutral position by allowing both of the Chinese rivals to continue their presence in the colony while London attempted an early recognition of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in order to be one of the first Western nations to set up diplomatic relations with the new regime, although this was later to prove to be in vain.

The Italian city-state: from commune to signoria

Italy in the Middle Ages was unique among the countries of Europe in recreating, in a changed environment, the urban civilization of antiquity - the society, culture, and political formations of city-states. This book examines the origins and nature of this phenomenon from the fall of Rome to the eve of its consummation, the Italian Renaissance. The explanation is sought in Italy's singular `double existence' between two contrasted worlds - ancient and medieval. The ancient was characterised by the total predominance of the landed aristocracy in economy and society, enforced through a peculiar system of city states embracing town and country. The new medieval influences were marked by the separation of town, country and aristocracy, by the identification of towns with trade and a mercantile bourgeoisie, and by commercial and proto-industrial revolution. Italy shared in both worlds. It remained a land of cities and of an urbanized ruling class (except in the Norman South) and re-established territorial city states; but the staes were very different from those of antiquity, the city leaders in the commercial revolution, and Italy itself seen as a nation of shopkeepers, birthplace of capitalism. In this fascinating and ground-breaking study, Philip Jones traces in detail the tension and interaction between the two traditions, civic and patrician, mercantile and bourgeois, through all phases of Italian life to their culmination in two rival regimes of communes and despots.

Inter-Korean Relations: Seoul's Perspective

OF THE THREE remaining divided nations in the postVietnam War era, Korea is unquestionably the most explosive. The two Germanys have never engaged in any military conflict with each other and continue to coexist peacefully. Relations between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan are no less tranquil, both being preoccupied with developmental goals: the PRC is vigorously pursuing its four modernizations, while Taiwan is busy trying to keep the momentum of its unprecedented economic boom. In the Korean peninsula, however, the two rival regimes not only continue to hurl insults at each other but also to confront each other along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) with a million heavily armed troops. It is this ever-present danger of an armed conflict that makes relations between North and South Korea a matter of global significance, for a conflict between the two has the potential of escalating into a serious confrontation, even war, among the major powers, whose interests intersect in the peninsula. Their stakes are reflected in a series of bilateral mutual defense treaties linking South Korea with the U.S., and North Korea with both the Soviet Union and the PRC; in the presence of 40,000 U.S. troops in South Korea; and in the strong economic ties between Seoul on one hand and Japan and the U.S. on the other. Inter-Korean relations also have enormous implications for the internal politics and external policies of the two Koreas. In North Korea the frenetic pace of economic construction, political indoctrination, and military training has been justified in terms of building a base for the eventual reunification of the fatherland. Moreover, political turmoil in the South has been exploited by North Korea's ruling elite to divert the attention of its people from domestic problems-a tactic that has be-