War, Politics, and Reconstruction: Stormy Days in Louisiana

Preventive War and Democratic Politics

I define the concept of preventive war, distinguish it from preemption and other sources of better-now-than-later logic, and examine numerous conceptual issues that confound theoretical and empirical analyses of prevention. I then consider the argument that democracies rarely if ever adopt preventive war strategies because such strategies are contrary to the preferences of democratic publics an...

The Politics of Bureaucracy and the Failure of Post-War Reconstruction

Gordon Tullock’s The Politics of Bureaucracy must be considered one of the most important works on bureaucracy ever written. In addition to discussing Tullock’s contribution to our understanding of bureaucracy, I contend that his insights on the topic remain relevant today. To support this claim, I focus on U.S.-led reconstruction efforts which attempt to export liberal democracy via military o...

FROM POLITICS OF WAR TO POLITICS OF PEACE – NORTHERN UGANDA: Whose War, Whose Peace & Whose Justice

Drug war politics: the price of denial

occurrence of evolutionary convergence and parallelism. Also, they had to try to relate their ideas to geological theories about the former distributions of land masses (including possible "isthmian links") and climatic changes. To give structure to his monstrously large topic, Bowler focuses on a smallish number of major themes: the shape of the "tree of life"; the question of whether arthropo...

Learning From Past; Assessment of the Post-War Reconstruction of Qasr-e-Shirin in Iran

This paper addresses the post-war reconstruction experience of Qasr-e-Shirin, Iran, in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). Compared with the war-damaged cities in southwest Iran, western cities such as Qasr-e-Shirin lack a post-war reconstruction assessment and documentation. With an objective view, the author aims at documenting the situation of the city almost thirty years after i...