Home  About us  Contact
 

Target State (target + state)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences75%

Selected Abstracts

Political Institutions and Constrained Response to Economic Sanctions

FOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS, Issue 3 2008
Susan Hannah Allen
Institutional constraints within the target state not only influence a leader's ability to resist economic sanctions, but they also affect the decision-making process within the target state and the nature of information that a sender can ascertain about likely response. Autocratic leaders, who are less constrained, send noisier signals about their probable behavior. This lack of constraint also allows more freedom to resist sanctions, as they can shunt the costs of sanctions off onto the general public, who have little influence over policy outcomes or leadership retention. Democratic leaders are more constrained and more susceptible to sanctions pressure. As result, there is less uncertainty for senders about probable response. Using a heteroskedastic probit model to explore potential systematic components of the variation surrounding sanctions response, the impact of sanctions is shown to differ by regime type,both in the response to coercion as well as in the variance surrounding that response. The results presented here suggest that as expected, democracies are more susceptible to sanctions pressure, but the response of mixed and authoritarian systems are more difficult to predict. These findings have implications for the design of future sanctions policy as well as suggesting which states make the best targets for economic coercion. [source]

"A Hand upon the Throat of the Nation": Economic Sanctions and State Repression, 1976,2001

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2008
Reed M. Wood
While intended as a nonviolent foreign policy alternative to military intervention, sanctions have often worsened humanitarian and human rights conditions in the target country. This article examines the relationship between economic sanctions and state-sponsored repression of human rights. Drawing on both the public choice and institutional constraints literature, I argue that the imposition of economic sanctions negatively impacts human rights conditions in the target state by encouraging incumbents to increase repression. Specifically, sanctions threaten the stability of target incumbents, leading them to augment their level of repression in an effort to stabilize the regime, protect core supporters, minimize the threat posed by potential challengers, and suppress popular dissent. The empirical results support this theory. These findings provide further evidence that sanctions impose political, social, and physical hardship on civilian populations. They also underscore a need for improvements in current strategies and mechanisms by which states pursue foreign-policy goals and the international community enforces international law and stability. [source]

Imposing International Norms: Great Powers and Norm Enforcement1

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 1 2007
RENEE DE NEVERS
What role does force play in changing international norms and who is it used against? This essay argues that when great powers seek to promote new norms, they will coerce the weak; persuasion is saved for the strong. The interaction of two factors,the standing of the target state in the international society of states and its power relative to the norm-promoting great power,helps explain the use, or nonuse, of force by great powers seeking to promote norms. The cases of the slave trade, piracy, and state sponsorship of terrorism are examined to evaluate how the attributes of norm-violating states affect the likelihood that great powers will intervene to encourage states to adopt new norms. Power appears to be the best defense against being targeted by a great power seeking to promote norm change, but good standing in the international society of states is an important deterrent against intervention. [source]

Intruder state avoidance multireference Møller,Plesset perturbation theory

JOURNAL OF COMPUTATIONAL CHEMISTRY, Issue 10 2002
Henryk A. Witek
Abstract A new perturbation approach is proposed that enhances the low-order, perturbative convergence by modifying the zeroth-order Hamiltonian in a manner that enlarges any small-energy denominators that may otherwise appear in the perturbative expansion. This intruder state avoidance (ISA) method can be used in conjunction with any perturbative approach, but is most applicable to cases where small energy denominators arise from orthogonal-space states,so-called intruder states,that should, under normal circumstances, make a negligible contribution to the target state of interests. This ISA method is used with multireference Møller,Plesset (MRMP) perturbation theory on potential energy curves that are otherwise plagued by singularities when treated with (conventional) MRMP; calculation are performed on the 13, state of O2; and the 21,, 31,, 23,, and 33, states of AgH. This approach is also applied to other calculations where MRMP is influenced by intruder states; calculations are performed on the 3,u state of N2, the 3, state of CO, and the 21A, state of formamide. A number of calculations are also performed to illustrate that this approach has little or no effect on MRMP when intruder states are not present in perturbative calculations; vertical excitation energies are computed for the low-lying states of N2, C2, CO, formamide, and benzene; the adiabatic 1A1,3B1 energy separation in CH2, and the spectroscopic parameters of O2 are also calculated. Vertical excitation energies are also performed on the Q and B bands states of free-base, chlorin, and zinc,chlorin porphyrin, where somewhat larger couplings exists, and,as anticipated,a larger deviation is found between MRMP and ISA-MRMP. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem 10: 957,965, 2002 [source]