Faculty

Profile

Solomon Major (CV) is research analyst and professor in the Strategic Research Department (SRD).   Before coming to SRD, Dr. Major taught for two years in the War College's National Security Affairs Department and, prior to coming to Newport, he spent the previous three years instructing at University of California, Santa Barbara's Department of Political Science. 

Dr. Major received his PhD from Stanford University with a focus in International Political Economy; Dr. Major also holds a Master's degree from Georgetown University in National Security Studies. Dr. Major has published on humanitarian NGOs, international economic sanctions and ethnic conflict.  He continues to work on economic sanctions and has projects and research ongoing on international trade and international humanitarianism and development.

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Published articles:

The Politics of Private Foreign Aid: Humanitarian Principles, Economic Development Objectives,
and Organizational Interests in the Allocation of Private Aid by NGOs.  International Organization.  Forthcoming.  With Tim Büthe and André  de Mello e Souza.
ABSTRACT: The Politics of Private Foreign Aid: Humanitarian Principles, Economic Development Objectives, and Organizational Interests in the Allocation of Private Aid by NGOs A large and increasing share of international humanitarian and development aid comes from non-governmental sources and is allocated by transnational NGOs. Yet, we know little about this private foreign aid, not even how it is distributed across recipient countries, much less what explains the allocation. This paper presents an original dataset, based on detailed financial records from most of the major U.S.-based humanitarian and development NGOs, which allows us to map and analyze the allocation of private aid. We find no support for the common claim that aid NGOs systematically prioritize their organizational self-interest and fundraising opportunities when they allocate private aid, and we find only limited support for the hypothesis that expected aid effectiveness drives aid allocation. By contrast, we find strong support for the argument that the deeply rooted humanitarian discourse within and among aid NGOs drives their aid allocation, consistent with a view of aid NGOs as principled actors and constructivist theories of international relations. Recipients' humanitarian need is substantively and statistically the most significant determinant of aid allocation (beyond a regional effect among U.S. NGOs in favor of Latin American countries). This finding is robust to the use of several different measures of aid recipients' objective need and to the inclusion of controls for numerous other possible explanations. Materialist concerns thus do not crowd out ethical norms among these NGOs.

Timing is Everything: Economic Sanctions, Regime-Type and Domestic Instability.   International Interactions.  Winter 2012.  Vol 38 No. 1.

The Perils of Profiling:  Civil War Spoilers and the Collapse of Intrastate Peace Accords.  International Security.   Winter 2006/2007.  Vol. 31 No. 3: pp. 7-40.   With Kelly Greenhill.

Caught in the Crossfire: “Innocent Bystanders” as Optimal Targets of Economic Sanctions.  The Journal of Conflict Resolution.  July 2005.  Vol. 49 No. 3: pp. 337-359.   With Anthony J. McGann. 
ABSTRACT: Current sanctions orthodoxy argues that groups’ ability to set policy depends on their total budget. According to such a perspective, successful sanctions must target the unfriendly within the target countries while shielding “innocent bystanders” from harm. The authors argue that the focus on groups’ aggregate budget constraint and the war-of-attrition view of policy formation misconceives of how policies are determined. The most effective groups to sanction will be those whose spending has the greatest marginal effect on policy. The authors show that this will often be the very innocent bystanders that prevailing theories have argued must be protected. Although this conclusion is conditional on their level of institutional empowerment and their having sufficient resources to make an impact on policy if properly motivated, when these initial conditions are met, a sanctions design can be specified with a high degree of prospective utility for sender states.

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Select Working Papers:

Sharpening Our Plowshares: Bridging the Gap between Military and NGO Humanitarian Aid-Givers.
ABSTRACT: The growing importance of the humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HA/DR) mission for the U.S. Navy has increased the interactions between those in uniform and the nongovernmental organization
(NGO) community. Although collaboration between these two communities has realized some
significant successes in cooperation burden-sharing, this maturing relationship has too often been
plagued by mistrust and misunderstandings. I argue that the military’s default solution to this friction,
STRATCOM that emphasizes common goals between uniformed and NGO aid-givers, is often unsuited to
bridge the gap(s) that exist between these communities. This is because the root of the problem is not
one of misunderstanding, but it rather represents a fundamental divide in perspective between those
who act according to a logic of consequence (the military), where actions are motivated by the ends
sought, and those that operate under a logic of appropriateness (humanitarian NGOs), where actions
are dictated by the “rightness” of the means employed. By developing the basis for these conflicting
logics, this paper suggests a new perspective on the military-NGO divide and offers some concrete
suggestions for reducing it—or at least moderate the worst of its effects in future HR/DA missions.

(Almost) Everything You Know About Economic Sanctions is Wrong.

To Spite Your Face: Artificial Factor Scarcity and International Trade.  With Anthony J. McGann.