Rousing a Response: When the United States Changes Policy toward Mass Killing

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 120-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda J. Rothschild
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mass Killing ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Change Policy ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Mass Killings ◽  
War Refugee Board ◽  
Policy Shifts ◽  
Do So

When do U.S. presidents change policy to respond with increased intensity to mass killings of civilians in other countries? The twentieth century witnessed a series of state-sponsored mass killings in a variety of regions around the world. Conventional arguments suggest that although the United States has the capability of responding to such atrocities, it often fails to do so because of a lack of political will for action. Historical evidence suggests, however, that although the modal response of the United States is inaction, at times U.S. presidents reverse course to respond more forcefully to mass killings. Three factors explain when and why these policy shifts happen: the level at which dissent occurs within the U.S. government, the degree of congressional pressure for policy change, and the extent to which the case of mass killing poses a political liability for the president. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's creation of the War Refugee Board in 1944 during the Holocaust supports this theory.

Random Acts of Violence? Examining Probabilistic Independence of the Temporal Distribution of Mass Killing Events in the United States

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (6) ◽  
pp. 1014-1023 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas M. King ◽  
Sheldon H. Jacobson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Temporal Distribution ◽  
Geographic Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
Contagion Effect ◽  
Mass Killing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mass Killings ◽  
Over Time

Recent mass killings, such as those in Newtown, Connecticut, and Aurora, Colorado, have brought new attention to mass killings in the United States. This article examines 323 mass killings taking place between January 1, 2006, and October 4, 2016, to assess how they are distributed over time. In particular, we find that they appear to be uniformly distributed over time, which suggests that their rate has remained stable over the past decade. Moreover, analysis of subsets of these mass killings sharing a common trait (e.g., family killings, public killings) suggests that they exhibit a memoryless property, suggesting that mass killing events within each category are random in the sense that the occurrence of a mass killing event does not signal whether another mass killing event is imminent. However, the same memoryless property is not found when combining all mass killings into a single analysis, consistent with earlier research that found evidence of a contagion effect among mass killing events. Because of the temporal randomness of public mass killings and the wide geographic area over which they can occur, these results imply that these events may be best addressed by systemic infrastructure-based interventions that deter such events, incorporate resiliency into the response system, or impede such events until law enforcement can respond when they do occur.

scholarly journals Understanding Mass Killing in America: A System Dynamics Approach

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 118-125
Author(s):  
Dillon Riedlinger ◽  
Jillian Wisniewski
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
System Dynamics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mass Killing ◽  
System Dynamics Modeling ◽  
Dynamics Modeling ◽  
Feedback Mechanisms ◽  
The Media ◽  
Mass Killings

This study explores the replication effect of mass killings across the United States. Often news outlets sensationalize emotional stories, such as mass killings, because they increase readership. Increased readership perpetuates the spread of the ideation to commit a mass killing through imitation, with each new incident having the possibility to spark several more throughout the country through increased exposure. This study places greatest focus on the imitation and does not analyze feedback mechanisms that affect other influences of violence. System dynamics modeling provides the framework for examining imitation incidents as an effect of increased exposure via the media.

Alliance Coercion and Nuclear Restraint: How the United States Thwarted West Germany's Nuclear Ambitions

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 91-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gene Gerzhoy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nuclear Proliferation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Common Belief ◽  
Security Model ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
The Common ◽  
Security Guarantees ◽  
Do So

When does a nuclear-armed state's provision of security guarantees to a militarily threatened ally inhibit the ally's nuclear weapons ambitions? Although the established security model of nuclear proliferation posits that clients will prefer to depend on a patron's extended nuclear deterrent, this proposition overlooks how military threats and doubts about the patron's intentions encourage clients to seek nuclear weapons of their own. To resolve this indeterminacy in the security model's explanation of nuclear restraint, it is necessary to account for the patron's use of alliance coercion, a strategy consisting of conditional threats of military abandonment to obtain compliance with the patron's demands. This strategy succeeds when the client is militarily dependent on the patron and when the patron provides assurances that threats of abandonment are conditional on the client's nuclear choices. Historical evidence from West Germany's nuclear decisionmaking provides a test of this logic. Contrary to the common belief among nonproliferation scholars, German leaders persistently doubted the credibility and durability of U.S. security guarantees and sought to acquire an independent nuclear deterrent. Rather than preferring to renounce nuclear armament, Germany was compelled to do so by U.S. threats of military abandonment, contradicting the established logic of the security model and affirming the logic of alliance coercion.

Writing Time in Metaphors

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western United States ◽  
Entire System ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Space Race ◽  
Do So

Coherence of place often exists alongside irregularities in time in cycles, and chapter three turns to cycles linked by temporal markers. Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950) follows a linear chronology and describes the exploration, conquest, and repopulation of Mars by humans. Conversely, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984) jumps back and forth across time to narrate the lives of interconnected families in the western United States. Bradbury’s cycle invokes a confluence of historical forces—time as value-laden, work as a calling, and travel as necessitating standardized time—and contextualizes them in relation to anxieties about the space race. Erdrich’s cycle invokes broader, oppositional conceptions of time—as recursive and arbitrary and as causal and meaningful—to depict time as implicated in an entire system of measurement that made possible the destruction and exploitation of the Chippewa people. Both volumes understand the United States to be preoccupied with imperialist impulses. Even as they critique such projects, they also point to the tenacity with which individuals encounter these systems, and they do so by creating “interstitial temporalities,” which allow them to navigate time at the crossroads of language and culture.

Out of the Whirlwind Reconsidered

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Michael Berkowitz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Holocaust Literature ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mutual Accountability ◽  
Union College

This article argues that Albert Friedlander’s edited book, Out of the Whirlwind (1968), should be recognised as pathbreaking. Among the first to articulate the idea of ‘Holocaust literature’, it established a body of texts and contextualised these as a way to integrate literature – as well as historical writing, music, art and poetry – as critical to an understanding of the Holocaust. This article also situates Out of the Whirlwind through the personal history of Friedlander and his wife Evelyn, who was a co-creator of the book, his colleagues from Hebrew Union College, and the illustrator, Jacob Landau. It explores the work’s connection to the expansive, humanistic development of progressive Judaism in the United States, Britain and continental Europe. It also underscores Friedlander’s study of Leo Baeck as a means to understand the importance of mutual accountability, not only between Jews, but in Jews’ engagement with the wider world.

Explosions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Douglas Bomberger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
The United States ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
One Step ◽  
Do So ◽  
Laws And Regulations

On 2 April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson urged Congress to enter the European war, and Congress voted to do so on Friday, 6 April. On the 15th of that month, Victor released the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s record of “Livery Stable Blues” and “Dixieland Jass Band One-Step”; it caused an immediate nationwide sensation. James Reese Europe travelled to Puerto Rico in search of woodwind players for the Fifteenth New York Regiment Band, and the Creole Band ended its vaudeville career when it missed the train to Portland, Maine. German musicians in the United States came under increased scrutiny in the weeks after the declaration of war, as the country prepared to adopt new laws and regulations for wartime.

scholarly journals Diasporic Foreign Policy Interest Groups in the United States: Democracy, Conflict, and Political Entrepreneurship

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Shubha Kamala Prasad ◽  
Filip Savatic
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
The United States ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
Indian American ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Political Entrepreneurs ◽  
Do So ◽  
Policy Interest

Why do some immigrant diasporas in the United States (U.S.) establish foreign policy interest groups while others do not? While scholars have demonstrated that diasporic interest groups often successfully influence U.S. foreign policy, we take a step back to ask why only certain diasporas attempt to do so in the first place. We argue that two factors increase the likelihood of diaspora mobilization: a community’s experience with democratic governance and conflict in its country of origin. We posit that these conditions make it more likely that political entrepreneurs emerge to serve as catalysts for top-down mobilization. To test our hypotheses, we collect and analyze novel data on diasporic interest groups as well as the characteristics of their respective countries of origin. In turn, we conduct the first in-depth case studies of the historical and contemporary Indian-American lobbies, using original archival and interview evidence.

scholarly journals Decline in Marriage Associated with the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 237802312098032
Author(s):  
Brandon G. Wagner ◽  
Kate H. Choi ◽  
Philip N. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cumulative Number ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Know How ◽  
The Social ◽  
Reporting Delays ◽  
Social Upheaval ◽  
Near Future ◽  
Do So

In the social upheaval arising from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, we do not yet know how union formation, particularly marriage, has been affected. Using administration records—marriage certificates and applications—gathered from settings representing a variety of COVID-19 experiences in the United States, the authors compare counts of recorded marriages in 2020 against those from the same period in 2019. There is a dramatic decrease in year-to-date cumulative marriages in 2020 compared with 2019 in each case. Similar patterns are observed for the Seattle metropolitan area when analyzing the cumulative number of marriage applications, a leading indicator of marriages in the near future. Year-to-date declines in marriage are unlikely to be due solely to closure of government agencies that administer marriage certification or reporting delays. Together, these findings suggest that marriage has declined during the COVID-19 outbreak and may continue to do so, at least in the short term.

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