Suchergebnisse

Ethnic war is an asymmetrical military contest for power in which vital interests of the groups are clearly at stake. Wining the war is, therefore, the fundamental objective of the com-batants. Compromise is hard to arrive at in negotiations, so long as the asymmetry of power between the ethnic parties is not altered. Thus, power assumes an important factor in determining the outcome. In this context, finding the linkage between both the war and peace processes, with each influencing the other, this article underscores the relevance of the theory of 'ripeness' to explain the phenomenon of war and peace. Power equivalence may induce a negotiation process as a 'mutually hurting stalemate' creates ripe moments for the end of the war. However, conditions to start negotiations are different from situations under which a negotiated political settlement is reached. Peace accords in ethnic wars are about power-sharing and autonomy. Generally, the focus is on creating new ethnically balanced institutions, while dismantling some of the centralised political structures. Reforming the State, constituting a part of the solution, would mean, to change its ethnic exclusive character and make it more inclusive one. A durable political solution in an ethnic war may spell out a new social and political contract between the warring parties for peace and development.

A central concern for experimental studies is participant motivation, which is crucial for internal validity. When participants are not committed to the task, internal validity diminishes because responses might not be authentic. This study introduces and tests the seriousness technique as a method for increasing participant investment in political science experiments that use student samples. The seriousness technique aims at creating a sense of responsibility by telling students that their participation is important because science needs quality data. Results from a computer-assisted foreign policy decision-making experiment show that the seriousness technique increased the degree of information participants access during the foreign policy simulation and the time they spent on the study. These findings suggest that political scientists who use student samples in their experiments can nurture serious subjects by employing the seriousness technique. It is argued that the results should be of interest not only to experimentalists but also to all scholars who use human subjects, including survey researchers, in their research.

THE AUTHOR CALLS FOR LIBERALS TO REASSESS THEIR BELIEF THAT REAGAN'S POLICY TOWARDS THE USSR WILL LEAD TO WAR. THE LIBERAL OBSTRUCTION OF REAGAN AID TO THE CONTRAS WAS BASED ON THIS MISCONCEPTION. THE LIBERAL ANALOGY BETWEEN THE US INVASION OF GRENADA AND THE SOVIET INVASION OF AFGHANISTAN IS DESCRIBED AS PREPOSTEROUS.

Some scholars have viewed the Soviet state and science as two monolithic entities--with bureaucrats as oppressors, and scientists as defenders of intellectual autonomy. Based on previously unknown documents from the archives of state and Communist Party agencies and of numerous scientific institutions, Stalinist Science shows that this picture is oversimplified. Even the reinstated Science Department within the Central Committee was staffed by a leading geneticist and others sympathetic to conventional science. In fact, a symbiosis of state bureaucrats and scientists established a much more terrifying system of control over the scientific community than any critic of Soviet totalitarianism had feared. Some scientists, on the other hand, developed more elaborate devices to avoid and exploit this control system than any advocate of academic freedom could have reasonably hoped. Nikolai Krementsov argues that the model of Stalinist science, already taking hold during the thirties, was reversed by the need for inter-Allied cooperation during World War II. Science, as a tool for winning the war and as a diplomatic and propaganda instrument, began to enjoy higher status, better funding, and relative autonomy. Even the reinstated Science Department within the Central Committee was staffed by a leading geneticist and others sympathetic to conventional science. However, the onset of the Cold War led to a campaign for eliminating such servility to the West. Then the Western links that had benefited genetics and other sciences during the war and through 1946 became a liability, and were used by Lysenko and others to turn back to the repressive past and to delegitimate whole research directions