Author: Steven Bernstein
Date Published: 14 December 2020

Map 1: The Taiwan Strait

Introduction

Taiwan faces an existential threat from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The PRC views Taiwan as a renegade province subject to eventual “reunification,” by force if necessary. The Taiwan “liberation” campaign was etched into the fabric of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) by Mao Zedong during the early days of the PRC. It defines the lives of its top-level officers, “providing their military service with purpose and value.” The PLA’s main strategic direction is to “prepare for conflict with Taiwan and to deal with US intervention in such a scenario.” In 2019, General Secretary Xi Jinping stated, “political division across the [Taiwan] strait… cannot be passed on from generation to generation.” The PRC is unwavering in its irredentist desire to achieve “national reunification” by ending seven decades of self-rule in Taiwan. Although this unresolved issue has lingered for decades, its relevance will only increase as the PRC’s standing rises in the world.

The future of Taiwan is not only pertinent to Greater China. Any conflict in the Taiwan Strait would ostensibly involve the US. The US government does not officially recognize PRC sovereignty over Taiwan and considers its status to be unresolved. The Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) neither guarantees nor relinquishes the ability of the US to intervene militarily in the event of a cross-Strait conflict. The TRA states, “The United States shall make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capacity as determined by the President and the Congress.” Although the TRA is not as binding as a mutual defense treaty, it makes it clear that US intervention is possible, perhaps even likely, if the PRC uses force. In addition to the TRA, the US supports Taiwan for geostrategic reasons. The existence of a US-friendly regime in Taiwan is of immense strategic value considering its pivotal location adjacent to the PRC. Taiwan serves as an impediment, complicating PRC efforts to establish dominance over the Western Pacific. 

Given Taiwan’s precarious security situation, it should not be surprising that its military has been planning for full-scale conflict with the PLA for decades. Taiwan’s prior conventional defense strategy and its current asymmetric strategy are well documented, but certain aspects are classified. In recent years, the implementation of cutting-edge technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI), revamped Taiwan’s defense strategy. The integration of AI into weapons and military operations is a global trend that will alter the way many future wars are fought. 

In order to better grasp the significance of weaponized AI more broadly, consider the emphasis the US has placed on it. In 2014, the Obama Administration implemented the Third Offset Strategy. In general, offset strategies use technology to overcome the military advantages of adversaries. Its principles are twofold: to have the military technological might to win or deter war if necessary. One of the core objectives of the Third Offset Strategy is to cultivate the most advanced AI technologies and apply them extensively to weapons and military operations. For context, the First Offset Strategy was implemented by President Eisenhower to achieve technological superiority in nuclear weapons, and the Second Offset Strategy, initiated by President Ford, resulted in the creation of modern precision-guided munitions and the global positioning system (GPS). In the face of the rapidly advancing military technological capabilities of the PRC and Russia, the US is hedging its bets on weaponized AI. The Third Offset Strategy is not actually unique. Similar initiatives have been established around the world, including Taiwan. 

The following sections will discuss the PRC’s war plan, Taiwan’s transition from a conventional defense strategy to an asymmetric strategy, as well as delve into Taiwan’s use of weaponized AI and its implications. In doing so, this paper will answer the following question: “In what ways will AI help Taiwan compel the PLA to fight a long-term conflict?” Lengthening the duration of the conflict is a strategic goal for Taiwan because if the US decides to intervene, its corresponding military actions may not occur instantly. Defense planners in Taiwan must prepare to fend for themselves in case US intervention is delayed or fails to materialize altogether. Aside from the prospect of US intervention, it would be advantageous for Taiwan to prolong the conflict because strong actors have lost nearly 64 percent of protracted asymmetric conflicts since 1950.

The scenario Taiwan faces is not entirely unique. It can be summed up in military terms as defending fortified beaches and other positions from amphibious landings. This project will contribute to the broader field by researching the role AI will play in such a defense scenario. This may be relevant to island-nations like Japan and the Philippines. Additionally, countries involved in the South China Sea (SCS) territorial disputes may be interested in using AI to mitigate the risk of having their islands overrun by the PLA. 

Author: Jacob Winn
Date Published: 4 April 2021

Jacob Winn’s full paper can be found in the Spring 2021 Issue of the Cornell International Affairs Review (CIAR) here.

Populism—the political appeal made by, or on behalf of, ‘ordinary citizens’ against political elites—swept across Europe after the Great Recession. Globalization, an exodus of youth from rural areas, and loss of traditional manufacturing jobs economically and socially displaced communities across the continent. Concurrently, European governments implemented broad austerity measures that reduced government program success in the name of economic growth. Alongside rising waves of internal and external migration, these factors granted a modern group of far-right political parties more electoral success in national and European Parliamentary elections compared to recent decades. This phenomenon is most visible in the United Kingdom, where the Brexit movement, referendum, and recent withdrawal from the European Union demonstrated the great influence that populist movements have on a country’s politics and policies.

The Brexit movement took root within the Conservative Party, and after a period of infighting, its disciples have come to dominate both the Party in Parliament and the Party’s electorate. Where David Cameron’s premiership promoted austerity and social liberalism—his party led the charge for same-sex marriage legalization less than a decade ago—Boris Johnson’s Government has shifted. So far, Johnson has focused on implementing policies from the neglected mid-twentieth-century tradition of “One-Nation Conservatism”: The paternalistic Conservative ethos that the government has a duty to provide a good life—thus ensuring the provision and longevity of the British way of life. At the same time, Johnson’s government is more socially conservative, moving to implement a points-based immigration system. On the part of the electorate, a similar shift has occurred: While Conservatives abandoned their hold on most urban areas, they have ubiquitously penetrated the Labour Party’s “Red Wall” in the English North significantly by promising to “Get Brexit Done”. This vowed to ensure the North its traditional heartland status, and by running non-elite, local candidates who promised to ‘shake up’ London-centric politics.

With all of this in mind, I sought to shed more light on how these changes play out. Scholarship has explored populism at length—including European populism—but has not yet provided detailed accounts on how a populist movement co-opts an existing political order, as these ideas co-opted the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom. In my research project, I asked the following question: Why has the Conservative Party changed so markedly in the years following the Brexit referendum, and what explains the Party’s rhetorical and general policy changes as well as its factional shifts?

I placed my research within an ongoing scholarly debate on the causes of modern populism. One school of thought views voters as “demanders” of populism that set the agenda for what populist leaders will discuss, while another school of thought views parties and elites as the key “suppliers.” However, a new school of thought, which I call the ‘Third Way’ approach, looks more directly at the relationships between voters and politicians. Building on these scholars’ work, I designed a study focusing its attention on what I call ‘Party Actors’: The Parliamentary or party staffers, youth group members, and local Councilors that sit in the middle of the Party and the electorate. I used a semi-structured, qualitative approach towards my fifteen interviewees, and conducted a thematic analysis on their answers.

The first of my two key findings was a feedback loop between the English working class and the Conservative Party: As the Conservative Party became dominated by ‘anti-elite rhetoric’, it fled increasingly left-wing urban areas towards rural, formerly Labour strongholds in the English North that experienced a lack of ‘acknowledgement’ from elites. Workers who felt that globalization and London-centrism was harming their way of life highly preferred to vote for ‘people like them’ instead of urban elites. The new class of Members of Parliament, with its empowered majority, claims the mandate to represent these voters and promises to ensure their best interest: Northern renewal, local healthcare, restricted immigration, and more police officers to protect them. All-in-all, there has been a “decoupling of political authorities and citizens” in the lead-up to Brexit, continued between Conservative Party’s political authorities and its voters until the 2019 election. The resulting political realignment has placed the Conservative Party in its most advantageous electoral position in decades and realigned the core ideological tenets within the party.

My second finding was what my interviewees and I called a “libertarian-authoritarian dichotomy.” Without morally loading the terms, a ‘libertarian Conservative’ was described as someone who supports an increasingly small role for the government in the economy and people’s social lives, while an ‘authoritarian Conservative’ is increasingly willing to intervene in economic or social affairs, such as by expanding the NHS, while restricting immigration. Most libertarian Conservatives in Parliament sought to remain in the European Union: Today, they have either resigned, or gone silent as Johnson chose his cabinet from the ‘Get Brexit Done’ loyalists of the 2019 Parliamentary election campaign. Voters viewed authoritarian Conservatives as people who could ‘lead Britain better than the EU could,’ though interviewees also noted that their new electorate considered Johnson’s Conservative Party to represent them better than the London-based ‘Etonians’ or alumni from ‘Oxbridge’.

This research explicates the burst of populism seen across Europe and helps explain the post-Brexit political realignment in the U.K. Future research should focus on applying the Third Way approach and ‘libertarian-authoritarian dichotomy’ cross-nationally, whether by looking at Brazil’s Bolsonaro, France’s National Rally Party, Mexico’s MORENA, or the United States’ Donald Trump.

Policy makers interested in “inoculating” their populations against populism might also consider implementing economic and social policies preventing the grievances that lead to the ‘Worker-Party feedback loop’ that this research describes—preventing the decoupling of citizens from political authorities as seen in the United Kingdom. Such policies might rigorously re-invest in opportunities for communities and regions that have been ‘left behind’ by globalization; lawmakers should also consider combating regional and individual income inequality. Doing so may ensure that their country’s citizens feel that they can achieve a high quality of life without having to leave their homes or communities, and may generate feelings of respect from national leaders.

Finally, on the supranational level, anti-European Union populism seems to arise when stagnant wages, high unemployment, underdeveloped infrastructure, and perceived erosion of culture can be blamed on “elites”—especially when these elites are of a different national origin. To the extent that austerity policies provoke these conditions, these policies must be either avoided or mitigated by all national governments and political parties that are concerned with a political turn against democratic norms. Finally, in the medium to long-term, policymakers within the European Union can adapt to Euroscepticism through further democratizing reforms that empower the European Parliament and engage in deeper MEP constituent services, bringing Europe to the local level. By recognizing constituencies on a more local basis, the ‘European Union’ can come to be seen not as synonymous with “elite”, but as a “protector of Europe” that fits more comfortably within countries’ national self-identities.

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Author: John Salchak
Date Published: 15 October 2021

Abstract

Established in 1998, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a private multistakeholder technical organization that oversees critical internet infrastructure. This project has theoretical and empirical goals regarding ICANN. Theoretically, this paper will present a framework through which domain name allocation and assignment, a task conducted by ICANN, becomes a public policy problem. Empirically, this paper will use two historical case studies to investigate how the multistakeholder model of governance functions at ICANN regarding political issues of domain name allocation. Through both case studies, this paper finds that states tend to have an outsized role in the ICANN multistakeholder model. ICANN tends to defer to the wishes of states, even if doing so constitutes a violation of its own rules and procedures. Despite this, accountability mechanisms can be used to prompt ICANN to overturn its initial decisions and adhere to its established rules and procedures, thereby reducing the influence of states in the multistakeholder process.   

Author: Nicolas Reeves
Date Published: 28 September 2021

In the winter of 1838-1839, a detachment of Mohammed Ali Pasha’s Egyptian army marched north from Aqaba to Petra, whose Nabataean ruins had become a sought-after travel destination for European orientalists after Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt “rediscovered” the city in 1812. The troops’ mission was to subdue a small local tribe that had caused some unrest in the area for charging these visitors exorbitant fees to guarantee safe passage to the ruins.¹

The Egyptians were forced to retreat soon after arriving in Petra, a shocking setback for a force that had driven the army of Sultan Mahmud II out of Ottoman Syria just six years before, nearly overrunning the imperial capital of Constantinople in the process. John Kinnear, a Scottish traveler who visited Petra that year, recounted the misery the troops experienced as they camped among the city’s Nabataean ruins: 

For several days the valley appeared to be entirely deserted, and, but for the little cultivated spaces among the ruins, as utterly desolate as if it had remained for ages unoccupied except by the vultures, which wheeled their airy circles over the ruined city. Not a night however passed during which some of the tents were not robbed, and the arms stolen, as if by some invisible hand; and even one or two soldiers, who had imprudently strayed from the encampment, were carried off, and never returned.²

This “invisible hand” belonged to the Bdoul tribe, whose leader was the inimitable Sheikh Imqaibel Abu Zeitun al-Fuqara. By foiling the Egyptian punitive expedition, Abu Zeitun reaffirmed the Bdoul’s sovereignty over Petra, and with it, the tribe’s right to extract payments from foreigners who came to visit the city. 

Figure 1: A map of the Petra region. 

One hundred eighty years later, the situation could not be more different. During his reign, Abu Zeitun’s might had relegated the Layathna tribe of Wadi Musa to cultivating the distant land around al-Hayy (see Figure 1). However, the reestablishment of Ottoman rule over Syria after the Egyptians vacated the Levant in 1841 eventually precipitated a shift in the balance of power between the tribes of the Petra region.³ Today, the Layathna dominate Petra’s administrative apparatus, called the Petra Development and Tourism Region Authority (PDTRA). Compared to other groups in the Petra region, Wadi Musans also enjoy unparalleled access to work as tour guides, souvenir sellers, hotel managers, restaurant owners, and other forms of formal employment within the tourism industry.⁴ Moreover, PDTRA officials, Layathna sheikhs, and entrepreneurs from the tribe challenge the legitimacy of Bdoul efforts to benefit economically from visitor flows to the city, describing their work in the tourism sector as “destructive,” “illegal,” and fomenting “chaos.” 

Layathna entrepreneurs even cast doubt upon the Bdoul’s status as members of the region’s indigenous community. In 2019, for instance, Abu Dhiab, a Layathna tribesman who sells horse rides to tourists, remarked to me: 

A long time ago, Petra was ruled by the Ottomans. The Layathna were the ones who fought and removed the Ottomans from Petra. Because of this, Emir Abdallah [the founder of Jordan] gave Petra to the Layathna…. The Bdoul came to Petra between 1935 and 1940. Before that, they lived [80 kilometers to the south,] in al-Hamayma.⁵

Why is it possible for Layathna narratives to baselessly question the legitimacy of the Bdoul’s identity and history in the region? To answer this question, it is instructive to explore how power and discourse create and legitimize historical “realities” in the present day.

As part of the semi-structured interview method that I employed during my 2018-2019 fieldwork in Petra, I asked study participants the following question: “What is your tribe’s history in Petra?” Invariably, the Layathna sheikhs with whom I spoke responded with stories about their parents’ and grandparents’ armed resistance to the Ottomans during the Great Arab Revolt, framing their ancestors as the defenders of Petra. Sheikh Abdelqader al-Hassanat stated, 

The Turks did not enter Wadi Musa. They only made it as far as the hills surrounding it, for the tribes had gathered, and by the Grace of God the Almighty, the Turks did not enter the region. Large numbers of them died, but they did not enter. In the final years of the Ottoman Empire, there was tyranny and oppression, so the Wadi Musans resisted; the sheikhs of Wadi Musa refused these politics. 

When I asked Sheikh Abdelqader to elaborate on the history of the Bdoul, his lips twisted into a faint smile. “I don’t know,” he said.

Sheikh Ali al-Bdoul, on the other hand, answered my question about his tribe’s history in Petra as if he knew that I had already spoken with sheikhs and entrepreneurs of the Layathna. Through his historical account, he emphasized his tribe’s connection to the land:

The graves of the grandfathers of our grandfathers are below; they are inside Petra, next to Jabal Haroun. Listen: Wadi Musa…Wadi Musa used to belong to [Sheikh] Auda Abu Taya [of the Howeitat tribal confederation]. He was a companion of Sharif Ali [the eldest son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca and one of the leaders of the Great Arab Revolt]…. We, the people of Wadi Musa, and the people of Baydha all took orders from Auda Abu Taya.

By claiming that “the people of Wadi Musa…took orders from Auda Abu Taya,” Sheikh Ali questioned the Layathna’s historical sovereignty over the Petra region, as well as the tribe’s claimed instrumentality in protecting the area from Turkish tyranny. In doing so, however, Sheikh Ali also placed the Layathna at the center of his narration of the Bdoul’s past. This contrasts sharply with Sheikh Abdelqader’s candid response of “I don’t know” to my question about Bdoul history.

In his study of the Kabyle people of Algeria, Pierre Bourdieu posited that “to make someone a challenge is to credit him with the dignity of a man of honour, since the challenge, as such, requires a riposte and therefore is addressed to a man deemed capable of playing the game of honour.” Moreover, “there is nothing worse than to pass unnoticed: thus, not to salute someone is to treat him like a thing, an animal….” By excluding the Bdoul from his historical narrative, Sheikh Abdelqader forces the tribe “to pass unnoticed,” thus rejecting the supposition of an equality of honor contained in Sheikh Ali’s account, in which claims of Layathna weakness play a central role.⁶

More fundamentally, however, the extent of Bdoul marginalization in Petra is encapsulated less in what Sheikh Ali did say than in what he did not say. Although the Great Arab Revolt took place during a time of Layathna dominance and Bdoul weakness, Sheikh Ali nonetheless focused his narrative of the Bdoul’s history on the years surrounding this event. In other words, Sheikh Ali’s choice reveals that in Petra’s discursive environment, even stories that only tangentially connect the Bdoul to the Revolt are valued as a greater source of present-day legitimacy than oral histories about the exploits of Sheikh Abu Zeitun and other protagonists of the tribe’s golden age. 

The reason for this has to do with the tribal balance of power in Petra today, and with its reinforcement on the national level through historical narratives propagated by the Hashemite regime. Not coincidentally, this regime discourse positions the Hashemite-led Great Arab Revolt as the turning point in Jordan’s history. In this telling, “the four centuries of Ottoman rule, (1516-1918 CE) were a period of general stagnation in Jordan.”⁷ They were brought to an end when, “seeing an opportunity to liberate Arab lands from Turkish oppression…Sharif Hussein bin Ali, Emir of Mecca and King of the Arabs (and great grandfather of King Hussein), launched the Great Arab Revolt.”⁸ Replicated and reinforced through school curricula, national holidays, memorials, and museum exhibitions, this narrative valorizes the efforts of Layathna sheikhs “to liberate Arab lands from Turkish oppression.” Concurrently, this narrative accords only secondary importance to the stories of Sheikh Abu Zeitun, Bdoul dominance over Petra, and other events occurring during the centuries of “stagnation.” Though the Hashemite historical narrative is not the only factor contributing to Bdoul marginalization in Petra in the present day, its pervasiveness and exclusivity helps erase the tribe from Petra’s history, legitimizing unfounded claims like “the Bdoul came to Petra between 1935 and 1940.”

* * *

On April 11, 2021, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan marked the 100^th anniversary of its founding. Central to this celebration was the principle of “The One Family,” which, according to the official website of the centennial festivities, refers to “the melting together of the society’s various elements, irrespective of their origin and affiliation, to form a single Jordanian family, unique in its unity, diversity, and stability.” Al Oudat and Alshboul (2010) and Massad (2001) have criticized previous iterations of this melting-pot rhetoric in Jordan. After all, “unity, diversity, and stability”⁹ are not transformative goals; rather, these words describe a social contract that fails to address the economic and/or political exclusion suffered by Palestinian-Jordanians, refugee communities, and even East Bankers—so-called “ethnic Jordanians”—hailing from less influential families.¹⁰

Building on this argument, I have shown here that the dominant historical narrative in Jordan advances an exclusionary discourse that makes it difficult even for some East-Bank tribes—the Bdoul being a case in point—to root their group identities in contributions to past events that helped shape the country’s present. To realize the qualities of “unity” and “diversity” associated with “The One Family,” a more objective, regime-led reckoning with Jordan’s Ottoman past is necessary. In addition to bringing the pasts of certain marginalized groups of “ethnic Jordanians” into the historical mainstream, such a re-engagement with this time period would also bring to light, for instance, the role that trade with Palestinian and Syrian cities played in the development of the Jordanian story. As for the Bdoul and the Layathna, this author is under no illusions that a more objective Hashemite recounting of Jordan’s Ottoman past would single-handedly resolve the intertribal disputes and inequalities that feature in Petra’s tourism economy today. Nevertheless, such a change would begin to level the playing field between the two tribes. By rooting the golden ages of both the Bdoul and the Layathna in the official historical discourse, the regime narrative would confer equality of honor, and with it, legitimacy, upon each tribe’s claim to Petra, Jordan as its ancestral homeland. 

Endnotes

1. A long-form, Arabic-language version of this article will appear in Abhath al-Yarmouk: Humanities and Social Sciences Series in 2022 under the title, “Bayn al-mādi wal-ḥādir: Ḥikāyāt abnāʾ qabīlatay al-Bidūl wal-Layāthna al-tārīkhiya wa ahmiyatuha al-mustamira fī al-ʿaṣr al-rāhin [Between past and present: The oral histories of the Bdoul and Layathna tribes and their ongoing importance today].”
2. John Kinnear, Cairo, Petra and Damascus: Remarks on the Government of Mehemet Ali and on the Present Prospects of Syria (London, John Murray, 1841): 161–162.
3. Kenneth Russell, “Ethnohistory of the Bedul Bedouin of Petra,” Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 37, no. 1 (1993): 25–28.
4. Nicolas Reeves, “Shaykhs and tribal entrepreneurs: Tribal hierarchies, governmental development policies, and the struggle over representation in Petra’s tourism economy,” Oxford Middle East Review 4, no. 1 (2020).
5. I have used pseudonyms in place of the legal names of all individuals whose quotations appear in this article.
6. It is worth noting that the narratives of both Sheikh Abdelqader and Sheikh Ali contain falsehoods. It is untrue that “the Turks never entered Wadi Musa.” In fact, al-Hayy, the historical home of the Layathna, became the center of the Wadi Musa subdistrict of the Ottoman district of Ma’an. A sheikh of the Layathna even became the Ottomans’ tax collector. As for Sheikh Ali’s account, the Layathna paid khawa, a type of protection tax, to the Ibn Jazi Howeitat, who were led by ‘Arar ibn Jazi, not Auda Abu Taya, who led the rival Abu Taya branch of the Howeitat. Thus, it would be more accurate to say that Wadi Musa belonged to ‘Arar, though even that statement does not appear to reflect the reality experienced in Wadi Musa by the 1890s, when the Ottoman sub-district of Wadi Musa was officially established. For more, see Russell, “Ethnohistory of the Bedul,” 27–28.
7. “The Ottoman Empire,” A Living Tribute to the Legacy of King Hussein I, The Royal Hashemite Court, accessed July 19, 2021, http://www.kinghussein.gov.jo/his_ottoman.html.
8. “The Great Arab Revolt,” A Living Tribute to the Legacy of King Hussein I, The Royal Hashemite Court, accessed July 19, 2021, http://www.kinghussein.gov.jo/his_arabrevolt.html.
9. “ʿAn al-Urdun [About Jordan],” Miʾawiyat al-Dawla al-Urduniya: al-Mawqaʿ al-Rismī [Centennial of the Jordanian State: the official website], The Government of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, accessed July 19, 2021, https://100jordan.jo/AR/Pages/عن_الأردن.
10. Mohammed Ali Al Oudat and Ayman Alshboul, ‘“Jordan First’: Tribalism, Nationalism and Legitimacy of Power in Jordan,” Intellectual Discourse 18, no. 1 (2010): 80–91; Joseph Massad, Colonial Effects: The making of national identity in Jordan, (New York, Columbia University Press, 2001).

Author: Alexander Erdman
Date Published: 4 June 2021

A Greenlandic Gap

Greenland serves as a useful case study of the importance of language politics in the formation of national identity and the development of democratic politics. Votes in 1979 and 2008 asserted Greenlandic autonomy from the Danish state.¹ These votes entail the creation of a Greenlandic government and the unraveling of the Danish “unity of the realm.” Greenlandic national identity began as an anti-colonial social movement. Since 1979, the promotion of Greenlandic identity has accompanied local political development.² 

Denmark still looms large in Greenlandic politics. The findings of this study describe the symbolic importance of language in Greenlandic identity today. While Danish remains widespread,³ Greenlandic has been Greenland’s sole official language since 2009.⁴ Greenland’s de facto bilingualism does not mean that both languages enjoy equal legal status; the country’s linguistic division is a result of the island’s colonial past. 

Author: McKenna Burelle
Date Published: 12 July 2021

McKenna Burelle’s full paper can be found in the Spring 2021 Issue of the International Affairs Review (IAR) here.

ABSTRACT

The Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) is a project designed by the Indian government in 2000 to bridge the large infrastructural inequalities that exist between rural and urban regions of India. The project’s goals are to construct all-weather roads in rural habitations throughout the majority of India. In 2013, a phase two, PMGSY-II, was initiated to put more emphasis on intra-village road systems and improve access to important village institutions, such as health centers. This paper studies the impact of PMGSY on accessibility to health care facilities in rural India using a difference-in-differences framework. 

Using data from the Women’s Questionnaire in the 2015-2016 Demographic and Health Surveys in India and district level information on roads from the PMGSY public database, I exploit the timing of PMGSY-II roads as a source of exogenous variation in access to health centers. To measure access to health facilities, I examine changes in health care utilization for births occurring from 2010 to 2016. I find that antenatal care and Tetanus vaccinations for mothers improved along with respondents’ ability to access vehicle transportation to health facilities in districts treated with PMGSY-II roads. However, while there has been some research conducted on road connectivity and its impacts, more research is needed to continue bolstering the growing body of literature on the effects of rural road development.