Political Science and International Relations
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Browsing Political Science and International Relations by Author "Willardson, Spencer L"
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Item Open Access Detention as a Peacemaking Strategy: The 2007-08 Iraq Surge and US Detention(2016) Willardson, Spencer LThe Surge in Iraq was one of the key foreign policy decisions of the past decade. Its success prompted a second surge into Afghanistan by a new president a few years later. The success of the Iraq surge has prompted work by academics and policymakers alike. One factor of the success of the surge has been understudied by both academics and policymakers is the role played by the detention of individuals and the changes in detention policy that accompanied the surge. In this paper I outline a brief informal model of how an intervening state can use detention to help alleviate some of the causes of intergroup conflict to increase the odds of successful intervention. I then show how the changes in US detention policy during the surge contributed to the success of the overall strategy. A key argument in this paper is that detention contributed to the success of the surge even though it was not a primary or public aspect of the surge strategyItem Open Access Neoliberal reform and protest in Latin American democracies: A replication and correction(SAGE, 2014) Solt, Frederick; Kim, Dongkyu; Lee, Kyu Young; Willardson, Spencer L; Kim, SeokdongDo neoliberal economic reforms in Latin American democracies mobilize citizens to overcome their collective action problems and protest? A recent addition to the scholarship on this crucial question of the relationship of markets and politics, Bellinger and Arce (2011), concludes that economic liberalization does have this effect, working to repoliticize collective actors and reinvigorate democracy. We reexamine the article’s analyses and demonstrate that they misinterpret the marginal effect of the variables of theoretical interest. Thus, the article’s optimistic claims about the consequences for democracy of economic liberalization in the region are not supported by its own empirical results. It is argued here that its results suggest instead that protests became more common in autocracies when they moved away from markets. Rather than speaking to how people have mobilized to protest against liberal reforms in Latin America’s democracies, the work’s analyses illuminate only when people protested against the region’s dictatorshipsItem Open Access Strategic Intelligence during Coin Detention Operations – Relational Data and Understanding Latent Terror Networks(2013) Willardson, Spencer LOne aspect of the global “War on Terror” that has received limited coverage in the academic literature is the problem of detained persons as it relates to intelligence. This is a surprising oversight, given the number of detainees that the US has been responsible for (over 25,000 were in custody in Iraq alone at one time during its peak). The detention environment offers a prime strategic intelligence opportunity for the US intelligence community to study the tactics and organizations of individuals who have been removed from the overall conflict. In this article an easily-implemented collection program is recommended to be deployed in US/Coalition detention centers. The primary recommendation is to gather relational data on detainee communication, both authorized and illicit, and to use this data to perform network analyses of terrorist groups and their individual members