Assessing teen risk behavior and later drug use

Gemstone Team Risky Business

Crises and Crisis Generations: International Conflict and Military Participation in Politics

Why do states facing high levels of international threat sometimes have militaries that are heavily involved in politics and at other times relatively apolitical, professional militaries? I argue that the answer to this puzzle lies in a state's history of 'acute' international crises rather than its 'chronic' threat environment. Major international crises lead to professionalization and de-politicization of militaries in both the short- and long-term. International crises underscore the need for the military to defend the state and highlight military deficiencies in this regard. Accordingly, major international crises lead to military professionalization and withdrawal from politics in order to increase military effectiveness. This effect persists years, and decades, later due to generational shifts in the officer corps. As the "Crisis Generation" of officers become generals, they bring with them a preference for professionalization and de-politicization. They guide the military towards abstention from politics. I test this theory using a new global dataset on military officers in national governing bodies from 1964-2008 and find strong support for the theory. Major international crises lead to two waves of military withdrawal from government, years apart. Further statistical analysis finds that this effect is most strongly felt in the non-security areas of governing, while in some cases, international crises may lead to militaries increasing their involvement in security policy-making. Further, international crises that end poorly for a state — i.e., defeats or stalemates — are found to drive more rapid waves of military withdrawal from government. The statistical analysis is supported by a case illustration of civil-military relations in the People's Republic of China, which demonstrates that the crisis of the Korean War (1950-53) led to two waves of military professionalization and de-politicization, decades apart. The first occurred immediately after the war. The second wave, occurring in the 1980s, involved wholesale military withdrawal from governing bodies, which was made possible by the ascent of the "Crisis Generation" of officers in the military, who had served as junior officers in the Korean War, decades prior.

RISKS TO FOOD AVAILABILITY AND ACCESS FROM CLIMATE POLICIES: AN INTEGRATED ASSESSMENT OF REGIONAL FOOD AVAILABILITY AND ACCESS WITH ALTERNATIVE CLIMATE MITIGATION STRATEGIES TO 2050

Although mitigating GHG emissions is necessary to reduce the overall negative climate change impacts on crop yields and agricultural production, certain mitigation measures may generate unintended consequences to food availability and access due to land use competition and economic burden of mitigation. Prior studies have examined the co-impacts on food availability and global producer prices caused by alternative climate policies. More recent studies have looked at the reduction in total caloric intake driven by both changing income and changing food prices under one specific climate policy. However, due to inelastic calorie demand, consumers’ well-being are likely further reduced by increased food expenditures. Built upon existing literature, my dissertation explores how alternative climate policy designs might adversely affect both caloric intake and staple food budget share to 2050, by using the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) and a post-estimated metric of food availability and access (FAA). My dissertation first develop a set of new metrics and methods to explore new perspectives of food availability and access under new conditions. The FAA metric consists of two components, the fraction of GDP per capita spent on five categories of staple food and total caloric intake relative to a reference level. By testing the metric against alternate expectations of the future, it shows consistent results with previous studies that economic growth dominates the improvement of FAA. As we increase our ambition to achieve stringent climate targets, two policy conditions tend to have large impacts on FAA driven by competing land use and increasing food prices. Strict conservation policies leave the competition between bioenergy and agriculture production on existing commercial land, while pricing terrestrial carbon encourages large-scale afforestation. To avoid unintended outcomes to food availability and access for the poor, pricing land emissions in frontier forests has the advantage of selecting more productive land for agricultural activities compared to the full conservation approach, but the land carbon price should not be linked to the price of energy system emissions. These results are highly relevant to effective policy-making to reduce land use change emissions, such as the Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD).