Journal of Conflict Resolution

When do states attack or consider attacking nuclear infrastructure in nonnuclear weapons states? Despite the importance of this question, relatively little scholarly research has considered when and why countries target nuclear programs. The authors argue that states are likely to attack or consider attacking nuclear facilities when they are highly threatened by a particular country’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. Three factors increase the salience of the proliferation threat: (1) prior violent militarized conflict; (2) the presence of a highly autocratic proliferator; and (3) divergent foreign policy interests. The authors test these propositions using statistical analysis and a new data set on all instances when countries have struck or seriously considered striking other states’ nuclear infrastructure between 1941 and 2000. The findings lend support for the theory and very little support for the alternative explanations. States are not deterred from attacking nuclear programs by the prospect of a military retaliation and concerns about international condemnation do not appear to influence the willingness to strike. Ultimately, states are willing to accept substantial costs in attacking if they believe that a particular country’s acquisition of nuclear weapons poses a significant threat to their security.

Reputational theory of conflict behavior dates back to Schelling’s seminal work on bargaining and continues to find both its advocates and critics to date. The authors do not take sides in this debate about the relevance of reputation for bargaining behavior but rather take a modified approach to reputations for resolve and probe some aspects that were largely underexplored in past research. The authors develop the argument that, if facing multiple strategic rivals and having failed in past disputes, a state has an incentive to invest in its reputation for resolute behavior by initiating and escalating conflicts. Their focus is then on both general and immediate deterrence, and while it was standard to tie reputation to a deterrer’s past, the authors direct the attention to the challenger’s reputation as a potential motivator for its conflictual behavior. This new focus is validated, and the related expectations supported, in the findings from their empirical analysis of strategic rivalries from 1816 to 1999.

The prediction of conflict constitutes a challenge to social scientists. This article explores whether the incorporation of geography can help us make our forecasts of political violence more accurate. The authors describe a spatially and temporally autoregressive discrete regression model, following the framework of Geyer and Thompson. This model is applied to geo-located data on attributes and conflict events in Bosnia over the period from March 1992 to October 1995. Results show that there is a strong spatial as well as temporal dimension to the outbreak of violence in Bosnia. The authors then explore the use of this model for predicting future conflict. Using a simulation approach, the predictive accuracy of the spatial—temporal model is compared to a standard regression model that only includes time lags. The results show that even in a difficult out-of-sample prediction task, the incorporation of space improves our forecasts of future conflict.

This contribution argues that social policies ameliorate poor short-run and long-run socioeconomic conditions (e.g., unemployment, poverty, inequality, and dissatisfaction), thereby indirectly reducing terrorist activity. The authors empirically assess the influence of social policies (indicated by social spending and welfare regime variables) on homegrown terrorism for fifteen Western European countries during the 1980—2003 period. The authors find that higher social spending in certain fields (health, unemployment benefits, and active labor market programs) is associated with a significant reduction in homegrown terrorism, while spending in other fields (e.g., public housing) is not. Moderate evidence furthermore indicates that the different worlds of welfare capitalism differently affect homeland terrorism. Social democratic welfare regimes that create low levels of market dependence are on average less prone to domestic terrorist activity. The findings suggest that homegrown terrorism in Western Europe may also be fought by higher spending in certain fields and more generous welfare regimes.

The question of whether democratic institutions facilitate terrorist activities is a controversial one in current scientific studies of terrorism. Although the ‘‘rule of law’’ is an essential institutional pillar of any mature democracy, its direct effect on domestic and international terrorism remains unexplored. Conceiving democratic rule of law as the coexistence of effective and impartial judicial systems and citizens’ recognition of the law as legitimate, the author presents a causal explanation in which a high-quality rule of law is considered to dampen ordinary citizens’ opportunity and willingness to engage in political violence, protecting democracies from becoming victims of terrorism. Built on a cross-sectional, time-series data analysis of 131 countries during the period from 1984 to 2004, the author finds that, ceteris paribus, maintaining a sound rule of law notably reduces the likelihood of any type of terrorist events. In short, the rule of law instantiated in democratic institutions provides a formidable bulwark against terrorism.