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This paper offers a theory of military retrenchment by states in relative decline. I argue that a declining state will choose to withdraw foreign military deployments and security commitments when there exists a suitable regional 'successor' to which it can devolve its current responsibilities. The degree of a successor's suitability and the strategic importance of the region to the declining state interact to determine when and how rapidly retrenchment will occur. Importantly, this devolutionary model of retrenchment predicts significant variations in retrenchment patterns across a declining state's multiple regional commitments. It advances the literature by producing nuanced predictions of precisely where, when, and how quickly retrenchment will occur. This paper assesses the theory empirically through an examination of Great Britain's varying regional retrenchment strategies prior to World War I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In October 1916, the French government agreed with Armenian political elites to establish a Légion of Armenian volunteers in British Cyprus to fight the common Ottoman enemy. Despite British, French, and even Armenian rejections of such a Légion during different times throughout 1915 and early 1916, all sides overcame earlier concerns. Understanding how they managed to overcome these concerns will allow for this little-known episode in the history of the Great War in the eastern Mediterranean to contribute to the knowledge on (1) the complex French and British wartime stances towards this region, driven by imperialism and humanitarianism; (2) the ability of local elites to draw concessions from the Allies; (3) the important role played by local British and French colonial and military officers; and (4) broader historiographical debates on the responses to the Armenian Genocide. This article explores the origins of how the Entente co-opted Armenians in their eastern Mediterranean campaigns, but also made them into pawns in the French and British reinvention of their imperial rivalry in this region in order to achieve their post-war imperialist agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that the legitimacy and the effectiveness of privateering in the mid-eighteenth-century Mediterranean were determined by high politics beyond the indispensable war status. After the presentation of four distinctive privateering stories involving individuals of different backgrounds, there follows an analysis of the Ottoman, French, and British factors that determined national and private interests in wartime Archipelago (the Aegean Islands). As the Ottoman Empire was the major commercial partner and a potentially desirable ally for both the French and the British, especially for the Levant Company, privateers were trapped between conflicting interests, beyond their own comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]