Security and Conflict Studies at The George Washington University. His book Targeting Civilians in War (2008) won the Joseph Lepgold Prize awarded by Georgetown University for the best book in international relations published in that year.
Downes applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Catastrophic Success consists of a figure that shows the effect of experiencing a foreign-imposed regime change on the likelihood of a civil war occuring in that country over the ensuing decade. The figure, which is derived from a data set of all country-years from 1816 to 2008, demonstrates that suffering a regime change at the hands of a foreign power more than doubles the probability that a civil war breaks out over the following ten years. It also shows that different types of regime changes have different effects. Regime changes in which outsiders install a new (usually autocratic) leader have the largest effect on the likelihood of civil war, increasing it more than threefold. Regime changes that construct political institutions in addition to emplacing new leaders have a smaller positive effect, whereas such interventions that restore the most recent leader to power (typically reversing a coup or a regime change by another power) have no impact on the probability of civil war.Visit Alexander B. Downes's website.
Anyone opening the book to page 99 would get a partial but somewhat misleading idea about the book as a whole. Page 99 is in the chapter on foreign-imposed regime change and civil war. But the book also includes chapters on how regime change affects the tenure of imposed leaders (they are more likely to be overthrown violently) and its effect on relations between the regime changer and its target (on average they do not improve, and regime changes that empower new leaders without institutional support increase the likelihood that the two states engage in militarized conflict).
The theory in my book explains these unhappy outcomes through two mechanisms. The first, which I call military disintegration, argues that foreign invasions for regime change sometimes cause the armies in target states to collapse and scatter. The dispersal of armed men around the country (e.g., Iraq in 2003) or across a border (e.g., Afghanistan in 2001) provides the raw material for ousted leaders or their allies to launch an insurgency against the new government and/or the foreign occupier. The second, which I refer to as the problem of competing principals, observes that while foreign-imposed regime change is meant to install leaders with similar preferences to the intervener's, it overlooks the fact that there is a second player in the game--the domestic public in the target state, which typically holds different preferences. Because the preferences of the new leader's internal and external "principals" diverge, and each can threaten the leader's survival in office, the leader faces a difficult dilemma: no matter what he does, he is likely to anger one or the other. If the leader hews to the intervener's wishes, internal conflict is the likely result; if she adheres to the domestic public's views, conflict (or at best poor relations) with the intervener is the likely outcome.
--Marshal Zeringue
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