Journal of International Affairs

Authoritarianism in Zimbabwe survives because a coalition of political and military elites stands ready and willing to employ violence to execute the Machiavellian vision of President Robert Mugabe and perpetuate his control of the state. Several variables reinforce the durability of this regime—chief among them the mass out-migration and the large inflow of remittances that has decimated the middle class and dampened the political voice of those who remain in the country. Beginning in 2000, Zimbabwe’s authoritarianism became militarized with the overt intrusion of the security sector into the political arena, a process that reached its peak before the June 2008 presidential runoff election. The electoral dimension of its authoritarianism stems from the fact that the regime unfailingly holds elections in search of popular legitimacy but then manipulates them for its own ends. This article dissects Zimbabwe’s militarized form of electoral authoritarianism with specific reference to the 2008 reign of terror. It concludes that the factor that best explains the regime is the symbiosis between the party and the security sector, with Mugabe providing the glue that binds them together in pursuit of regime survival.

At the 2005 UN World Summit, the largest gathering of heads of state in history made a landmark commitment to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, and pledged to intervene when a given state manifestly failed to protect its population from mass atrocity or was the actual perpetrator of these crimes. It is unequivocal that the DPRK has violated this international norm known as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). With hundreds of thousands of North Korean refugees outside of the country, evidence of crimes against humanity and genocide taking place in North Korea is overwhelming. The DPRK is actively targeting for destruction every group which is protected under the UN Genocide Convention through its policy of killing the half-Chinese children of North Korean women forcibly repatriated by China (genocide on national, ethnical, and racial grounds) and through its systematic annihilation of its indigenous religious population and their families (genocide on religious grounds). The North Korean state is perpetrating crimes against humanity as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court through its treatment of political prisoners and its exploitative and discriminatory food policy which has been the primary cause of millions of deaths.

The Arab Spring, a wave of revolutions in nondemocratic countries in North Africa and the Middle East, forced some dictators to flee from their countries while others stayed and one faced intervention by an international coalition. Using a stylized game-theoretic model, this article analyzes the decision-making process of a dictator and explains the different outcomes. A rational dictator only leaves the country if the expected costs from punishment outweigh the benefits of staying. For the international coalition, the model identifies a trade-off between the cost of the intervention and the potential for economic benefit from a successful intervention. A higher number of participants in the coalition increases the probability of the intervention’s success. However, if the intervention fails, coalition participants lose all economic benefits. Therefore, an intervening country benefits from the participation of other countries because it lowers the risk of failure. If the intervention succeeds, the economic benefits are shared among all intervening countries. Thus, an intervening country has the most to gain if it acts alone. Furthermore, a country can deliberately abstain from an intervention to benefit from higher shares of economic profit if the intervention fails and coalition members lose all economic benefits. The model can help explain the rarity of unanimous votes for an intervention and the complex and tedious bargaining process surrounding decisions to intervene.