Can a state exist without a military in an increasingly divided and heavily militarized world? The answer is “yes.”

Twenty-one sovereign countries – one-ninth of the United Nations’ roster – do not maintain standing armies. Many of them are small island states in the Caribbean and the South Pacific and the majority chose not to create armed forces upon attaining independence. Demilitarization, the act of abolishing an extant army, occurs much more infrequently, because it clashes with the interests of powerful organizations, especially the armed forces themselves. Some European mini states – Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco – scrapped their armies centuries ago. But two Central American countries, Costa Rica and Panama, and two small Caribbean Island nations, Dominica and Grenada, dispensed with their militaries after World War II.

Armyless states share some important commonalities: (1) the decision to demilitarize or not to have an army always follows a pivotal moment (military coup, foreign invasion, reaching independence) in history; (2) they have bilateral security arrangements and/or an alliance with a regional hegemon; (3) they have not been attacked or invaded; (4) they maintain public safety and border security organizations; (5) they are consolidated democracies; and (6) they are more prosperous and spend more on healthcare, education, and socioeconomic development than their neighbors with armed forces. While States without Armies engages all twenty-one demilitarized states, it focuses on the experiences of Costa Rica, Iceland, Mauritius, Panama, and the Solomon Islands.

About the Speaker
Zoltan Barany is the Frank C. Erwin Professor of Government at the University of Texas where he has been a faculty member since 1991. He is a student of military politics and sociology and the author of Armies of Arabia: Military Politics and Effectiveness in the Gulf (Oxford, 2021), How Armies Respond to Revolutions and Why (Princeton, 2016), The Soldier and the Changing State: Building Democratic Armies in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas (Princeton, 2012), and other books. Barany held visiting and research appointments at CSIS, the Hoover Institution, the universities of Oxford and Edinburgh in the UK, and the East-West Center in Honolulu. He was elected to a Life Membership in the Council on Foreign Relations in 2007.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

One of the key challenges stemming from climate change will be climate displacement, as sudden and gradual events disrupt livelihoods and force millions to leave their homes. Despite the existing scholarship’s focus on cross-border movement, the majority of climate displaced people will move internally instead of or before seeking refuge outside their nation’s borders. What obligations do states owe to their citizens when those states have historically not been emitters but have still failed to protect domestic populations from displacement related to environmental disasters and climate change impacts? Through exploring the disaster management framework in Colombia and conducting a case study of the town of Gramalote, this talk discusses the obligations that states like Colombia owe to their internally displaced populations in the context of climate change. Given the inexorability and foreseeability of climate displacement, this talk argues that states have an obligation to recognize climate displacement, plan ahead to protect their populations’ rights, and implement best practices under international human rights law throughout relocation and resettlement processes. Irrespective of the driver of displacement, displaced individuals should not be subject to a bifurcated regime of protection that treats displacement due to civil disruption, violence, or armed conflict distinctly from displacement in the context of climate change and environmental disasters.

About the Speaker
Camila Bustos is an Assistant Professor at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. Before joining Haub Law, Professor Bustos was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Human Rights at Trinity College and a Clinical Supervisor in human rights practice at the University Network for Human Rights. She also served as a term law clerk to Justice Steven D. Ecker of the Connecticut Supreme Court and as a consultant with the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP).

Professor Bustos graduated from Yale Law School, where she received the Francis Wayland Prize and was a Switzer Foundation Fellow and a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow. She worked at the Center for Climate Integrity, the Climate Litigation Network, and EarthRights International during law school. Professor Bustos also co-founded Law Students for Climate Accountability, a national law student-led movement pushing the legal industry to phase out fossil fuel representation and support a just, livable future. Prior to law school, she worked as a human rights researcher at the Center for the Study of Law, Justice, and Society (Dejusticia) in Colombia.

Professor Bustos’s research and scholarship focus on human rights law, environmental law, legal ethics, and climate change law.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Co-sponsor
Migrations Program
Cornell Law School
Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability

Eighty years ago, almost to the day, the end of the Second World War still looked a long way off to the men caught in the meat grinder of Iwo Jima. But the inexorable movement toward the total defeat of the Axis states—graphically depicted in the mushroom cloud that would soon loom over Hiroshima—was already palpable to Americans poring over the images of the Allies’ bloody advance across the European plains and the vast Pacific Ocean.

Yet the symbolic weight of the nuclear holocaust had unintended consequences, appearing to solve one geopolitical problem—the sharpening conflict with the Soviet Union—while exacerbating another: the crisis of colonial rule spreading across the “revolutionary crescent” in the lands of the former Co-Prosperity Sphere. Strategists in Washington later worried that the war had, paradoxically, ended too soon, leaving Americans ill-prepared to take on the burdens of world leadership, the end toward which the entire war effort had been directed since 1940.

Ruth Lawlor, Cornell University, discusses the crisis of hegemony, which unfolded precisely when U.S. economic, political, and military power was at its height. From the shatter zones of Eastern Europe and the anticolonial rebellions sweeping Southeast Asia to the global strikes erupting in Latin America and West Africa and the civil wars raging in China, Greece, and elsewhere, the emergence of a new, U.S.-led global order was a protracted and violent process. As that order now unravels before our eyes, the time seems right to return to the moment of its creation and, in so doing, to look beyond the watershed of 1945.

About the Speaker
Ruth Lawlor is a historian of U.S. foreign relations focusing on diplomatic, military, and global history. She was previously a visiting fellow at Yale and Boston Universities and was a Junior Research Fellow at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, where she also received her PhD.

Her book on sexual violence and the U.S. military justice system in World War II is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. With Andrew Buchanan (University of Vermont), she has also led an international effort to globalize the history of the Second World War, a project that has most recently included a radical reinterpretation of the Good Neighbor Policy and a dramatic revision of the history of the Mediterranean theatre as the proverbial “Lilliputian bathtub.” This work has culminated in the publication of a new edited volume, titled The Greater Second World War, which will be published with Cornell University Press next Spring. Today’s talk is drawn from the research for that book.

While her work on the Global Second World War is ongoing, Ruth is writing her second monograph on the geopolitics of the polar regions and especially the history of the U.S. military in Alaska. At Cornell, she teaches classes on the history of war in American and global history, U.S. imperialism, and (soon!) geopolitics and grand strategy.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies​​​​​​​

Drawing on more than a decade of archival research in the US and UK, including in many never-before-used records, the book follows computerized systems' technological and legal history for aiming the big guns of battleships in the first half of the 20th century. The pioneering system was invented by two British civilians named Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood in the decade before 1914. At its heart was indisputably the most sophisticated analog computer of the day, decades ahead of its time, and one that contemporaries regarded as a form of artificial intelligence ("a machine that uses intelligence"). Rather than pay for their invention, however, the British Navy and then the US Navy pirated it. Then, when the inventors sued for patent infringement, the British and American governments invoked legal privileges to withhold evidence from plaintiffs on the grounds of national security secrecy.

In the United States, their lawsuits became entangled with high-level Anglo-American diplomacy during World War II and with the Manhattan Project. The arguments developed by the government in their case, which built on precedents stretching back to 19th-century Britain, helped to lay the groundwork for the nuclear-secrecy regime.

Analog Superpowers thus speaks to several major issues: the relationship between intellectual property and national security in the two most powerful liberal societies of the modern era, the impact of patent laws on defense innovation, the history of nuclear secrecy, and the transition from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana. With tensions between the US and China over computing technology and AI all over the news today, the book also offers a historical perspective on matters of intense contemporary relevance.

About the Speaker
Katherine C. Epstein is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden. She is the author of two books: Torpedo: Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States and Great Britain (Harvard University Press, 2014); and Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State (Chicago, 2024). Her research, supported by an ACLS Burkhardt fellowship and membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, examines the intersection of government secrecy, defense contracting, and intellectual property in the United States and Great Britain in the first half of the 20th century. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, American Purpose, and Liberties, among other publications.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Cosponsor
Brooks Tech Policy Institute

Do acts of military insubordination affect states’ ability to prevent foreign aggression? Muhib Rahman, Cornell University, argues that military mutiny makes a state more vulnerable to international coercion. Mutinies help foreign adversaries differentiate weak targets from strong ones by “affecting” and “revealing” states’ war-fighting costs and resolve. They disrupt the military command structure and thus increase the costs of organizing well-coordinated defense against foreign threats.

Mutinies also act as an informative signal and reveal two sets of critical information. First, they make it public that the disruptions weakened command and control. Second, they expose deeper, systematic issues within the state apparatus that set the stage for the mutiny. As a strategic actor, the military is more likely to attempt a mutiny when it expects the government to be weaker and more amenable to making concessions. This strategic timing is informative for foreign adversaries, as it signals that the government’s resolve is low and allows them to distinguish weak targets from strong ones. The more severe the mutiny, the larger the effects. They have a greater effect on command structures and can draw significantly more international attention.

The author's quantitative analyses show that military mutinies (a) increase the likelihood that the state is targeted in a militarized interstate dispute, (b) decrease the likelihood of its resistance once the MID is initiated, and (c) more severe mutinies have stronger effects on state vulnerability to external coercion. The paper advances our understanding of how civil-military relations affect states’ external threat environment. It also underscores the dynamic role of private information in international conflict processes.

About the Speaker
Dr. Muhib Rahman is a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University, affiliated with the Department of Government and the Gender and Security Sector Lab. His research intersects international security, civil-military relations, and democratic governance. He examines how interstate crisis bargaining and defense cooperation affect government-military conflicts in domestic politics, focusing on elite defection and anti-government armed uprisings. He is also interested in understanding how civil-military relations influence states’ external threat environment and interstate conflict processes, especially in the Global South.

The Hayek Fund has supported Dr. Rahman’s work at the Institute for Humane Studies, the Marcus Foundation, the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, and the Clements Center for National Security. His research has been published in journals such as Foreign Policy Analysis and International Interactions, and he is revising manuscripts for the Journal of Conflict Resolution and Security Studies. He holds an M.A. in Political Science from McGill University and a Ph.D. in Government from the University of Texas at Austin.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies