Robert Pape
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Robert Anthony Pape, Jr. (b. 1960), is an American political scientist for his work on international security affairs, especially strategic air power and suicide terrorism. He currently is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.
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[edit] Academic career
Pape graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pittsburgh in 1982, majoring in political science, and earned his Ph. D. from the University of Chicago in 1988 in the same field. During his doctoral program he was a teaching assistant for a class taught by high profile, realist school scholar of international relations John Mearsheimer. He taught international relations at Dartmouth College from 1991 to 1996 and air power strategy at the United States Air Force's School of Advanced Airpower Studies from 1996 to 1999. Since 1999 he has taught at the University of Chicago, where is now tenured. He defines the focus of his current work as, "the effect of technological change on conflict and cooperation among major powers and the theory and practice of suicide terrorism." After presenting preliminary data on his research into suicide terrorism in the American Political Science Review in 2003, Pape founded the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, which he directs. The project is funded by the Carnegie Corporation, the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the University of Chicago, and the Argonne National Laboratory.
[edit] On air power
Pape's writings criticize the idea that wars can be won through air power alone. He argues that the use of air power for punishment, that is, attacking civilian and economic targets, such as in Operation Rolling Thunder or the fire-bombing of Japan in 1945, has almost universally failed in coercing targets. Instead, Pape suggests that successful usage of air power has come when it is used against conventional military targets and denies the target the ability to achieve their aims, such as in Operation Linebacker.
Pape also argues that air power and land power should be used together in a "hammer and anvil" fashion. In Pape's model, enemy land forces faced with both air and land power will be forced to either mass, and therefore be vulnerable to attack from the air, or will be forced to scatter, and therefore be vulnerable to being mopped up by land power. Pape cites certain battles in Afghanistan as examples of a hammer and anvil approach.
[edit] On suicide terrorism
Pape's Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism controverts many widely held beliefs about suicide terrorism. Based on an analysis of every known case of suicide terrorism from 1980 to 2003 (315 campaigns and 462 individuals), he concludes that there is "little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world’s religions. . . . Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland" (p. 4). "The taproot of suicide terrorism is nationalism," he argues; it is "an extreme strategy for national liberation" (pp. 79-80). Pape's work examines groups as diverse as the Basque ETA to the the Sri Lankan, Tamil Tigers. This has lead to criticism by other scholars that his finding of the importance of nationalism as a motivating ideology for terror is only relevant on a macro-statistical level, when in reality, most nations are only concerned with the motivations of a given group. For instance, the United States government exhibits more concern towards the inner workings of the Al Queda terrorist network than that of the nationally irrelevant, Irish Republican Army. Pape also notably provides further evidence to a growing body of literature that finds that the majority of suicide terrorists do not come from impovershed background, but rather have middle class origins.
[edit] Books by Robert A. Pape
- Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War. Cornell University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-8014-3134-4 (hardcover). ISBN 0-8014-8311-5 (paperback).
- Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. New York: Random House, 2005. ISBN 1-4000-6317-5 (hardcover). London: Gibson Square 2006 (updated). ISBN 978-1-903933-40-4 (hardcover)link title.
[edit] Book[s] about Robert A. Pape
- Precision and Purpose: Debating Robert A. Pape's Bombing to Win, edited by Jonathan Frankel. Frank Cass Publishers, 2004. ISBN 0-7146-8108-3
[edit] Articles
- "Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work," International Security 22.2 (Fall 1997).
- "Why Economic Sanctions Still Do Not Work," International Security 23.1 (Summer 1998).
- "The Determinants of International Moral Action," International Organization 53.4 (Autumn 1999).
- "The True Worth of Air Power," Foreign Affairs (March/April 2004).
- "Hit or Miss," an exchange with Merrill A. McPeak, Foreign Affairs (September/October 2004).
- "Blowing Up an Assumption," New York Times, May 18, 2005. (Summarizes the ideas of Dying to Win.)
[edit] Articles about Robert A. Pape
- "A Scholarly Look at Terror Sees Bootprints in the Sand," Washington Post, July 10, 2005.
