Books

Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2021. Cornell Studies in Security Affairs.

When a state confronts an obstinate or dangerous adversary, the lure of toppling its government and establishing a friendly administration is strong. The historical record, however, indicates that foreign-imposed regime change is not, in the long term, cheap, easy, or consistently successful. The strategic impulse to forcibly oust antagonistic or noncompliant regimes overlooks two key facts. First, the act of overthrowing a foreign government sometimes causes its military to disintegrate, sending thousands of armed men into the countryside where they often wage an insurgency against the intervener. Second, externally imposed leaders face a domestic audience in addition to an external one, and the two typically want different things. These divergent preferences place imposed leaders in a quandary: taking actions that please one invariably alienates the other. Regime change thus drives a wedge between external patrons and their domestic proteges or between proteges and their people. Drawing on a compilation of all instances of regime change around the world over the past two centuries, the book shows that regime change increases the likelihood of civil war and violent leader removal in target states and fails to reduce the probability of conflict between intervening states and their targets.

Available at Cornell University Press (enter code 09FLYER for a 30% discount) and Amazon.

Online Supplemental Materials:

Supplementary Materials for Chapter 1 (pdf)
Supplementary Materials for Chapter 3, Part 1 (pdf)
Supplementary Materials for Chapter 3, Part 2 (pdf)
Supplementary Materials for Chapter 4, Part 1 (pdf)
Supplementary Materials for Chapter 4, Part 2 (pdf)
Supplementary Materials for Chapter 4, Part 3 (pdf)
Supplementary Materials for Chapter 5, Part 1 (pdf)
Supplementary Materials for Chapter 5, Part 2 (pdf)

Replication Data:

Replication Data for Chapter 3 (Stata format)
Replication Data for Chapter 4: Irregular removal, leader-year data (Stata); Irregular removal, leader-spell data (Stata); Regular removal, leader-year data (Stata); Regular removal, leader-spell data (Stata)
Replication Data for Chapter 5: Coming soon

Targeting Civilians in War. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008. Cornell Studies in Security Affairs.

Accidental harm to civilians in warfare often becomes an occasion for public outrage, from citizens of both the victimized and the victimizing nation. This book, however, demonstrates that democratic and authoritarian governments alike will sometimes deliberately kill large numbers of civilians as a matter of military strategy. What leads governments to make such a choice? Through an examination of interstate wars over the past two centuries and case studies of naval blockade, strategic bombing, counterinsurgency, and ethnic cleansing, Alexander B. Downes concludes that governments decide to target civilians for two main reasons--desperation to reduce their own military casualties or avert defeat, or a desire to seize and annex enemy territory. When a state's military fortunes take a turn for the worse, civilians are more likely to be declared legitimate targets to coerce the enemy state to give up. When territorial conquest and annexation are the aims of warfare, the population of the disputed land is viewed as a threat and the aggressor state may target those civilians to remove them. Democracies historically have proven especially likely to target civilians in desperate circumstances.

Available at Cornell University Press and Amazon.

Recognition:

Winner of the Joseph Lepgold Book Prize for best book on international relations published in 2008, given by the Mortara Center at Georgetown University.

Online Supplemental Materials:

Web Appendix (pdf)
Replication data (Stata)