University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation

Taken from the content of the October 1992 meeting on Space Monitoring and Global Change, the contents of this IGCC paper range from means of assuring global cooperation in earth observation, potential systems and the practical difficulties of assembling and managing such systems.

On February 5-7, 1987, the University of California's Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation sponsored a conference on "Historical Perspectives on Global Conflict and Cooperation." The aim of the conference was two-fold: to identify promising new areas for historical scholarship in the field of global conflict and cooperation, and to generate new ideas for specific research proposals that University of California historians might later present to IGCC for funding.

If we need a new language of national and international politics in order to think differently so as to cope with the dangers of a nuclear world, we also need a new language of policy analysis to examine the structures and processes by which defense policy in general, and nuclear policy in particular, is made. What is needed, as a start, is a new lexicon of basic terms derived from language and discourse but applied to the policy process. We might then begin to develop this new vocabulary into an effective critique of defense decision making in the modern or indeed, the post-modern state. 

This series, Holding These Truths: Empowerment and Recognition in Action, presents case studies for a future conflict resolution textbook. It has been successfully piloted with several international classes. Those, who benefit most, stress the importance of carefully studying this introduction. Because the case study format is intentionally unique, written in an interactive and non-linear workbook style, unlike many introductions, the information provided here is required for understanding the case studies. Readers are encouraged to send comments and critiques directly to the author. Because of the deliberate one-of-a-kind format of the text, detailed page-by-page comments and questions are welcome. A list of the entire series is included below.

Introduction to Conflict Case Studies

Case Study #1: Neutral Fact-Finding and Empowerment Within Conflicted Systems

Case Study #2: Intrapersonal Approaches to Conflict: Cognitive and Perceptual Biases

Case Study #3: Negative Intergroup Influence

Case Study #4: Empathy: Effective Response with Escalating Aggression

Case Study #5: Assessing Covert Bad Faith and Power Abuse

Case Study #6: Cultural Competence: Ethical and Empowered Response With Discrimination

Case Study #7: Empowered Process---Skilled Leadership: Diffusion, Party Capacity and Speaking Truth to Power

Case Series #8: Empowered Process: Multicultural Collaboration

This is the eighth case study in the series Holding These Truths: Empowerment and Recognition in Action. This series presents case studies for a future conflict resolution textbook. It has been successfully piloted with several international classes. Those, who benefit most, stress the importance of carefully studying the introduction. (See Introduction to Conflict Case Studies, Nancy D. Erbe). Because the case study format is intentionally unique, written in an interactive and non-linear workbook style, unlike many introductions, the information provided there is required for understanding the case studies. Readers are encouraged to send comments and critiques directly to the author. Because of the deliberate one-of-a-kind format of the text, detailed page-by-page comments and questions are welcome. A list of the entire series is included below.

Introduction to Conflict Case Studies

Case Study #1: Neutral Fact-Finding and Empowerment Within Conflicted Systems

Case Study #2: Intrapersonal Approaches to Conflict: Cognitive and Perceptual Biases

Case Study #3: Negative Intergroup Influence

Case Study #4: Empathy: Effective Response with Escalating Aggression

Case Study #5: Assessing Covert Bad Faith and Power Abuse

Case Study #6: Cultural Competence: Ethical and Empowered Response With Discrimination

Case Study #7: Empowered Process---Skilled Leadership: Diffusion, Party Capacity and Speaking Truth to Power

Case Series #8: Empowered Process: Multicultural Collaboration

This is the fifth case study in the series Holding These Truths: Empowerment and Recognition in Action. This series presents case studies for a future conflict resolution textbook. It has been successfully piloted with several international classes. Those, who benefit most, stress the importance of carefully studying the introduction. (See Introduction to Conflict Case Studies, Nancy D. Erbe). Because the case study format is intentionally unique, written in an interactive and non-linear workbook style, unlike many introductions, the information provided there is required for understanding the case studies. Readers are encouraged to send comments and critiques directly to the author. Because of the deliberate one-of-a-kind format of the text, detailed page-by-page comments and questions are welcome. A list of the entire series is included below.

Introduction to Conflict Case Studies

Case Study #1: Neutral Fact-Finding and Empowerment Within Conflicted Systems

Case Study #2: Intrapersonal Approaches to Conflict: Cognitive and Perceptual Biases

Case Study #3: Negative Intergroup Influence

Case Study #4: Empathy: Effective Response with Escalating Aggression

Case Study #5: Assessing Covert Bad Faith and Power Abuse

Case Study #6: Cultural Competence: Ethical and Empowered Response With Discrimination

Case Study #7: Empowered Process---Skilled Leadership: Diffusion, Party Capacity and Speaking Truth to Power

Case Series #8: Empowered Process: Multicultural Collaboration

The following is an issue of IGCC's periodic Newsletter, detailing IGCC affairs and IGCC funded research initiatives.

The following is an issue of IGCC's periodic Newsletter, detailing IGCC affairs and IGCC funded research initiatives.

Written in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, the document contains discussion about possible future trajectories for cooperation over Nuclear weapons. Seeing neither the grounds for continued competition nor immediate cooperation, the authors prescribe a path of cautious engagement in cooperative measures to diminish any nuclear threat.

The defense innovation systems (DIS) in France and Sweden have longstanding traditions of domestic innovation and high self-reliance, but they differ greatly in how they have achieved these ambitions. France has almost complete self-reliance in defense technology and close government control of activities contributing to defense innovation and regarding the defense industry. In France, there is considerable state ownership, and foreign ownership is blocked. In contrast, Sweden has delimited its breadth of sovereign technology development since the 1990s, and now expresses three "essential security interests": fighter aircraft, underwater capability, and cyber. This research brief describes what characterizes the present defense innovation systems in these countries, discusses their similarities and differences, and points out factors that have led to their success.

This brief provides an analytical framework to identify, categorize, and assess the diverse array of factors that are involved in the pursuit of defense innovation, as viewed through an innovation ecosystem prism. Defense innovation systems are engaged in highly complex, time-consuming and resource-intensive work. Many of the insights from this framework are derived from an extensive examination into the state of innovation in the contemporary Chinese defense science, technology, andindustrial system, examined in more detail in Brief 2018-3 in this series.

The international community has consistently underestimated North Korean nuclear and missile capabilities. How has an economically impoverished, technologically backward, and internationally isolated state been able to establish robust and increasingly competent nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, especially since the mid-2010s? Has North Korea predominantly relied on foreign sources of technology or are its nuclear and missile programs the result of domestic effort? Even when technologies have been borrowed, a detailed analysis of the evolution of the programs suggests sustained domestic investment has proven crucial. The result is a far-flung and large weapons of mass destruction (WMD) infrastructure. Any negotiations over the program must take the extent of this infrastructure into account and consider the challenges of how to inspect, verify, and limit them, including through repurposing these capabilities to civilian uses.

A ceasefire in the border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea is only the beginning of the process of conflictresolution that must occur for peaceto take hold. The possibility ofthe conflict erupting into violenceagain is high unless serious internaland international effort is put into thedemarcation of the border and theacceptance of that demarcated borderas fair.The United States need to build strong relations with  Ethiopia as well as encourage peace and economic development.

“Ethnic” and “sectarian” conflicts are not caused by ethnicity or religion. To avoid future episodes we need early warning systems and intervention in societies undergoing rapid and destabilizing economic and political transitions.

This brief examines the issue of transparency during and after the period of political dominance by the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP) which ruled with only a brief nine-month interruption from 1955–2009. It highlights two related but analytically separate dimensions of governmental transparency—transparency in decision-making processes and transparency in official policies. The first concentrates on the public visibility of how agencies decide on matters under their jurisdiction; the second focuses on how visible actual government policies are to those most affected by them and to the general citizenry. I argue that Japanese agencies have been far more open on policy content than on the processes by which those decisions were reached. In addition, this brief examines recent changes designed to foster greater transparency in both process and policy, including a Freedom of Information Act, e-government provisions, enhanced roles for parliamentary inquiry, a greater role for nongovernmental organizations, and other measures. It also highlights the broad shifts in government attitudes toward transparency under the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which has governed since 2009.

These papers were prepared as background papers for the May 1994 meeting of hte NEACD in Tokyo. They neither represent a consensus of the participants nor a summary of any part of the discussions at any of the meetings. They are presented here in the hopes that other readers outside of the NEACD prcess will find them to be as useful and thought-provoling as did the hosts and participants.

An examination of the viability and usefulness of arms control in the late 1980s, the paper looks at the prospects of arms controls to maintain peace and the dangers inherent to such agreements. The authors then provide a series of suggestions to improve the procedures surrounding arms control implementation and management.

Authoritarian influence in multilateral institutions—particularly the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC)—is growing rapidly and poses a serious threat to democratic and human rights principles. Repressive governments have worked to undermine mechanisms that are meant to ensure accountability for rights abuses and to transform the United Nations (UN) its related bodies, and other international institutions into fora for mutual praise and exculpation. In this report, Rana Siu Inboden, a member of the IGCC network of scholars working on authoritarian regimes and international institutions, and a senior fellow with the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at The University of Texas at Austin, unpacks what these threats mean and what can be done to stop them.

Given bilateral tensions and the importance of airpower to national defense, has long-term strategiccompetition between the United States and China in the military aviation sector emerged? This brief evaluates US and Chinese military aviation through three factors that shed light on the degree and nature of strategic competition: resource allocations, targeted platform development, and airpower employment concepts. While China has been competing with the United States for decades, China has only recently begun to drive US decisions. Cost-imposing strategies may not favor the United States, so innovation and technological developments in military aviation should focus on how to thwart China’s ability to achieve its military objectives.

The defense innovation systems (DIS) in France and Sweden have longstanding traditions of domestic innovation and high self-reliance, but they differ greatly in how they have achieved these ambitions. France has almost complete self-reliance in defense technology and close government control of activities contributing to defense innovation and regarding the defense industry. In France, there is considerable state ownership, and foreign ownership is blocked. In contrast, Sweden has delimited its breadth of sovereign technology development since the 1990s, and now expresses three "essential security interests": fighter aircraft, underwater capability, and cyber. This research brief describes what characterizes the present defense innovation systems in these countries, discusses their similarities and differences, and points out factors that have led to their success.

Promissory representation is the idea that a significant part of representation consists of parties making promises to voters during election campaigns and keeping those promises if they hold enough power to do so after elections. In countries that are highly exposed to globalization, governing parties face significant challenges to fulfilling the promises they made to voters. At the same time, voters punish governing parties that fail to keep their campaign promises. This presents parties with the dilemma that while voters expect them to make ambitious promises during election campaigns, their capacity to deliver on those promises is undermined by the constraints of globalization. In response to this dilemma, parties rely on strategic ambiguity to avoid retrospective sanctioning by voters in future elections. Ambiguous campaign statements are reconcilable with a broad range of subsequent government policies and are therefore unlikely to be perceived as broken promises by voters. We analyze the use and effects of strategic ambiguity in a mixed-methods design consisting of a survey experiment and an observational study of 293 election platforms by 44 parties in six countries between 1970-2019. The findings shed new light on the widespread use of ambiguity in contemporary politics with important implications for democratic representation in a globalized world.

Recent years have witnessed significant democratic backsliding. Many democracies around the world experience incremental deteriorations of democratic institutions, rules, and norms resulting from the actions of duly elected governments, but we still know little about how backsliding is affected by international integration. We argue that integration of countries into the U.S.-led Liberal International Order (LIO) after the end of the Cold War has provided aspiring autocrats in office with tools, resources, and political support to pursue strategies of incremental executive aggrandizement. Our theory implies that integration has increased the likelihood of democratic backsliding, especially in regimes where anti-pluralist forces are able to capture international integration for their own purposes. We test the empirical implications of our theory with a mixed-methods approach that combines a large-n quantitative comparative analysis of democratic backsliding in 97 democracies after the Cold War with a typical case study to trace the underlying causal mechanisms of the theory. The findings indicate that international economic and political integration have had a robust positive effect on the likelihood of democratic backsliding in a broad range of contexts and that the hypothesized mechanisms are observable in the detailed case study. These findings have important implications for democracy in an integrated world.

Biodiversity decline and ecosystem loss are among the gravest transnational crises facing the planet, with deep implications for climate change. What determines how different countries choose to protect nature? Previous work has argued that economic dependence on natural resources undermines green policies. I instead argue that resource dependence can lead to mobilization in favor of protection. Citizens experience the negative consequences of environmental degradation and ecosystem loss firsthand, and domestic and international green groups take notice. Although mobilization can occur across regimes, in democracies these groups more effectively advocate for protection once mobilized, helping to stem biodiversity loss. The adverse effects of resource dependence, therefore, mainly apply to less democratic countries, where extractive interests are most able to steer policymaking and mobilization is less likely to succeed. To test this argument, I employ a mixed-methods research design. I employ a novel panel regression discontinuity design at country borders for all terrestrial country-border pairs from 1992 to 2020, using new geospatial data on protected area (PA) designation over time. I find that the effect of natural resource dependence is conditional: When democratic institutions are weaker, natural resource dependence leads to less biodiversity protection. When democracy is stronger, natural resource dependence increases the likelihood that protected areas are established. I complement these results with a qualitative case study of the history of conservation in Costa Rica to explore the mechanisms. These findings highlight the mitigating role that democratic institutions can play between natural resource dependence and biodiversity protection, and have important implications for our understanding of environmental politics and the role of mobilization among various actors in shifting policy.