Robert Pape

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Robert Anthony Pape, Jr. (born 1960), is an American political scientist known for his work on international security affairs, especially strategic air power and suicide terrorism. He is currently 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[1] where he was a Harry S Truman Scholar from the state of Pennsylvania, 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 the high-profile realist international relations scholar John Mearsheimer. He taught international relations at Dartmouth College from 1991 to 1999 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 he is now tenured.[1] He defines the focus of his current work as "the causes of suicide terrorism and the politics of unipolarity."[1] 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.[2]

[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 firebombing 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 integrated and 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 (2005) contradicts many widely held beliefs about suicide terrorism. Based on an analysis of every known case of suicide terrorism from 1980 to 2005 (315 attacks as part of 18 campaigns), 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 Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers. Pape also notably provides further evidence to a growing body of literature that finds that the majority of suicide terrorists do not come from impoverished or uneducated background, but rather have middle class origins and a significant level of education.

In a criticism of Pape's link between occupation and suicide terrorism, an article titled "Design, Inference, and the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism" (published in The American Political Science Review), authors Scott Ashworth, Joshua D. Clinton, Adam Meirowitz, and Kristopher W. Ramsay from Princeton charged Pape with "sampling on the dependent variable" by limiting research only to cases in which suicide terror was used.[3] In a response to the article, Pape asserted that he dealt with these objections sufficiently in his book, and that he had not sampled at all, but rather included the universe of suicide terrorist attacks.[4]

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c http://political-science.uchicago.edu/faculty/pape.shtml
  2. ^ "A Scholarly Look at Terror Sees Bootprints In the Sand" By Caryle Murphy Washington Post, July 10, 2005; D01
  3. ^ American Political Science Review , Volume 102, Issue 02, May 2008, pp 269-273.
  4. ^ American Political Science Review , Volume 102, Issue 02, May 2008, pp 275-277.

[edit] Selected publications

[edit] Books by Robert A. Pape

[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 (not yet published)

[edit] Articles

[edit] Articles about Robert A. Pape

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