Earlier studies of economic sanctions underestimated the role and importance of more subtle forms of coercion because they concentrated attention on highly public, formally legislated attempts at economic coercion in world politics, such as the cases of Italy in the 1930s and Rhodesia since 1965. The author agrees with Galtung, Knorr, and others that in highly public cases, sanctions will often fail in their avowed political purpose because they actually stimulate nationalism and thus resistance in the target-state; he argues that in an increasingly (but unequally) interdependent world, relatively subtle sanctions can be politically effective—with only moderately purely economic effects—by exploiting the LDC's typically fragmented interest-group and class structure. In order to describe and explain how such economic coercion works, it is necessary to bridge several “islands” of literature: on economic sanctions, on the structure of dependency, and on the causes of political instability.

Recent refinements in social science thinking about power could be used to revitalize this approach to understanding international relations. The relevance of scholarly work on the causal concept of power is explored with regard to the following topics: potential vs. actual power, interdependence, military power, positive sanctions, the zero-sum model of politics, and the distinction between deterrence and compellence. The tendency to exaggerate the fungibility of power resources, the propensity to treat military power resources as the1 “ultimate” power base, and the emphasis on conflict and negative sanctions at the expense of cooperation and positive sanctions, are still common in international relations scholarship. The most important need is for recognition that the absence of a common denominator of political value in terms of which different scopes of power can be compared is not so much a methodological problem to be solved as it is a real-world constraint to be lived with.

This paper examines the consociational approach to the study of deeply divided societies and notes its weaknesses. It argues that the absence of a well-developed alternative “control” approach to the explanation of stability in deeply divided societies has resulted in the empirical overextension of consociational models. Control models, focusing on how superordinate groups manipulate subordinate groups rather than on the emergence and functioning of elite cartels, need to be developed—not only for the study of stable, deeply divided societies in which consociational models are inappropriate, but also as a means of eliminating certain theoretical problems that have been raised as criticisms of consociationalism. The paper includes a critical review of the literature that is available to guide study of control in deeply divided societies, and concludes with recommendations for the shape of an analytical framework within systematic comparison.

The SALT I Agreements, concluded in 1972, are assessed with the benefit of several years’ perspective. This study examines the negotiations and agreements from the standpoint of achievements and shortcomings. It finds a number of each, but on balance a substantial positive achievement. SALT I marked a beginning to collaborative efforts at strategic arms control by the two superpowers, and in a number of respects—especially the ABM Treaty—it had a clear and favorable effect in mitigating the arms competition. The main shortcoming was the failure to reach significant restraints on strategic offensive arms, especially a ban on MIRV's at a time when that was still possible. Also, the pursuit of “bargaining chips” for arms negotiations can impede arms control and contribute to arms competition. An “oversell” étente and SALT in 1972 prompted a swing to undervaluing both in the late 1970's. netheless, on balance SALT I was a significant step forward.

Soviet political scholars have argued that, since 1970, it has become impossible for the United States to pursue a “positions-of-strength” foreign policy effectively. These analysts feel that in the past, the U.S. has relied heavily on projecting its military strength in diplomatic affairs, and that changes in the international political and economic order now prevent the continuation of this policy. A study of the positions-ofstrength issue in Soviet scholarly journals reveals that Soviet scholars do not agree on how the United States will react to this development. While the majority contends that the U.S. will try to regain its ability to pursue positions-of-strength diplomacy, a significant minority believes that the time is right for a deepening of Soviet-American cooperation. Although the prospects for cooperation appear less promising at present than they did during 1972–1975, the study shows a general softening on the subject of cooperation since 1970.

This paper sets forth a preliminary theory of the substructure of Chinese politics. Power is based on an influential constituency in China as elsewhere, but here there are two types of such constituencies: the formal, consisting of an actor's bureaucratic colleagues and subordinates, which exerts formal power [ch'üan-li]; and the informal, consisting of interested family members, long-term friends, and protégés, which exerts informal influence [shih-li]. The support of the former may be relied upon during “nonantagonistic contradictions”; but if the contradiction becomes “antagonistic,” only the informal base is likely to be of any avail, because of the severe sanctions applied to any associate of an “enemy of the people.” The “Gang of Four” could be considered as “favorites” of Mao Tse-tung, inasmuch as their narrow and shallow “backgrounds” afforded them no constituency, formal or informal, aside from the Chairman himself. Their political actions were characterized by exclusive loyalty to their patron and by a disregard for the formal rules of the game. Sensitive to the long-range untenability of their positions, the Four sought to expand their base by appealing to the masses through the media and by building an incipient bureaucratic constituency. Their ultimate failure may be attributed not only to their ineptitude at base-building, but to the inherent limitations of their positions in an increasingly determinate bureaucratic-political game.

The decision to use and develop a low-status language in translations and creative works is often based on a desire to provide symbols that will assist the efforts of political leaders to challenge existing national and ethnic frontiers and to create new groups loyal to different institutions. New frontiers alter the relationships between peoples and also affect patterns of access to power and wealth within a group. Writers, translators, dictionary makers, and other literary figures who innovate for this reason should be called “language strategists.” Although primarily moved by a creative and artistic spirit, these persons are often intimately associated with national and ethnic movements because they share the interests of the political elites who lead them. This conscious or unconscious alliance is essential in the creation of ethnic and national identities.

Weber's understanding of bureaucracy, despite substantial qualification and revision, remains the dominant paradigm for the study of administration and formal organizations. We continue the process of revision by accepting his ideal-typical concepts of bureaucratic and patrimonial administration, but subject them to theoretical and historical reinterpretation and application. Our reading of historical change as it relates to bureaucracy leads us to question Weber's interpretations. His conceptualization of bureaucracy in terms of rational-legal-authority and formal rationality fails to take account of the existence and use of power within and outside of organizations, and of the persistence of patrimonial features. The use of power produces conflict and pathologies. When these serve the legitimate values and interests of participants and actors in the organizational environment, they can have benign consequences. The persistence of patrimonial features, rather than signalling the survival of dysfunctional atavisms, can promote administrative effectiveness by mitigating conflict and promoting organizational loyalty, discipline, and efficiency.

Strategic intelligence failures cannot be prevented by organizational solutions to problems of analysis and communication. Analytic certainty is precluded by ambiguity of evidence, ambivalence of judgment, and atrophy of institutional reforms designed to avert failures. Many sources of error are unresolvable paradoxes and dilemmas rather than curable pathologies. Major failures in attack warning, operational evaluation, and intelligence for strategic planning are due primarily to leaders’ psychological attributes rather than to analysts’ failures to detect relevant data. Since analysis and decision are interactive rather than sequential processes, and authorities often hear but dismiss correct estimates, intelligence failure is inseparable from policy failure. Solutions most often proposed—worst-case analysis, multiple advocacy, devil's advocacy, organizational consolidation, sanctions and incentives for analysts, and cognitive rehabilitation—are either impractical because of constraints on the leaders’ time, or they are mixed blessings because they create new problems in the course of solving old ones.

Britain's experience with the Concorde Project was characterized by changes in the objectives of governmental policy for which the Concorde was to be an instrument. Early in the project, the British state used the Concorde to rationalize Britain's aircraft industry and to enter the E.E.C. Later, the international objective became less salient; the domestic objective, instead of encouragement of efficiency, became maintenance of the industry's employment levels in order to promote political stability. The shift in the purposes of policy can be linked to changes in the power relations beween Britain's society and state. The changes in power relations raise issues about recent characterizations of the British polity and other advanced industrialized societies.

Most concepts of ethnicity are unsuitable for political analysis because they ignore either subjective or objective aspects, and because they ignore the fluid and situational nature of ethnicity. The approach flowing from the concept proposed here permits the observer to examine empirical variations that tend to be treated as rigid assumptions by modernization analysts on the one hand and class analysts on the other. The concept is applied to a study of the Nubians of Uganda because of the intermixture of class and ethnic features involved in their fall from status at the beginning of the colonial period and their subsequent sudden rise following the 1071 coup d'état of Idi Amin. The fairly recent creation of the Nubians as an ethnic category and the relative ease with which others can become members illustrate other features of the proposed concept of ethnicity. Finally, this concept is used to examine and criticize overly restrictive notions of ethnicity found in theories based upon both cultural pluralism and consociationalism.

National leaders are frequently surprised by the actions of other governments. This paper explores the structure common to problems involving the use of resources for achieving surprise. Such resources include deception through double agents and through sudden changes in standard operating procedures. Still other resources for surprise include cracked codes, spies, and new weapons. Since surprise is usually possible only by risking the revelation of the means of surprise, in each case the same problem arises: when should the resource be risked and when should it be maintained for a potentially more important event later? A rational-actor model is developed to provide a prescriptive answer to this question. Examining the ways in which actual actors are likely to differ from rational actors leads to several important policy implications. One is that leaders may tend to be overconfident in their ability to predict the actions of their potential opponents just when the stakes get large. Another implication is that, as observational technology improves, the potential for surprise and deception may actually increase.

For a long time, the Soviet pattern of development and use of computing differed from the West in terms of time-scale, philosophy, institutional arrangements, capital decisions, and applications. Starting in the late 1950s, a major political, military, and economic reassessment of the value of computing took place; during the next dozen years, the overall Soviet view moved much closer to that of the rest of the developed world. This new perception has been backed by large political and economic commitments. Apparently the Soviet leadership is hoping that computer technology will make the existing economic system more efficient and effective, and will thus help to avoid fundamental reforms that are politically unacceptable. A massive transfer of foreign technology over the last decade has made the Soviet computer industry less isolated than during the 1960s, but its interfaces with the outside world are still narrowly defined. Serious difficulties remain in trying to transplant a sophisticated and pervasive technology into a systemic environment very different from that in which it originated and thrived.

As a vehicle for the growing association of southern nationalists and Marxists, dependency theory is an important part of the history of our times, something much more than a school of academic writing. Whatever the varieties of analysis existing within this school (and there are many), a major historiographie shortcoming is common to most of its literature: having grasped the Hegelian insight that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, dependencistas exaggerate the point, making the mistake of refusing any autonomy, any specificity to the parts (southern countries) independently of their membership in the whole (the imperialist system established by the North). A better approach to the study of the place of the South in the international system is to emphasize the variety of state structures present there with their different abilities to mobilize forces internally and translate this into international rank. Southern advances are more substantial than many realize; the essay concludes that southerners should pay more attention to the real room for initiative and maneuver they have, but which dependency theory systematically overlooks. Most of the illustrative examples concern India, the Ottoman Empire, and Latin America before World War I.

The possibility and widespread practice of exit, on the part of dissatisfied citizens, has important, though highly diverse, bearings on the formation, solidity, and “quality” of the state. An association exists between the wide availability of exit and the condition of statelessness in a number of aboriginal societies as well as in Rousseau's state of nature. In the 18th century, the exit option—which became available to the wealthy as movable forms of property increased in importance—was hailed by such observers as Montesquieu and Adam Smith as a restraint on arbitrary rule or taxation. Today, on the other hand, such exit (capital flight) tends to render the introduction of needed reforms more difficult. Emigration-exit was benign in its effect on the sending countries in the 19th century and may have been helpful to the process of democratization in Europe. Lately, however, exit has been considered a threat to the existence of the state and has led to strong, though very different, defensive reactions in Ireland and East Germany. The small modern state can fend off excessive exit by providing a variety of public goods to its citizens; one of these public goods is “understood complexity.”

Integrated rural development has become the focus of growth with equity policies in developing countries. Evaluations of development programs and plans over the past two decades indicate that little change can be achieved in developing societies through single purpose policy interventions and that diversified and integrated programs aimed at increasing agricultural productivity and dispersing directly productive and social overhead investments in rural regions are essential for socially equitable economic growth. Because of their importance to emerging development strategies, this paper identifies and analyzes the political and administrative problems of planning and implementing integrated rural development programs. It reflects a sympathetic but skeptical view of the prospects for achieving rural development without fundamental political and administrative reforms. It suggests that unless governments in developing countries and international assistance agencies can resolve three crucial problems—those of mobilizing political commitment, restructuring administrative arrangements, and delivering basic services to the rural poor—integrated rural development may go the way of all previous development fads, and have little impact on intended beneficiaries.

A recent report commissioned by the OECD, Towards Full Employment and Price Stability, represents an attempt by mainstream economists to account for world capitalism's economic difficulties during the 1970's, and to prescribe solutions. Although the report identifies the key sources of inflation and recession as political and social, it carefully analyzes only economic processes. Yet it makes a political argument: that democratic states must discipline their citizens more effectively in order to conform to the requirements of capitalism. This conclusion rests on unexamined normative assumptions, and fails to consider questions of political feasibility. The report is deficient both as explanatory theory (due to its political and sociological naivete) and as policy science (due to its pervasive ideological bias). Its weaknesses indicate the need for better political and sociological analysis to complement economic theories of inflation and recession.

American strategic theorists used to urge that the United States adopt a Clausewitzian point of view on international conflict, that we treat war as something undertaken to serve the larger aims of policy, with the conduct of war subordinated to the larger considerations of policy. Under contemporary conditions, however, this notion of warfare is not appropriate. The experience of warfare since the time of Clausewitz shows that his distinction between war in the abstract and war in the concrete is not any kind of dialectical unity; rather, political war and total war (the concrete manifestation of Clausewitz's war in the abstract) are two distinct phenomena, and our technological and ideological positions discourage political war. War is no longer an instrument of state policy, a means whereby those who rule the state attain their values; instead, it is increasingly the fact or possibility of war which determines the values of the state.

Because of its parsimony and power, deterrence theory is the most important American theory of international relations. Yet it has many faults. The boundaries outside of which it does not apply are not clear; it does not tell how a state can change an adversary's motives; it does not deal with the use of rewards. Current scholarship of the third wave of deterrence theory, including George and Smoke's Deterrence in American Foreign Policy, has increased our knowledge by providing empirical evidence on when and how deterrence fails. Examination of the details of decision making reveals the ways in which attempts to deter can go wrong. Recent work stresses the role of each side's intrinsic interest in an issue, and argues that earlier formulations of the theory exaggerated the importance of commitment. The third wave also introduces a larger political element by focusing attention on states' goals and the context of their behavior.

Political scientists have recently turned to the Weberian concept of patrimonialism to explain political stability in some Third-World states. Indonesia during the Guided Democracy period is an example of a regime with strong patrimonial characteristics, although its collapse canot be explained in patrimonial terms. The New Order regime has sought to consolidate its power in patrimonial style. Efforts have been made to de-politicize the masses while confining political competition to non-ideological jockeying for power within the elite. However, the New Order's dependence on economic development to obtain support from key groups outside the military elite has tended to push the regime toward increasing regularization and bureaucratization and growing conflict within the military elite. Moreover, the depoliticization drive may not be effective in the long run. In these circumstances, the patrimonial distribution of the spoils of office as a means of maintaining political stability is likely to be increasingly supported by direct repression.