Why do regimes sometimes stay at peace, but at other times go to war or in other ways choose to use force? This is a book that should be made much more accessible to policy makers because it punctures some dangerous myths by which they are guided. Roughly 38%, however, lost office in an irregular manner [33], and 76% of those faced severe punishment in the form of exile (52%), imprisonment (15%) and/or death (2%). An important assumption of Weeks’s theory is that in constrained authoritarian regimes, civilian leaders are removed only by other civilian elites, whereas military leaders are removed only by the military. My argument suggests that the bargaining range is smaller when one leader is relatively immune to the costs of fighting or losing wars, gains private benefits from war, or has inaccurate assessments of the likelihood of winning, each of which is influenced by domestic regime type.

It is also true that the unit of analysis in Chapter 2 is the directed dyad-year rather than the country-year. In the first, civilian control is firm enough that military actors play no role in decisions to remove the executive. Working towards these ambitious goals, Weeks introduces a significant amount of complexity in the analysis, but inevitably, introducing more complexity on some issues requires simplifying other issues. His teaching focuses on international relations, with an emphasis on conflict and international relations history.

I hope to see it explored further in the burgeoning theoretical and empirical literature on civil-military relations. If the peacetime threat of domestic punishment is high, the use of force with the potential for political domestic rewards in the case of victory can be a rational gamble, even if defeat carries a high concomitant likelihood of punishment.

Otherwise, the fear of a military coup or insurrection would cause leaders of machines to act more like the leaders of military juntas, in which a leader faces a domestic audience composed primarily of military officers. Weeks's typology and analysis have laid the foundation for understanding the diversity of authoritarian international politics, and Dictators at War and Peace will undoubtedly become the standard for such analysis. Realists have been skeptical of this claim, contending that all types of political systems conduct foreign policy similarly.Even more valuable is her finding that certain types of dictatorships are as pacific and as competent at war as democracies. In her excellent book, Jessica Weeks advances a clear and generally compelling argument about how important variations among autocracies affect decisions about the use of force.

In short, the book will be a standard for people interested in the foreign policy of non-democracies.

If anything, Goemans’s focus on Admiral Anaya raises the question as to why he supported the war so fervently; Goemans takes this as exogenous, but in the book, I attribute much of Anaya’s fervor to his naval background and parochial interests. If leaders value the good similarly, we are left with the typical unit-interval issue space, with a point on the line representing the probability of victory and intervals around this point that specify each leader’s costs of war, firmly leading us back to James Fearon’s unitary rational actor explanations, which leaves no room for different regime types. Downes notes that I do not explicitly say that the leaders of juntas must be military officers themselves, though he points out that in one place in the text I imply this to be the case. Weeks (78) codes Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1967 as a Strongman—a leader with a military background constrained by no audience—but Brooks depicts Nasser as locked in a fierce competition for power with his military chief, Abdel Hakim Amer. Wilhelmine Germany thus appears to be another example of a civilian-led regime that shared power with and—in important ways—could not control its military, which led to the adoption of a military strategy poorly suited to the country’s political needs, with ultimately devastating consequences in the First World War.