Talk:Robert Pape

Methodologists Vs. Pape
Currently the criticism of Dying to win section suggests Pape won his argument against the Princeton methodologists. This is widely regarded as untrue, even at Chicago.

See Pape's response http://www.princeton.edu/~kramsay/Site/research_files/pape-respon.pdf And the Princeton rejoinder http://www.princeton.edu/~kramsay/Site/research_files/rejoinder3.pdf —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.187.223.80 (talk) 04:25, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Copyright Violation
There is an article Robert Pape that should be removed and redirected here, as it is a copyright violation of his uchicago bio and contains much less information than this article. Rlove 16:43, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
 * I redirected Robert Pape to this article. It had absolutely no useful information not found in this article and was a copyvio. Rlove 17:14, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Name Change
I could not find this article originally because of the middle initial. We have a redirect now, as well as some categories, but people seaching for "Robert Pape" are very unlikely to type in his middle initial. Palm_Dogg 18:33, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
 * I originally had the same inability to find this page. But I removed "Robert Pape" altogether in fixing the copyright violation and redirected it here.  So the ambiguity is resolved.  If you want to switch which of the two is the "official" article, that is fine, and I even agree, but I don't think it is a pressing need to move the article anymore. Rlove 19:12, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Moved. WhiteNight T 23:51, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Removed image(s)
Certian images have been removed by me because they have been added to a category that makes them speediable, most likely Category:Images with no copyright tag. Kilo-Lima|(talk) 16:48, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Inconsistent Information
I removed a paragraph under the Dying to Win section. The information was inconsistent with the qualitative findings of the book. Pape wants his page to be edit with his approval only. Is this possible? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jhoman (talk • contribs) 18:43, 21 January 2010 (UTC)


 * No and I dont see why that information was removed. Critical review of a scholarly work is generally permitted so long as the review itself is notable, and at a glance, this criticism is. Bonewah (talk) 19:43, 21 January 2010 (UTC)


 * No, Pape doesn't get veto power over his article. However, on the substance of the edit, I agree with Jhoman. The concluding sentence that Jhoman removed does not follow from what is said about the American Political Science Review article. Moreover, it is rare in academia that one would say anyone has "conclusively demonstrated" anything. There is no reason to think that this journal article is any more conclusive than any other one. Academic38 (talk) 03:54, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

POV in Bombing to Win section
As of July 27, 2013 the Bombing to Win section included an unsourced controversial claim stated as fact: "Pape rejects the German Rotterdam Blitz, the Bombing of Belgrade in World War II and even 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (after the event) had strategic effect. In fact the operations had forced the Dutch, Yugoslavs, and Serbs into capitulation rapidly; in the case of the 1999 air strikes, by air power alone." There are multiple problems with the phrase "In fact":
 * It doesn't have a citation. Even without the words, "In fact", a strong claim of veracity on a disputed issue clearly violates Wikipedia policy regarding writing from a neutral point of view. without substantial citations the clearly establish that the broad consensus of professional opinion holds that Pape is wrong on the points in question.  No such citations are provided, and I doubt if any such consensus exists.  It would help to have references.
 * It's not obvious what the facts are.
 * Different people viewing the same events will rarely agree completely on what happened, i.e., on "the facts".
 * There is an entire body of thought that questions the very existence of "facts". First, there is René Descartes's famous comment that, "I think, therefore I am." In sociology this extends to social constructionism.  In industry any science, this extends to the concept of operational definition.  Regarding the latter, W. Edwards Deming famously said that there is no true value to any number that is obtained as a result of a measurement:  Change the method of measurement, get a different answer.

Accordingly, I'm changing the wording to something more neutral. DavidMCEddy (talk) 16:59, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Routinely challenged
As of July 17, 2013, the intro to this article ended, "Pape's findings on suicide terrorism have routinely been challenged by scholars who have identified potential methodological flaws with his conclusions." I've searched the academic literature, not just Google, for research challenging his work. I've not found much. I believe it is a gross overstatement to claim that his work has "routinely been challenged"; I'm removing the word "routinely".

Ashworth is on target with his concern about research without a control group / sampling on the dependent variable. However, most "routine" criticisms I've seen of his work have in my judgment displayed a failure to carefully read and consider what Pape wrote. For example, prior to July 16, 2013, the article on Suicide attacks claimed that, "Characteristics which Pape thought to be correlated to suicide bombing and bombers included: Islam, especially the influence of Salafi Islam". Anyone who has done more than a cursory review of Pape's work knows that he clearly rules out religion as a primary motivator of suicide terrorism: He says that suicide terrorists are motivated primarily by a foreign occupation that threatens local culture. His "Dying to Win" includes an section on Salafi Islam: "So follower of Iranian or Iraqi Shi'ism has ever become an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist." (p. 106) "However, when we examine the effect of the absolute number of the Salafi-influenced population on the absolute number of terrorists from any country, the effect is not statistically significant" (p. 111).

Pape's work, combined with that of Erica Chenoweth, is a major threat to Military-industrial complex, because it suggests that the only uses of violence that are clearly effective in promoting the long-term well-being of the vast majority of humanity are those that are clearly defensive against obviously violent and dangerous people. All other uses of violence run major risks of being counterproductive by driving people off the sidelines to support the opposition. When police kill people who are not an obvious threat, they convince others not to cooperate with the police. Military operations with substantial "collateral damage" often have the same effect as the London Blitz did for Hitler: Manufacture more recruits for his opposition than he could manage. Today, this is only a conjecture. I mention it, because many individuals and organizations today pay people to distort Wikipedia articles in their favor. We need to be careful regarding what is said about Pape, because some of it is clearly not true and could be planted by people whose power in the short term may depend on Pape's research being misunderstood. DavidMCEddy (talk) 01:57, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

It it seems to be nonsensical to claim that Pape sampled only the dependent variable (a buzzword it appears for choosing evidence that supports your case and rejecting evidence that does not) as Ashworth claimed. He chose ALL attacks from 1980 to 2003. It is conceivable that anything that opposes the agenda of those that profit from mobilization (such as arms manufacturers and those printing money to lend to Governments to fight terrorism and thereby getting their pilfering fingers on taxes or real money paid back to them) would oppose such a notion. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.199.125.230 (talk) 22:02, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Grammar fault in quote from Cutting the Fuse
Might someone else be able to check p. 333 of Cutting the Fuse to check the third of four indented quotes from that book?

This quote includes the phrase, "the terrorists organization's campaign". My sense of English grammar suggests this should be either, "the terrorist organization's campaign" or "the terrorists' organization's campaign". In other words, "terrorist" here should either be singular or plural possessive, but not plural, because it seems more like an adjective than a noun in this context. I suspect this quote may be miscopied.

I don't have the book, and I don't know how I can check it without buying it, and I'm not ready to do that.

Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 21:57, 19 March 2017 (UTC)