547Crisis hardship mobilizes the anti-democratic side---that is how breakdown happens.
Andersen 19 — David Delfs Erbo Andersen and Suthan Krishnarajan. October. Political scientists at Aarhus University. Government and Opposition, “Economic Crisis, Bureaucratic Quality and Democratic Breakdown,” vol. 54, no. 4, p. 715-744 Clopus
Economic crises are frequent in democracies, deriving from bank collapses, bursting of housing bubbles or exhaustion of domestic and export markets. Their origins aside, they uniformly spur unemployment and impoverishment and typically exacerbate existing inequalities (Bernhard et al. Reference Bernhard, Nordstrom and Reenock 2001 ; Gasiorowski Reference Gasiorowski 1995 ; Gerschenkron Reference Gerschenkron 1989 ). Classic studies of democratic breakdown, however, indicate that the otherwise robust relationship between economic crises and democratic breakdown may be too simplistically stated. In Juan Linz’s conclusions ( Reference Linz 1978 : 50) to his famous volume explaining the advent of military dictatorships in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s and the diverse democratic breakdowns in interwar Europe, he notes that democratic crises ‘are the result of a lack of efficacy and effectiveness of successive governments when confronted with serious problems that require immediate decisions’. Nevertheless, Linz does not specify how state bureaucracy may affect efficacy or effectiveness even though such connections should be obvious. In a similarly intriguing but unspecified manner, Adam Przeworski ( Reference Przeworski 1991 : 33) stated that ‘whether or not democracy survives adverse economic conditions is a joint effect of conditions and institutions’. Finally, Nancy Bermeo ( Reference Bermeo 1997 : 19) comes closer in her review of the role of economic crisis for democracies in the interwar years by stating, ‘What seems to distinguish the casualties from the survivors in the interwar story is less the behavior of an actively anti-democratic public than the state’s capacity to provide what might be called “civic order”’. But the effect of state capacity on civic order is not pursued further.
We take from these classics that crises are merely drivers of change and not ultimately decisive of the outcomes of these changes. Specifically, crises matter because the crisis hardships of impoverishment and feelings of unjust distribution of resources trigger dissatisfaction among the masses. If this is not addressed by the democratic leaders, trust in the ability of those leaders and outright disbelief in a better future under democracy may develop, with the effect that anti-democratic movements mobilize and campaigns against democracy will have better chances of gaining public credence (Gerschenkron Reference Gerschenkron 1989 ; Svolik Reference Svolik 2013 ; see also Luebbert Reference Luebbert 1987 ). More theorization is needed as to how state bureaucracy contributes to alleviating hardships produced by crises.
548The state supplies arms capital---the budget, not the market, is what holds it up.
Stavrianakis 25 — Anna Stavrianakis. April. Professor of International Relations at Sussex; researches the arms trade, arms transfer control and the war in Yemen. Global Studies Quarterly, “The Arms Trade and the Transformation of Global Order: A Revitalized Research Agenda,” vol. 5, no. 2, ksaf033 Clopus
The material resources devoted to the production of armed force and the preparation for organized violence are at unprecedented levels. In 2023, global military spending hit a historic high of US$2.4 trillion, with the global military burden—military spending as a share of overall government spending, and thus “a measure of government priorities”— reaching 2.3 percent (SIPRI 2024a). Military spending carries significant opportunity costs, which disproportionately harm working class and lower income women (Elveren and Moghadam 2022, 427), and widen current and future gender inequalities (Elgin et al. 2022, 1481). Women and racialized minorities have long been skeptical of the claims about the necessity of military spending for “national” security. In the United States, which accounts for more than one third of all global military spending, Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 has been revitalized for the current conjuncture and includes the demand for the redirection of the war economy and military spending toward healthcare, education, jobs, and infrastructure in a move to dismantle the systemic racism that maintains economic oppression (Poor People’s Campaign 2024). The state plays a central role in providing the material resource for the arms industry in the form of military spending. Sales by the top 100 arms companies reached US$597 billion in 2022, with large backlogs in orders and increased demand for weapons spurred by the war in Ukraine promising growing revenues for companies (SIPRI 2023). This continues the general upward trend sparked by 9/11 after the ostensible post-Cold War peace dividend. This combination of state funding and company revenue and profit is indicative of one of the key features of neoliberalism, namely, that it is hostile to state power only insofar as it does not profit or benefit from it materially or ideologically. In the United States, the world’s largest arms exporter, the arms industry is officially private, in contrast to its nearest competitors, Russia and China, where the industry is state-owned or state-controlled. In Europe there is a mixture of public and private ownership of national arms companies, as well as trans-European companies that are both transnational and part publicly, part privately owned. Growing arms companies such as the UAE’s EDGE and Saudi Arabian Military Industries are wholly owned by the government of Abu Dhabi and the Saudi Public Investment Fund, respectively. Regardless of their formal ownership status, arms companies have a tap on the state budget and are subsidized far more than other industries. Even where the industry is formally private, it is integrated into state structures, with a confluence between state power and corporate interest (e.g., Perlo Freeman 2024). States play a direct role in creating the arms market via active involvement in defense industrial policy and the creation of monopsony and oligopoly conditions in the buying and selling of weapons. The price of arms sales is set politically, and the trading of arms is heavily subsidized. While the arms industry is reliant on state power, it is also being reshaped by financialization and the rise of venture capital (Marshall 2023). The private arms industry is increasingly owned by asset management and investment firms (Rogaly 2023), making it a core case of corporate welfare as taxpayers subsidize military production and profits are appropriated privately. In Europe, some of the largest arms companies are both part-owned by states and by US funds such as Capital Group, Vanguard, and Blackrock (Curic,
Pena, and Rico 2022)—further concentrating an already oligopolistic market. The arms trade as a whole is marked by endemic, often state-sanctioned, corruption (Boliakova and Perlo-Freeman 2018). The arms trade is one of the ways that conflict has “engendered new sources of growth and debt” and is the lynchpin between financialization, militarization, austerity, physical violence, and extractivism, which are all shaped by misogyny and racism (True and Hozic´ 2020, 1201,
1207). Yet the arms sector has not received comparable critical attention to finance, tech, and fossil fuels in the transformation of capitalism, even as it intersects with them and has, if anything, an even firmer grip on the state budget given its proximity to state security and the capacity for organized violence. This confluence of state and corporate power is suggestive for future avenues of research. For example, while feminists have been right to devote attention to the gendering of informalization in the global political economy, this attention has been ambivalent in relation to the arms trade. Arms trading is often given as an example of “‘shadow’ and ‘irregular’ activities where some form of enterprise and payment is expected but regulation is either difficult to enforce or intentionally avoided/evaded” (Peterson 2008, 11). In informalized settings, arms trading is indeed one of these activities. But the vast bulk of arms trading is formal and legal. The “shadow world” of the arms trade (Feinstein, Holden, and Pace 2012) can also be conceptualized as the network of state and corporate actors, their intermediaries, and facilitators, which includes state organs, banks, insurance companies, and shell companies, as well as the rogue individuals engaging in illicit behaviors such as the infamous arms trafficker Victor Bout, dubbed the “merchant of death.” We need to tie these informal arms trading practices conceptually and empirically back to political projects, which usually coalesce around state power. Those political projects are often about land, control of resources, and geopolitics. The role of the arms trade in the war in Yemen, for example, is usually framed in terms of its humanitarian consequences. However, what is less often addressed is the combination of destruction and reconstruction being carried out by Saudi Arabia and the UAE with the support of their Western patrons, which has a “compelling geopolitical logic” of control of maritime routes and the territorial hinterlands of the Arabian Peninsula (Hanieh 2018, also Ziadah 2021). The UAE is also a primary sponsor of the Rapid Support Forces operating in Sudan, who have fought in Libya, Central African Republic and Chad as well as Yemen. The Rapid Support Forces are, in the words of Sudanese scholar Magdi el Gizouli, the epitome of a neoliberal army, “the privatised version of an army in the third world” (Benjamin 2023). They are deeply involved in the illicit trading in commodities such as gold, debt, narcotics, arms, and cars, supported by the UAE, which has a monopoly on Sudanese gold exports. While privatization and illicit trading are significant, state power has not disappeared by any stretch of the imagination.
549...or it demands rupture---which their own literature was built to replace.
Akbar 23 — Amna A. Akbar. June. Charles W. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Professor of Law at Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law. Yale Law Journal, “Non-Reformist Reforms and Struggles over Life, Death, and Democracy,” vol. 132, p. 2497 Clopus
43. These conversations are not linear or teleological. Almost three decades ago, Angela P. Harris called for a “jurisprudence of reconstruction” that would have “some understanding of how [race,] material relations of production and consumption and discourse affect one another.” Harris, supra note 39, at 777-78.
44. E.g., BEATRICE ADLER-BOLTON & ARTIE VIERKANT, HEALTH COMMUNISM, at xiv (2022) (“[E]ven as we fight within the US for policies like Medicare for All, the task at hand is much greater.... It is the total reformation of the political economy of health, and in so doing, the total reformation of the political economy.”).
liberal reformism dominant in the legal academy. In centering productive contradictions between reform and revolution, the heuristic facilitates strategic and tactical questions that “reformist reforms” do not: it requires engaging with systems as they are, allows one to hold in view bold and radical horizons, and facilitates the identification of strategic battles that might serve as a bridge through popular agitation. Rooted in the mid-twentieth-century writings of the French Austrian philosopher André Gorz and recently retooled by the geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, non-reformist reforms are a response to the impasse of liberal reformism and traditional conceptions of armed revolution. 45 They offer another way of responding to the capture of law, politics, and the state. Because non-reformist reforms emerge from theories of change rooted in building popular power, Part III attends to actually existing sites of struggle in the United States: abolition and decriminalization; decolonization and decommodification; and democratization. 46 I turn to major campaigns, including #StopCopCity in Atlanta; organizing to cancel rent by KC Tenants in Kansas City, Missouri, and to cancel student debt by the Debt Collective; and workers organizing for collective power, and the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) joint campaign for the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and the Green New Deal. While others may disagree with my characterizations of these as prevailing winds, I offer the assessment to provoke debate about the sort of reform projects legal scholars may pursue in alignment with the emancipatory organizing of our time. 47 This work of “movement law”—thinking in conversation with emancipatory movements—provides a distinctive way to deploy expertise through more collaborative practices than scholars typically pursue. 48
550Movements are smaller, skip the strike, and organize on platforms that surveil them.
Chenoweth 20 — Erica Chenoweth. July. Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard’s Kennedy School; built the standard dataset on civil resistance. Journal of Democracy, “The Future of Nonviolent Resistance,” vol. 31, no. 3, p. 69-84 Clopus
How Movements Have Changed
First, in terms of participation, civil-resistance campaigns have become somewhat smaller on average than in the past. There have certainly been impressive mass demonstrations in the years since 2010. In 2017 and 2019, millions of people turned out to protest against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. And in Chile, the October 2019 uprising against the government of President Sebastián Piñera reportedly drew a million people nationwide. Yet despite the dramatic images of crowds filling public spaces, recent movements on the whole, at their peaks, have actually been smaller than successful movements of the late 1980s and 1990s. In the 1980s, the average nonviolent campaign involved about 2 percent of the population in the country where it was underway. In the 1990s, the average campaign included a staggering 2.7 percent of the population. But since 2010, the average peak participation has been only 1.3 percent, continuing a decline that began in the 2000s. This is a crucial change. A mass uprising is more likely to succeed when it includes a larger proportion and a more diverse cross-section of a nation’s population.
Second, contemporary movements tend to over-rely on mass demonstrations while neglecting other techniques—such as general strikes and mass civil disobedience—that can more forcefully disrupt a regime’s stability. Because demonstrations and protests are what most people associate with civil resistance, those who seek change are increasingly launching these kinds of actions before they have developed real staying power or a strategy for transformation. Compared to other methods, street protests may be easier to organize or improvise on short notice. In the digital age, such actions can draw participants in large numbers even without any structured organizing coalition to carry out advanced planning and coordinate communication. 21 But mass demonstrations are not always the most effective way of applying pressure to elites, particularly when they are not sustained over time. Other techniques of noncooperation, such as general strikes and stay-at-homes, can be much more disruptive to economic life and thus elicit more immediate concessions. It is often quiet, behind-the-scenes planning and organizing that enable movements to mobilize in force over the long term, and to coordinate and sequence tactics in a way that builds participation, leverage, and power. 22 For the many contemporary movements organized around leaderless resistance, such capacities can be difficult to develop.
Very possibly related to movements’ overemphasis on public demonstrations and marches is a third important factor: Recent movements have increasingly relied on digital organizing, via social media in particular. 23 This creates both strengths and liabilities. On the one hand, digital organizing makes today’s movements very good at assembling participants en masse on short notice. 24 It allows people to communicate their grievances broadly, across audiences of thousands or even millions. It gives organizers outlets for mass communication that are not controlled by mainstream institutions or governments. But the resulting movements are less equipped to channel their numbers into effective organizations that can plan, negotiate, establish shared goals, build on past victories, and sustain their ability to disrupt a regime. 25 Some movements that have emerged from digital organizing have found ways to create long-term organizations. But even then, their initial reliance on the internet has a dark side: Easier communication also means easier surveillance. Those in power can harness digital technologies to monitor, single out, and suppress dissidents. Autocrats have also exploited digital technologies not only to rally their own supporters, but also to spread misinformation, propaganda, and countermessaging.
This leads to the fourth factor that may be contributing to the decreased effectiveness of contemporary civil-resistance movements: Nonviolent movements increasingly embrace or tolerate fringes that become violent. 26 From the 1970s until 2010, the share of nonviolent movements with violent flanks remained between 30 and 35 percent. In 2010–19, it climbed to more than half.
Even when the overwhelming majority of activists remain nonviolent, civil-resistance movements that mix in some armed violence—such as street fighting with police or attacking counterprotesters—tend to be less successful in the end than movements that remain disciplined in rejecting violence. 27 This is because violence tends to increase indiscriminate repression against movement participants and sympathizers while making it harder for the movement to paint participants as innocent victims of this brutality. Entrenched regimes can cast violent skirmishers as threats to public order. In fact, governments often infiltrate movements to provoke them into adopting violence at the margins, thereby giving the regime justification for the use of heavy-handed tactics. What powerholders really fear is resilient, nonviolent, mass rebellion—which exposes as a lie their aura of invincibility while simultaneously removing any excuses for violent crackdowns.
Several clear lessons emerge from comparing contemporary movements to their historical antecedents. First, movements that engage in careful planning, organization, training, and coalition-building prior to mass mobilization are more likely to draw a large and diverse following than movements that take to the streets before hashing out a political program and strategy. Second, movements that grow in size and diversity are more likely to succeed—particularly if they are able to maintain momentum. Third, movements that do not rely solely on digital organizing techniques are more likely to build a sustainable following. And finally, movements that come up with strategies for maintaining unity and discipline under pressure may fare better than movements that leave these matters to chance.
Does Nonviolent Resistance Have a Future?
551Regimes learned---they infiltrate and provoke the movement into violence.
Chenoweth 20 — Erica Chenoweth. July. Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard’s Kennedy School; built the standard dataset on civil resistance. Journal of Democracy, “The Future of Nonviolent Resistance,” vol. 31, no. 3, p. 69-84 Clopus
First, movements may be facing more entrenched regimes—ones that have prevailed against repeated challenges by shoring up support from local allies and key constituencies; imprisoning prominent oppositionists; provoking opponents into using violence; stoking fears of foreign or imperial conspiracies; or obtaining diplomatic cover from powerful international supporters. The regimes in Belarus, Iran, Russia, Syria, Turkey, and Venezuela have proved especially resilient in the face of challenges from below. There is no doubt that activists who work in such settings are confronting grave difficulties. Yet this post hoc explanation for movement failure has its shortcomings. Many regimes—such as Bashir’s government in Sudan—are seen as immutable and resilient up until the moment that a nonviolent resistance movement topples them, after which observers claim that the regimes were weak after all. But over history, many once-stable autocratic regimes—such as Chile under Augusto Pinochet, East Germany under Erich Honecker, Egypt under Hosni Mubarak, and communist Poland—succumbed to nonviolent movements after skillful mobilizations that often marked the culmination of years of effort.
Second, governments may be learning and adapting to nonviolent challenges from below. 16 Several decades ago, authoritarian regimes frequently found themselves surprised by the sudden onset of mass nonviolent uprisings, and governments struggled to find ways to suppress these movements without triggering increased popular sympathy and support for the repressed. Elites may also have underestimated the potential of people power to seriously threaten their rule. Today, given the ample historical record of successful nonviolent campaigns, state actors are likelier to perceive such movements as genuinely threatening. Consequently, autocratic regimes have developed a repertoire of politically savvy approaches to repression. 17 One prominent strategy is to infiltrate movements and divide them from within. In this way, the authorities can provoke a nonviolent movement into using more militant tactics, including violence, before the movement has built a broad enough base to ensure its popular support and staying power.
Third, with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the United States has accelerated its retreat from its global role as a superpower with a prodemocracy agenda. Although many have critiqued this agenda as a form of neo-imperialism shrouded in liberalism, the liberal international order established by the U.S. and other leading Western nations also coincided with an expansion of human-rights regimes that produced governmental and nongovernmental watchdogs who named and shamed human-rights abuses. These trends may have opened space for political dissent in many countries around the world. 18 Daniel Ritter has argued that in the post–Cold War world, authoritarian regimes were particularly susceptible to nonviolent challenges from below because they needed to maintain the semblance of respect for human rights in order to appease their democratic allies and patrons. 19 For instance, Egypt’s dependence on foreign assistance meant that when revolution broke out in 2011, the Egyptian military was highly attuned to scrutiny from liberal democracies such as the United States. Without an activist United States—and, more broadly, without powerful champions of human rights who have real leverage or enforcement capacity vis-à-vis autocratic regimes—we would expect greater brutality against nonviolent dissidents.
552The interregnum is the danger---crisis is where democratic breakdown gets its opening.
Andersen 19 — David Delfs Erbo Andersen and Suthan Krishnarajan. October. Political scientists at Aarhus University. Government and Opposition, “Economic Crisis, Bureaucratic Quality and Democratic Breakdown,” vol. 54, no. 4, p. 715-744 Clopus
The financial crisis that hit most of the world from 2008 has relaunched old debates about democracies’ resilience to economic crises and sparked comparisons with the Great Depression of the 1930s (see e.g. Krugman Reference Krugman 2011 ; Lindvall Reference Lindvall 2012 ). At the same time, it seems evident that countries with lower bureaucratic quality today, such as Greece, Brazil and Mali, have been and are suffering much worse consequences politically from the Great Recession than neighbouring countries with higher levels of bureaucratic quality. Yet the general notion that public administrations are important for democratic stability during times of economic crisis has still not been explored in extensive global analyses.
Existing research consistently shows a connection between economic crises and democratic breakdown. An economic crisis, all else equal, increases the risk of democratic breakdown (see e.g. Bernhard et al. Reference Bernhard, Nordstrom and Reenock 2001 , Reference Bernhard, Reenock and Nordstrom 2003 ; Gasiorowski Reference Gasiorowski 1995 ; Møller et al. Reference Møller, Schmotz and Skaaning 2015 ; Przeworski and Limongi Reference Przeworski and Limongi 1997 : 167–9; Svolik Reference Svolik 2008 ). However, it is also evident that some democracies survive the strains associated with economic crises whereas other democracies break down under similar or even less severe circumstances (Haggard and Kaufman Reference Haggard and Kaufman 1997 : 277; Przeworski et al. Reference Przeworski, Alvarez, Cheibub and Limongi 2000 : 116–17). Some democracies are more resilient to crises than others. Why should this be?
In attempting to solve this puzzle, few studies have engaged in cross-national empirical analyses. Among the existing analyses, one structural notion has been that high levels of economic development protect democracies that are undergoing economic crises (Przeworski and Limongi Reference Przeworski and Limongi 1997 : 167–9). However, it is far from always the wealthiest democracies that survive crises (Ertman Reference Ertman 1998 ). Another main strand of research devotes attention to institutional factors such as party system characteristics and the configuration of legislative and executive power (parliamentarism or presidentialism) (see e.g. Bernhard et al. Reference Bernhard, Nordstrom and Reenock 2001 ; Svolik Reference Svolik 2008 : 161). Footnote
A third approach focuses on particular political strategies and policy reforms given different class configurations (see e.g. Brambor and Lindvall Reference Brambor and Lindvall 2014 ; Capoccia Reference Capoccia 2005 ; Gourevitch Reference Gourevitch 1986 ; Luebbert Reference Luebbert 1987 ).
553States protect exporters because restriction costs the industry---that concedes our turn.
Klomp 24 — Jeroen Klomp. January 3. Economist at the Netherlands Defence Academy studying the effects of arms embargoes. Journal of Policy Modeling, “Targeting profits: The economic impact of arms embargoes on defense companies,” https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpolmod.2024.01.012 Clopus
runs from the fact that arms embargoes hit a regime where it hurts, without resorting to military force or necessarily harming the general population (Fruchart et al., 2007; Baldwin, 1997; Drezner, 1999). Arms embargoes are commonly used in cases of war, human rights violations, support for terrorism, or nuclear weapons development. In such cases, these coercive measures are meant to punish the target, send a message about acceptable behaviour to other actual or potential offenders, and lessen the target’s repressive and warlike ability (Giumelli, 2011). Despite their popularity as a foreign policy tool, arms embargoes have been widely criticized in academic and policy circles as being ineffective. Embargo busting practices by sending states coupled with a lack of international enforcement are believed to fundamentally undermine embargo success (Bondi, 2002; Boucher & Holt, 2009; Kaempfer & Lowenberg, 2007; Staibano, 2005; Bondi, 2002; Durch, 2000; Cortright & Lopez, 2001; Moore, 2010; Tierney, 2005; Brzoska, 2008; Brzoska & Lopez, 2009).
1 States are often reluctant to impose serious limitations on their arms transfers as ending an existing arms export relationship might give domestic firms a competitive disadvantage. The consequences of this disadvantage do not stop at the lost market share for exports, but implementing and administering complex strategic trade controls will also impose high financial costs on the industry due to large administrative burdens (Cupitt et al., 2001; Beck & Gahlaut, 2003; Porteous & Verbeke, 1990; Verbeke & Porteous, 1990; Seyoum, 2017, Parkhe, 1992). Meanwhile, the large number of international suppliers creates a weak link phenomenon in that the state that does the least to comply with an embargo determines its success. In this common pool situation, one state may be capable of reaping substantial economic benefits by sending arms to embargoed states, benefits that will easily exceed the cost the state would pay from the consequences of embargo failures (Russett & Sullivan, 1971). Consequently, in more competitive arms markets, governments more easily allow to violate the boycott and try to promote their own arms industries as matters of national economic necessity and industrial support. Thus, governments have to weigh the economic interest and political importance of the domestic defense industry against the costs of violating an embargo (Sandler, 2000). These costs go beyond the monetary fine imposed by the enforcing authorities, but also involve the negative effects on international security, the possible loss of trade privileges, and the reputational damage to firms and states. Therefore, senders implement only trade measures that are the most beneficial and least costly to them. However, it is likely that sanctions that are not costly to a sender—those that would not jeopardize a valuable arms trade relationship, for example—may often not be costly to a target, either. One major shortcoming of the existing literature is that most studies on the effectiveness of arms embargoes are primarily focused on the country level—explaining whether arms embargoes are able to stop the arms transfers between the embargo-supporting state and the target state (See, for instance, Peksen, 2019; Martínez-Zarzoso & Johannsen, 2017; Erickson, 2013). However, based on the more recent business and economics literature, it is highly questionable whether the economic consequences of arms embargoes are shared equally among the broad range of defense-related firms competing on the international market or within a country (Smith and Dunne, 2018). These economic consequences will also shape the incentive of companies to
1 For instance, Fruchart et al. (2007) conclude, based on extensive and detailed case research, that nearly every single UN arms embargo has been systemically violated. Likewise, the widely used Peterson Institute for International Economics sanctions database shows that military sanctions fail to achieve their policy goals in about two out of three cases (Hufbauer et al., 2009). More recent research by the Targeted Sanctions Consortium on United Nations sanctions suggests an even lower rate of success.
violate or comply with an embargo. Therefore, the contribution of this article is to be one of the first to shift the attention away from the arms embargo impact on the country-level and instead focus on a company-specific effect. In particular, this study tries to answer the question of what impact arms embargoes have on the economic performance of defense companies. For the purpose of this research, I use a panel model including data from more than 200 major defense companies from 25 countries. After testing for the sensitivity of the results, my main findings indicate that arms embargoes lead to a loss in sales revenues and a drop in the net profits of defense companies in countries with strong political institutions needed to effectively monitor and enforce an embargo. In contrast, arms embargoes have almost any effect on the business performance of firms located in countries with a weak rule of law or suffer from corruption. One explanation is that companies in these particular countries have more opportunities to avoid or bypass an arms embargo. Additionally, it turns out that the ability of a firm to effectively mitigate the negative consequences of an embargo is also related to firm-specific particularities, such as the degree of product diversification of a company. The remainder of the article is structured as follows. Section 2 provides the theoretical background underlying the relationship between the economic performance of defense companies and arms embargoes. Section 3 describes the data used, while section 4 discusses the empirical method applied. Section 5 shows my empirical results on the influence of arms embargoes on the economic performance of major international defense companies, while the final section offers the conclusions.
2. Theoretical background
2.1. Theoretical model The primary purpose of arms embargoes is to prohibit the export of military-strategic items such as arms (including major conventional arms, weapons of mass destruction), (dual-use) technology, data, services (maintenance, technical advice, assistance, and training), and knowledge that can readily be used for military purposes to listed person, entities (e.g., states, companies, organizations) or regions. In the last decade, the U.S., EU, and the UN have been the main senders of arms embargoes. Embargoes sent by the U.S. are unilateral foreign policy measures, whereas military sanctions imposed by the EU and UN have a multilateral character. Multilateral sanctions are not typically subject to enforcement by the institutions that impose them and depend mainly on the obligation of individual senders to translate them into national legislation and practice, while uni lateral sanctions (U.S.) rely primarily on the sender’s willingness to implement them. Better enforcement, from this perspective, would lead to better compliance and, therefore, more effective embargoes. To date, arms embargoes have been imposed for mainly four reasons: (i) to signal disapproval of behaviour by a certain actor, (ii) to maintain neutrality in an ongoing conflict, (iii) to limit the ability of an actor to inflict violence on others or (iv) to weaken country’s military cap abilities before a foreign intervention (Giumelli, 2011). The impact of arms embargoes on the economic performance of a defense firm can best be illustrated using the following simple theoretical framework. The model starts by considering a re presentative profit-maximizing firm. Since military-strategic goods are highly differentiated products, companies operate under monopolistic competition with some considerable market power.
554Washington funds the purchase and signs the licence---withdraw either and the sale ends.
Stavrianakis 25 — Anna Stavrianakis. April. Professor of International Relations at Sussex; researches the arms trade, arms transfer control and the war in Yemen. Global Studies Quarterly, “The Arms Trade and the Transformation of Global Order: A Revitalized Research Agenda,” vol. 5, no. 2, ksaf033 Clopus
Another key feature of the political economy of the global arms trade is the extent of US dominance. The United States accounts for over a third of global military spending and over 40 percent of global arms transfers, delivering weapons to over 100 states (SIPRI 2024b). This is an order of magnitude more than its nearest competitors, Russia and China. The historical experience of the United States in hot wars in the global South, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, illustrates
that there is no necessary congruence between military dominance and strategic victory (Barkawi and Laffey 2006; Chamberlin 2018), and the contemporary US may be experiencing relative political and strategic decline; nonetheless, its material military dominance remains. A key task for critical scholarship is to think internationally about the significance of the arms trade and to decenter the United States while acknowledging this material dominance. This can be done in two ways: internationalizing our understanding of US and Western power; and looking at other major actors in the arms trade in the context of US dominance of global capitalism. The US state is the world’s largest military spender, and arms sales require the authorization of the US government; yet the US arms industry is also significantly internationalized. For example, Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest arms company, is headquartered in the United States but has twenty-eight foreign entities situated in nineteen countries across four regions of the world. While US companies tend to have a strong presence in Europe, Lockheed Martin is an outlier with a third of its foreign entities located in the Middle East (SIPRI 2020, 4–5). More generally, the arms industry is internationalizing unevenly, with practices of subcontracting, joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, and technology transfer agreements most extensive in Western Europe and the United States. The European industry is the most heavily internationalized, due to its consolidation since the late 1990s as part of an effort to compete with US industry after the end of the Cold War. US- headquartered firms have a strong presence in Europe and also in Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Israel, and Taiwan (SIPRI 2023), cementing the Anglosphere and non-NATO elements of the postwar US empire. This internationalization is changing shape as Middle Eastern arms companies such as the UAE’s EDGE and Saudi Arabian Military Industries serve as local partners for foreign, especially US, firms seeking government contracts (Marshall 2023). Mason describes an “emerging Arab military ecosystem” marked by “trickle-down hardware, ideologically defined military engagement, and mobilization around a unified vision of security and control” (Mason 2024, 9). Meanwhile, the arms industry is much less internationalized in Russia and China due to state ownership and the strong focus on the domestic development of weapons, combined with Western sanctions on Russia and wariness of China. While some countries in South America, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa host foreign entities of the world’s largest arms companies, internationalization is much less pronounced there (SIPRI 2020). The unevenness of internationalization is evident in the current wars in Ukraine and Gaza. While Western arms companies are struggling to keep up with the demand for weapons for Ukraine due to supply chain problems, Russia has massively increased its military spending and domestic military production to support its invasion, while remaining dependent on foreign-made microelectronic components (Byrne et al. 2022). Compared to Western industry, many Asian and Middle Eastern companies have more flexible capacity that can be scaled up more quickly, supported by states with self-reliance goals. This means they have stronger networks of local suppliers that mitigate the challenges to supply chains faced by Western companies (SIPRI 2023). Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza would be impossible without US support and therefore cannot be considered a solely national endeavor. Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US military assistance since World War II and US Foreign Military Financing (FMF) accounts for around 16 percent of Israel’s annual defense budget (Yousif and Stohl 2023).
FMF provides US taxpayer-funded grants to foreign governments to purchase US arms and services. Growing activist interest in arms supplies to Israel in response to its assault on Gaza and the call for an embargo by Palestinian trade unions is taking up the challenge of empirically understanding where weapons are physically made and by whom (Workers in Palestine 2024). Hamas, meanwhile, receives weapons from Iran, uses a variety of Soviet-era weapon designs copied by China and Iran, and makes some weapons within Gaza (Guay 2024). Israel and Hamas both participate in transnational arms networks with different political economies in which the scale of resources and technological sophistication, and the effects of armed violence, are vastly asymmetrical. Uneven internationalization has significant politico-economic and security stakes. Who makes the profits and owns the intellectual property in joint ventures between Saudi or Emirati and US-based companies, for example? Which state’s export controls apply to the transfer of weapons from such joint ventures? These seemingly technical questions have analytical and political significance because of the practice of using overseas subsidiaries to evade controls. For example, South African arms company Rheinmetall Denel Munition has exported weapons to Saudi Arabia for use in the war in Yemen when the home government (Germany) of its majority shareholder (Rheinmetall) had imposed restrictions on selling directly to Saudi Arabia (Open Secrets 2021). Who should be held accountable for arms exports that contribute to violations of international law in such a case? If IR is interested in questions of violence, power, and order, then these empirical questions matter. Such questions also indicate the challenge for IR of producing nonmethodologically nationalist data. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)—the most respected and reliable source of arms trade data—produces statistical data about arms transfers and arms production. This data is organized on the basis of nation states, with the top 100 companies listed by national headquarters, although SIPRI has also led the way in researching the internationalization of the industry (SIPRI 2020), which is a good empirical starting point for such a task.
555Junior partners extract the weapons---leverage runs the other way.
Spindel 23 — Jennifer Spindel. February 28. Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of New Hampshire; researches international signalling and alliance behaviour. European Journal of International Security, “Arms for influence? The limits of Great Power leverage,” vol. 8, no. 3, p. 395-412 Clopus
Loyalty coercion is form of alliance management that leverages major powers’ concern about their reputation as a good ally. Loyalty coercion occurs when a junior partner creates a narrative that it is being abandoned or mistreated by its major power partner. Junior partners use loyalty coercion to manage up, and to extract additional resources beyond what the major power would otherwise like to provide. It is a way for junior partners to say to the major power: changing your relationship with us will have negative side effects for the faith other partners place in their alliance with you. To minimise, or in some cases even forestall, these claims, the major power will provide additional resources to the junior partner. Providing resources, especially in the form of conventional arms transfers, is one way to create alternate facts on the ground to push back against claims of mistreatment.
All junior partners can attempt to use loyalty coercion; the conditions that make loyalty coercion more likely to succeed are addressed at the end of this section. Loyalty coercion attempts can happen when two conditions are met: (1) the major power believes its commitments are interconnected; and (2) there is a relevant audience to receive and react to the junior partner’s claims. I explain each of these in turn.
First, loyalty coercion requires that the major power care about its reputation for being a good ally. There has been a vibrant debate in the literature about whether or not states have reputations and if those reputations matter. Footnote 22 Reputation supporters, and policymakers, believe that commitments are interconnected and that what a state does with respect to one ally will affect their relations with other allies. Footnote 23 States want to know that their alliance partners are reliable and will uphold their commitments and not work against their allies. This is the logic behind the domino theory: the US had to intervene in Vietnam to prove it would defend Bonn. Footnote 24 As Glenn Snyder explained, states have an interest in ‘fostering a certain image of oneself in the mind of the ally’. Footnote 25 Even if scholars continue to debate the existence of reputation, policymakers frequently make reference to their alliance reputation and express concern that interactions with one ally will affect interactions with other allies. In the words of President Dwight Eisenhower, ‘You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.’ Footnote 26 The perceived interconnectedness believed by policymakers means we must treat it seriously. Footnote 27
Because loyalty coercion is exercised rhetorically, there must be a relevant audience to receive the junior partner’s claims. Without a relevant audience, the major power can ignore any protestations about mistreatment with little worry about consequences. Footnote 28 This means that the specific manifestations of loyalty coercion will vary based on the audience. For example, if the junior partner is targeting the major partner’s other allies, its loyalty coercion will emphasise the fears of abandonment and/or mistreatment. The goal is to stoke fears, by saying that what is happening to this junior partner could happen to the other allies. There will be variation here, too, depending on how the junior partner is ranked within the major power’s alliance hierarchy. A peripheral ally is unlikely to be able to make claims that resonate with core allies. Footnote 29 Allies that see themselves as close to and crucial in the major power’s partners will have less concern about the treatment of allies that it sees as distant and sharing fewer interests. For example, Israel in the 1960s wanted to be seen as a core US ally, and tried to make claims that would resonate with the European allies. Israeli leaders frequently referenced their ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a direct reference to the US-UK special relationship. Footnote 30 The US noted that Israel was trying to project ‘the image of a de facto alliance’ with the United States by noting the similarities between it and the European allies. Footnote 31 However, the European allies did not at all see their fate represented in the US-Israel relationship, and in fact saw Israel as their own junior partner that they could sell arms to. Footnote 32
A core ally, on the other hand, can make claims that will strike fear in both core and peripheral allies. After all, if the major power is mistreating its core allies, what hope is there for those on the periphery? These concerns were evident in US discussions about reducing security assistance to West Germany in the 1960s. The US was concerned that West Germany would claim abandonment, and that the other European allies would have a loss of confidence in the future, and would feel ‘they cannot rely on the Americans for their defense for the long range’. Footnote 33 Claims of mistreatment from West Germany were much more worrying, coming as they would be from a core ally, than claims of mistreatment from Israel.
If the junior partner does not believe its claims will resonate with other allies, it might make rhetorical pleas that resonate with adversaries. The overarching message would be to say that junior partner is being mistreated or ignored, and is open to realignment. The junior partner would hope that the possibility of realignment would be a blow to the major power, and would cause the major power to provide it with additional resources. Jordan played to these concerns in the mid-1960s. King Hussein felt like he was second fiddle to Israel, and often raised the prospect of accepting Soviet weapons in his conversations with US officials. The US felt that Jordan was ‘genuinely pro-West’, but that arming Jordan would complicate the relationship with Israel. Footnote 34 But the US was so concerned about losing Jordan to the Soviet sphere, that it felt it had to arm Jordan or else it would signal to the Soviet Union that Jordan could be turned. Footnote 35 The US was concerned that not arming Jordan would ‘have a significant effect on the credibility of our positions’. Footnote 36 In other words, loyalty coercion directed towards adversaries is a messier and longer chain of events, but can still generate concerns within the major power about how it is perceived by allies and adversaries.
While all states can make loyalty coercion attempts, not all states will be successful in extracting additional resources from the major power. Whether or not loyalty coercion is successful depends on the past behaviour of the junior partner. Junior partners with a track record of cooperation and good alliance behaviour to point to are more likely to be successful than junior partners that have misbehaved. An ally can hardly claim mistreatment if it has, itself, worked against its major partner or repeated proved uncooperative. Junior partners that are very loyal will have a greater likelihood of success than allies that have done the bare minimum in the alliance. What does good behaviour look like in the context of an alliance? At a bare minimum, allies do not work against the stated wishes of their partners. This can manifest in different ways, and could mean voting similarly in international organisations, deciding not to pursue a conflict, or both speaking out against the actions of a third state. At the bare minimum, allies should consult one another to avoid surprises, especially on issues of vital interest to their ally. Similar to Snyder’s alliance halo, there is an obligation to, at the very least, avoid damaging the interests of the ally. Footnote 37 At higher levels of good behaviour, we will see more coordinated policy actions and statements. This could mean backing the actions of your ally, even if you don’t have a strong of an interest in the issue. It might also mean joining in a military coalition, or offering troops or other materiel to the ally’s war effort. States that undertake these higher levels of alliance cooperation will have a greater likelihood of loyalty coercion success, because they can point to their strong track record of cooperation, and use it to bolster their rhetorical claims of mistreatment.
Loyalty coercion can be used on its own, or in combination with other coercive attempts. For example, states that are of geostrategic interest to the major power can combine loyalty coercion with reminders of their material or instrumental value. Consider the US relationship with Saudi Arabia. US interests in Saudi Arabia have constrained its response to the Saudi-led war in Yemen, even after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy in Turkey in 2018. Footnote 38 It is tempting to see Saudi interest in purchasing S-400 missile defence systems from Russia as pure alignment coercion: Saudi Arabia threatens to turn to Russia to stoke fears within the US and extract greater resources in turn. But Saudi Arabia used loyalty coercion alongside the more instrumental geostrategic coercion. A Saudi official explained that negotiations with Russia were due to mistreatment by the US, including the Biden administration’s ‘defiance of Saudi Arabia’ and ‘display of disinterest in the region’s concerns’. Footnote 39 Important junior partners including Qatar and India expressed interest in receiving support from Russia after they saw Saudi Arabia enter negotiations with Russia. Even when states can point to their significant strategic value, they can find greater leverage by rhetorically leaning-in to loyalty coercion.
556Soviet arms makers had no profit motive and armed the world anyway.
Anicetti 25 — Jonata Anicetti, Shang-Su Wu, and Ron Matthews. July 30. Postdoctoral fellow at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Assistant professor in the Homeland Security Program at Rabdan Academy. Professor of defence economics. European Journal of International Security, “Russian counter-trade as a mechanism for promoting arms sales and diplomatic influence,” vol. 11, no. 3, p. 419-437 Clopus
Soviet post–Second World War defence counter-trade
The Soviet legacy is an indispensable foundation of Russia’s military counter-trade. The supply of arms was a key tool of foreign policy for Moscow during the Cold War. Ideologically, Leninism preferred violent revolution for expanding the boundaries of the Communist world – thus, weapons were essential. 31 Post-revolution, the ‘turned’ states would likely demand further arms for internal security, against either civil war or armed resistance, and against external threats by capitalist powers. Soviet emphasis on military capability was forged by the devastating Second World War invasion by National Socialist Germany, requiring the Soviet Union to strengthen its defence as well as that of fellow Communist states. To enhance these countries’ survival against invasion, an autarkic economic system was established with Soviet assistance, and, within this system, scarce resources were prioritised for the development of indigenous defence industries. 32
The history of external invasions led to a continuous build-up of the Soviet Union’s armed forces, as well as those of friendly neighbours, strengthening strategic depth. The Soviet Union’s huge operational environment highlighted the strategic importance of arms production volume, as quantity was critical in overcoming Germany’s superior technologies. During the Cold War, weapons were more effective, compared to the politically unattractive commercial products, in strengthening relations with overseas allies and partners. 33 Subsequently, logistical needs, upgrades, and replacement, along with related operational doctrines, considerably projected and preserved Moscow’s geopolitical influence. Except for arms donations, all other forms of military hardware transfer and training, whether via loans or grants, provided financial leverage for exerting Soviet influence over beneficiary countries. 34
To manage the large number of Soviet arms transferred, counter-trade rather than conventional sales was a common Soviet practice, primarily for political purposes. Internally, the Soviet military industries were not driven by profit but rather by the demand for national security under the country’s planned economy system. 35 Therefore, manufacturers and planning authorities had little motive to secure commercial revenue. In the event, arms deals generated hard currency, but this was more related to national interest, such as foreign exchange preservation, than for generating direct income. Externally, the range of foreign customers for Soviet arms was under strict political guidance and control. Most customers, therefore, were either Communist or developing countries,
27 Blank and Kim, ‘Arms sales and Russia’s future as an Asian power’ 28 Ibid Published online by Cambridge University Press 29 Ibid. 30 Bechev, Popescu, and Secrieru, Russia Rising, p. 51. 31 Paul Kelly, Conflict, War and Revolution (London: LSE Press, 2022), pp. 337–40. Christopher Mark Davis, ‘The exceptional Soviet case: Defense in an autarkic system’, Daedalus, 120:4 (1991), pp. 113–34 (pp. 114–15). Ibid., p. 115. Dzvinka Kachur, Russia’s Resurgent Interest in Africa: The Cases of Zambia and Tanzania (Johannesburg: South African Institute of International Affairs, 2021), pp.15–18 Davis, ‘The exceptional Soviet case’, p. 114.
and both had little recourse to hard currency to service such deals, making counter-trade the main solution. 36 Middle East countries were the principal early overseas customers possessing sufficient affordability to procure Soviet arms, 37 but they too had to rely on counter-trade for payment rather than hard currency. Soviet defence-related counter-trade can be categorised into four flows, comprising European members of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), China, India, and the rest. Under the CMEA, arms transfers were structured according to member states’ nuanced socialist economic systems. For non-CMEA countries, bilateral clearing arrangements were usually applicable. For all other recipients of Soviet arms, delivery was conducted on a more direct basis, including against hard currency payments, delivery of commodities, and non-economic forms of payment, ranging from political to strategic assistance, with the latter including naval basing rights and shore support. 38 The European CMEA members and the Soviet Union constituted a complex ‘international division of labour’ mosaic rather than a conventional set of arms deal practices. Due to the tense strategic environment during the initial stages of the Cold War, especially the Korean War, Moscow established a comprehensive collective autarkic system among Warsaw Pact member states. This regional production and trading network lasted about four decades, during which time several generations of arms were produced. 39
Rather than usual counter-trade, the exchange pattern reflected several elements, including war preparations, a regional industrial division of labour, multilateral transfers, and conventional export. War-preparation measures amplified the quantity of forces, particularly weapons, by expanding defence industries in most European CMEA member states, as well as standardising their military logistics. The Soviet Union provided credits to the European beneficiary states to assist their recovery from Second World War infrastructural damage. In the process, local defence-related industries were rebuilt to service the growth of national armed forces. 40 The Communist model allowed payments through an interstate barter system. 41 Supply was based on individual conditions and accommodated industrial division of labour/production among and within certain European CMEA states. Czechoslovakia and Poland, for example, possessed superior industrial foundations and were thus allowed to produce broader ranges of weapon systems based on indigenous systems design, such as L-39 jet trainers, which achieved sales across the Communist bloc. Other Warsaw Pact member states produced fewer types of arms, and these local models were mostly for domestic purposes. This remarkable defence industrial division of labour continued throughout and even beyond the Cold War. 42
557Their term doesn’t pick out anything---no state in memory earns the label.
Krebs 24 — Ronald R. Krebs and Robert Ralston. September 27. Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in the Liberal Arts and political scientist at the University of Minnesota. Political scientist at the University of Birmingham. Constitutional Political Economy, “The national security state and the uses of militarism,” https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-024-09448-x Clopus
standpoint, some imperialist expansion is profitable and therefore readily explained, but 10 “militaristic” imperialism is cost-inefficient and even “parasitic.” There is a robust debate on why militarism, in this sense, takes hold. For some, militarism derives from flawed institutions, such as the uniformed military’s domination over policymaking. The military mind is inclined to war, they claim, whether because of personal 11 ambition, collective interests, or professional socialization. Others imply that certain political institutions—personalized autocracies or tyrannies or presidential democracies—give leaders 12 political incentives to exaggerate threats and invoke military solutions. Others propose that militarism is a product of strategic habit. Warranted investments in military means and successes on the battlefield become entrenched in institutions, decision-making processes, and discourse. They are then applied unreflectively, in inappropriate circumstances, and they are 13 immune to demonstrated ineffectiveness. Regardless of militarism’s origins, all versions of militarism #2 rest on the presumption that informed observers would agree which uses of military force are warranted and which uses of military force are excessive. Yet there are no simple, accepted answers as to when should force be used, how much force should be used, or what uses of force are unwise or counterproductive. There is no consensus stance drawing a sharp line between legitimate,
10 Hossein-zadeh 2006. See, relatedly, Vagts’ classic distinction between militarism and “the military way,” which he defined as “a primary concentration of men and materials on winning specific objectives of power with the utmost efficiency”: see Vagts 1959, 13. 11 Berghahn 1981, chap. 3. However, writing in early Cold War America, Samuel Huntington saw “the military mind” as fundamentally cautious and conservative. Military officers, he argued, were, as a professional class, by selection and socialization, reluctant to use their imposing tools. His intellectual sparring partner Morris Janowitz similarly concluded that officers were not, by nature or professional inclination, militarists, but rather could be socialized to democratic norms. See Huntington 1957; Janowitz 1960, as well as Betts 1977. 12 Lowi 1985; Kaufmann 2004; Weeks 2014. Porter 2018; Pearlman and Atzili 2018. More generally, on habit, see Hopf 2010; and on dominant narratives, as a background common sense, see Krebs 2015.
defensible uses of force and their indefensible, militaristic cousins. Moreover, given the “fog of war”—the Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s term for warfare’s inherent complexity and unpredictability¹⁴—even uses of force that seem useful in prospect may turn out to be losing propositions. Military force is always a gamble, and even smart wagers—those that pay off most of the time—can come up losers. In a nutshell, militarism #2 does not allow us to construct claims about the world that might be proved wrong. It is a way of criticizing uses of force that one finds objectionable. Moreover, defined this way, it is not clear that any country in recent memory, even Russia, perhaps even the United States, deserves the label “militaristic.” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 turned out to be a bloody slog, but it was expected to be a romp—not just by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s yes-men, but by military analysts around the globe and by the Ukrainians too. In the preceding 15 years, Russia opportunistically extended its influence in the Caucasus and in Syria, but it did not clearly behave militaristically. After all, it had long refrained from an all-out invasion of Ukraine, preferring over the preceding decade to try to undermine Ukraine’s pro-Western tilt from within and to sponsor semi-covert military operations. As for the United States, it has dispatched soldiers all over the globe since the end of the Cold War and especially since 9/11, it has thrown its soldiers into futile campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, it has deployed drones to hunt militants and extremists in numerous countries, and it has often mistaken tactical victories for strategic triumphs. But the United States has declined to pursue far more military interventions than it has undertaken during and since the end of the Cold War. Even when US leaders have deployed force, they often have done so only after long resisting its
Beyerchen 1992.
siren call. In Libya, the United States was at best a reluctant militarist, “leading from behind,” and in Syria, President Barack Obama, after much delay, ordered only half-hearted half measures. If even the United States and Russia are not obviously militarists, by this definition, then militarism #2 is of little value. Militarism, we contend, nevertheless deserves a place in our social scientific lexicon. But that requires a conceptual shift—away from a problematic orientation toward the use of armed force (per Militarism #1 and #2) to a particular and arguably problematic orientation toward the armed forces and soldiers. Militarism #3 is a set of cultural practices that promotes an idealized image of the armed forces and its representatives. In this sense, it has been woven unevenly into the rhythms, practices, and symbols of everyday life across the world. Militarism #3 involves worshipping and romanticizing a nation’s soldiers—in the colloquial sense, including sailors, marines, aviators, and all uniformed service-people—placing them at the center of the nation’s civil religion and its associated rites and rituals. It is present in the speeches of politicians that extol soldiers’ virtues, that hail soldiers not as professionals potentially doing a dangerous job but as paragons of patriotism, avatars of self-sacrifice, embodiments of heroism, and exemplars of good citizenship. It overlooks the reality, and implicitly denies, that soldiers in most countries across the West are today largely recruited via market mechanisms, that militaries must avidly compete with civilian employers for labor, and that militaries are often losing that battle and struggling to fill the ranks. Unlike militarism #1, militarism #3 has not manifested in the same ways or to the same degree everywhere and at all times. After all, soldiers have not always and everywhere been treated as objects of universal admiration. Rather than the best and the brightest, they have
558Critique with no praxeological dimension is hollow---their field says so.
Ralph 25 — Jason Ralph. September 1. Professor of International Relations at the University of Leeds, author of On Global Learning. Review of International Studies, “American Pragmatism, the Frankfurt School, and the future of Critical International Relations Theory,” vol. 52, no. 2, p. 286-305 Clopus
That leads to my fifth point, which I develop in this section. The real problem for CIRT is not its supposed neglect of system analysis in favour of normative theory, or its favouring of second-generation Frankfurt School analysis over its first generation. The problem is that the praxeological dimension has lacked, as Horkheimer would put it, ‘the pragmatic character of traditional theory’. CIRT has long been accused of lacking practical policy relevance, Footnote 111 and now it (and its norm studies cousin) seem ‘hollow’ as result. Footnote 112 To address that, I think CIRT should ‘reorient towards practice’ Footnote 113 by following the lead of the practice turn in ‘new constructivist’ IR. Footnote 114 More specifically, it can focus on ‘communities of practice’, i.e. those ‘spatial-organization platforms where practitioners interact, learn and end up creating and diffusing practices and promoting their adoption by future practitioners’. Footnote 115 This would be a pragmatic – and Pragmatist – adjustment to the previous focus on the normative and sociological process of norm building. It would give those interested in praxeology an empirical focus for both negative and (as Conway might say) ‘reformist’ critique. Footnote 116
An immediate problem with this suggestion is that IR practice theory can be read as ‘traditional theory’ in the way Horkheimer used that phrase. On the one hand, its grounded focus on the everyday micro-practices of practitioners is useful in addressing the concern that the ‘grand narratives’ of contemporary CIRT are too far removed from praxeology. Indeed, some see the practice turn in IR as part of a wider Pragmatist arc for these reasons. Footnote 117 On the other hand, practice theory is potentially at odds with Critical Theory’s emancipatory project if it loses ‘sight of the nature of social domination’. Footnote 118 This is especially the case if practice theory focuses only on the struggles among practitioners to prove their ‘competence’ in performing practices, and if practice is defined merely as ‘patterned actions that are embedded in particular organized contexts'. Footnote 119 This approach potentially produces knowledge of a system, and how practitioners define and realise its purpose, but it does not – to repeat Horkheimer – comment on ‘whether the purposes as such are reasonable.’ Footnote 120 Indeed, Horkheimer seemingly spoke directly to this when he expressed concern about the failure to challenge the social value of technical knowledge. It ‘is one of the reasons why men who in particular scientific areas or in other professional activity are able to do extremely competent work, can show themselves quite limited and incompetent, despite good will, when it comes to questions concerning society as a whole’. Footnote 121
Why then would the focus and methods of practice theory help CIRT? It can, I suggest, make that contribution if the (lower-case) pragmatic move to focus on practice is combined with the kind of (upper-case) Pragmatist critique I described above. Indeed, I have argued along these lines in previous work with Jess Gifkins. We looked at practice theory accounts of diplomacy at the United Nations Security Council, including its approach to cosmopolitan harm conventions like the Responsibility to Protect. While we do not directly speak to CIRT, the implication is clear. The purpose of practice theory should be to critique the competence claims of systemic practitioners (e.g. Security Council diplomats) according to the norms produced by the global ‘lifeworld’. Footnote 122 I more recently expanded on this approach developing two normative tests to ‘blow apart’ the complacency of communities of practice. The first of these is ‘inclusive reflexivity’, which assesses the openness of communities of practice to Deweyan ‘publics’, i.e. those affected by a practice but otherwise excluded from the knowledge processes that notionally legitimises them. Whereas this acts as a form of negative critique (or what Visoka might term ‘critique as alternative’), the second test – ‘deliberative practical judgement’ – reflects the Pragmatist commitment to problem-solving (or ‘critique with alternative’). Footnote 123 The emphasis on practical consequences means the Pragmatist will prudently take technical knowledge into account as it searches for that better alternative.
Together, these tests can, I suggest, inform the praxeological dimension of CIRT by addressing pressing challenges like climate change, for instance. Whether the purpose of theory is ‘emancipation’ of the human subject (as in Critical Theory), or ‘amelioration’ of the lived experience (as in Pragmatism), climate change presents a two-part challenge. The first is that the technical reason of a capitalist system, which values the exploitation of the environment and legitimises carbon-emitting practices for economic growth, contradicts the objective reason of climatologists who alert us to the catastrophic consequences of business-as-usual. The second challenge is that the technical reason of the climate system and the climatologists could conceivably colonise the lifeworld in ways that also threaten the human subject and harm the lived experience. In focusing on the communities of global practice that have emerged around the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – in particular the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Conference of Parties (COP) – I have situated Pragmatist analysis between these extremes.
559Scenario work builds the practical knowledge a decision needs---there is no view from outside.
Stein 24 — Janice Gross Stein. December 4. Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management and Founding Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. European Journal of International Security, “Radical uncertainty and pragmatism: Threat perception and response,” vol. 10, no. 3, p. 419-435 Clopus
Storytelling about what works in the world, as I noted earlier, is an important part of pragmatist thinking and, more importantly, how we in fact think about a world only partly of our making. Stories do more than build in context, contingency, and social processes and conventions. They help us to think about the future by imagining different worlds. Whether they are called stories, narratives, or scenarios matters less than the individual and collective processes of imagining possible futures, the contexts and the contingencies that could combine to create these futures, and the pathways that would take us to them. Footnote 59 Imagining the pathways to these possibilities helps to shape understanding of what practical knowledge we need to build, how that knowledge might meet each of these worlds, the signposts to watch for along the pathways, and where and when to begin a process of experimentation, probing, and learning.
Living in a world of uncertainty
A central theme of this article is the importance of acknowledging that, at times, we live in a world of uncertainty. Acknowledging uncertainty is hard to do. It pushes against powerful psychological impulses. Yet only by acknowledging uncertainty, rather than hiding it by denying it or treating it as risk, or by hiding from it through avoidance, can leaders open the door to experimentation and learning and adaptation.
In a world of radical uncertainty, pragmatists as well as evolutionary biologists and psychologists can only know, after the fact, what has worked in the world. There are no easy or obvious solutions to that wicked problem. Leaders can only guard against false certainties from their advisers and overconfidence in themselves. They can do their best to remain open to new information, challenge assumptions and advice, ask what they have not heard, actively create an environment that supports dissent, consult people who are not usually in the room who might think about the problem differently, and engage in continuous thought experiments and storytelling to imagine possible futures and the proposed responses that might work in each of these worlds. All of these are easy to prescribe and hard to do. Footnote 60 And none of them may be enough. Leaders may still fail even with iterative processes of experimentation. In a world of radical uncertainty, however, without processes that are grounded in the search for practical knowledge, failure looms large.
560Their framework is provincial---built on a peace most of the world never had.
Holland 24 — Jack Holland and Lee Jarvis. October 7. Professor of Global Security Challenges at the University of Leeds. Professor of International Politics at Loughborough University. Journal of Global Security Studies, “COVID-19 and the Limits of Critical Security Theory: Securitization, Cosmopolitanism, and Pandemic Politics,” https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogae031 Clopus
If theory is for somebody and for some purpose (e.g., Cox 2012), it is so, in part, because it develops in some time and some space. The contexts in which thinking and writing are done are specific, not universal. As, of course, are the contexts in which (in)security is lived and experienced. The coronavirus pandemic transformed Europe, and the United Kingdom within it, into a space and time of variegated but widespread insecurity. The health crises, seemingly omnipresent risk, cost-benefit calculations, and everyday security concerns it generated were unfamiliar to a geo-security imagination founded upon (the assumptions of) Europe’s Kantian peace. They are not so unusual in other parts of the world, or for more marginalized and insecure groups within Europe. Health insecurities, fragile economies, complex ethical navigations of social and familial relationships, and widespread conditions of risk are not foreign to all people. These conditions—experienced in heterogeneous but very real and widespread ways in even the most affluent parts of Europe in 2020—can help us to think through the limits of critical theories developed “here,”in different times, by a select few. The COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on critical security theory, we argue, is therefore to highlight the peculiar and specific geo-security imaginaries formative to its context and which, necessarily, limit the universal applicability of analytical and normative frameworks. Our two chosen theoretical vehicles for assessing the pandemic’s lessons on theory’s context—securitization theory and security cosmopolitanism—are both extremely important bodies of work, associated with prominent security theorists, whose research we admire and benefit from in our own teaching and research. It is therefore important to note, explicitly, that the aim here is not to dismiss them but, rather, to help uncover (or recover) their foundations and, by so doing, to think through limitations or biases that arise. We hope, in this sense, to further their utility by infusing greater reflexivity in their use. By highlighting the blind spots, perhaps their spotlights can shine even brighter, illuminating contemporary security challenges and potential solutions. We seek improvement, not abandonment; revision, not revolution—that is our aim, rather than something more destructive. And, in so doing, we recognize that critiquing theoretical or ethical visions for their failure to anticipate (perhaps exceptional) events—or for their inability to resolve complex, perhaps intractable, ethical dilemmas—implies a high, and perhaps unattainable,
standard against which to evaluate contemporary security scholarship. 5 Our efforts, then, are an attempt to contribute to contemporary efforts at updating the landscape of critical security theory (e.g., Neal 2019). We believe these tools, in turn, can be part of building a better world, but only if the world from which they came—inclusive of its privilege— is not forgotten. This, then, is an act of remembering— of times, spaces, and people—with the aim of working toward the imagining and realization of a better future. This act of remembering is important because failing to act can be consequential. Sampson (2002), in a poignant yet often forgotten article, framed “the way we imagine international politics” as “tropical anarchy”; this being, the idea that the “rest of the world” is a fundamentally dangerous space. A Kantian peace is the necessary antithesis of tropical anarchy; the primitive space of “out there,” juxtaposed to the civilized space of “home.” As Sampson (2002) put it, much of the discipline relies not upon a Waltzian imagining of anarchy, but rather, of a bifurcated view of inside and outside, civilized and barbaric, with Europe or the West at the core of what needs protecting. Our reminder for critical security theory is that the Kantian peace is imagined (not objective), peculiar (not universal), productive (in its homogenizing of space), and relational (defined through the assumed and projected alterity of other spaces). Building critical security theory—uncritically—upon a reified Kantian peace not only exceptionalizes the insecurities faced by a majority of the world. It also serves to homogenize its formative contexts, invisibilizing the struggles of many in Europe and a broader “West” to live secure lives.