Editors' Note

Editors'Note ~ ~ In our lead article, Gail Lapidus of Stanford University assesses the factors leading to Moscow's decision in December 1994 to use militay force to crush Chechnya's resistance to the authority of the Russian leadership. Exhaustively researched and documented, Lapidus's study traces the evolution of the secessionist struggle through six stages. At the heart of the conflict, she says, was the Chechens' growing desire for sovereignty and territorial integrity sparked by Mikhail Gorbachev's political liberalization initiatives and further fueled by the establishment of a number of new states after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Lapidus also considers the role of Western governments and international institufionsfirst in preventing the outbreak of hostilities and then in mitigating and, finally, terminating the conflict. She concludes that when the behavior of a major power is at issue, the potential for outside intervention is limited, which in turn raises a host of troubling questions about the prospects for future internal conflict resolution. The next two articles take up the debate on the utility of economic sanctions as an effective instrument of foreign policy. In "Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work," published in the fall 1997 issue of International Security, Robert Pape of Dartmouth College challenged the findings in Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, a highly regarded and influential study that offered qualified optimism about the effectiveness of economic sanctions as a foreign policy tool. One of the study's coauthors, Kimberly Ann Elliott of the Institute of International Economics, argues here that Pape mischaracterizes the principal objective of the work, which, according to Elliott, was to determine if and how economic sanctions contributed to desired foreign policy outcomes -not, as Pape contends, whether they caused them. Pape responds with a vigorous defense of his original findings. How successful will NATO be in undertaking out-of-area peace operations? Joseph Lepgold of Georgetown University suggests that NATO's decision in the last decade to broaden its original mission from the collective self-defense of its members to include the use of NATO forces to resolve disputes on the territory of non-NATO members is highly problematic. He contends that NATO member governments will continue to be extremely reluctant to engage troops in collective actions when their security interests are not directly threatened.If NATO chooses to deploy troops, however, it should create Combined Joint Task Forces. These militay commands, formed on an ad hoc basis for specific operations, offer NATO the best chance of success in future peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations. Kurt Dassel of Harvard University examines the conditions under which domestic turmoil will cause the militay to engage inforeign aggression to divert attention away from internal problems. Building on both militarist and diversionary theories of war, Znternntional Security, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Summer 1998), pp. 3 4 0 1998by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 3 International Security 23:l 1 4 Dassel argues that the military will generally prefer to use force at home. If, however, employing force domestically would cause a military organization to divide against itself, then it will secure its interests by pursuing aggression abroad. Dassel generates several case studies to support his argument. Michael Desch, who is leaving Harvard to become Associate Director at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky in the fall, offers a critical review of cultural theories in the field of international security studies. Desch divides the literature on cultural theory into three distinct phases, or "waves": the World WarII, Cold War,and post-Cold War waves.Assessing the influence of these bodies of work, Desch contends that cultural theories may be useful supplements to realist theories, but they are unlikely to supplant them. In our final article, Ted Hopf of Ohio State University discusses the constructivisf challenge to neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism. He first seeks to correct some of the misconceptions that he believes traditional scholars share in their understanding of constructivism. He then offers a constructivist research agenda that seeks a middle ground between mainstream international relations and critical theory. NOTE TO CONTRIBUTORS International Security welcomes submissions on all aspects of security affairs. Manuscripts should be...