Over the last 12 years, Mexico has become one of the most dangerous places to be a journalist. We examine how this risk-environment influences the content and strategies of reporting at one of Mexi...

Some norms go through long contested periods, resulting in norm change, rejection, or persisting conflict. Others are adopted quite quickly, with little resistance across diverse societies. An underlying and unanswered theoretical question is why? A foundational characteristic of a norm as a concept, and a key aspect of constructivist scholarship on norms, is the role of values and moral principles

How do international organizations (IOs) affect access to social services for refugees and host country nationals during humanitarian crises? We explore the quality of care received by Syrian refugees and Lebanese nationals in Lebanese health facilities using data from original surveys in a nationally representative sample of health centers. Given its importance as a site of interactions with host

New domains of military conflict, such as space and cyber, arguably increase opportunities for conflict across, as well as within, domains. Cross-domain conflict is thus seen by many as an emerging source of international instability. Yet, existing systematic empirical research has little to say about how domains interact. This study introduces a new dataset of the domains in which nations took military

How does political imprisonment influence anti-regime protest? We argue that political imprisonment facilitates rather than stifles protest. Political imprisonment is a salient indicator of arbitra...

Political actors often resort to electoral violence to gain an edge over their competitors even though violence is harder to hide than fraud and more likely to delegitimize elections as a result. E...

There is limited evidence that reliance on foreign aid from Western donors compels repressive governments to embrace democratic reforms and respect citizens’ rights. However, donors have another, p...

Recent work in international relations has problematized state-centric assumptions of governance to explore variations in authority by a range of nonstate actors (e.g., nongovernmental organizations, criminal syndicates, gangs). This forum centers on the phenomenon of rebel group governance during civil wars and leverages the concept to advance our understanding of current theories and conceptualizations

Diplomats in embassies and permanent representations are increasingly using the messaging application WhatsApp to communicate with their peers. They use WhatsApp groups to coordinate initiatives at multilateral forums, communicate more rapidly with headquarters and stay in touch with organizational developments at home, as well as form more personal working relations among their peers. To make sense

Since 9/11, a number of scholars added gender as a new variable to explain how economic, political, and/or social developments in the Middle East have diverged from developments elsewhere. These studies relied almost exclusively on statistical analysis and frequently discounted much of the extant literature, especially the more feminist and historically sensitive and in-depth qualitative works on the

Almost all ceasefires experience violations, yet we know little about how such violations relate to the military and political aspirations of conflict parties. This article builds on ceasefire and bargaining literature to understand why ceasefire violations occur and how they relate to strategic decision-making processes. Building on these theoretical insights, it proposes a typology of four main types

What explains the foreign policy gap between elites and the general public on nuclear proliferation? We investigate specific contexts in which experts’ nonproliferation information changes public a...

Research on the efficacy of leadership decapitation has focused primarily on targeting the topmost leaders of groups. Yet, most organizations rely on multiple leaders with specific functional or ge...

Scholars of international conflicts have long emphasized the role of private information in the onset of interstate wars. Yet, the literature lacks direct and systematic evidence of its effect. This is largely due to challenges with accessing decision-makers’ private and often confidential information and opinions. We compile a large corpus of declassified French diplomatic cables that span the period

The literature suggests that voters have a self-centered incentive to call for the de-escalation of conflicts that inflict economic costs on them, which explains why economic sanctions and trade wars often lose popular support when the resulting cost for the domestic economy rises. It is thus puzzling why some costly disputes between two advanced democracies are prolonged. Taking a psychological approach

The possibility that economic competition puts working and employment conditions under pressure is a frequently voiced concern in debates on international trade. We provide an empirical assessment of the argument that competition for world markets has generated a race to the bottom in labor standards. Spatial econometrics is used to identify interdependence in labor practices among trade competitors

Leaders shift political institutions to ameliorate threats to their tenure. The masses might rebel to replace the leader and change institutions. Disloyalty by political insiders might result in a ...

How does targeting in armed conflict affect public opinion in conflict zones? Armed actors choose between targeting militaries and civilians, further choosing whether to target civilians discrimina...

English School accounts of international relations always stressed some degree of interaction between political international society and ideational world society. Yet, English School research, relying on agential and structural premises, often misses how and where international society and world society interact. If intermediation between the two societies is identified, it often remains abstract

Is government repression of self-determination (SD) movements affected by the internal structure of the movements? This article investigates the relation between internal fragmentation of SD movements and state repression. While internal fragmentation of domestic challengers is well-documented in conflict studies, its effect on state repression is largely overlooked by the extant literature. Here,

What reduces individual support for the use of violence among groups seeking self-determination? This article advances a new explanation for changes in popular support for violence – international ...

The literature at the intersection of global norms and transnational advocacy typically equates target states’ foreign constituencies with those exerting normative pressure on the states in question on behalf of their domestic constituencies. Another type of foreign constituency remains undertheorized: foreign nationals as rights claimants who make normative claims against target states, such as victims

In contemporary times, scholars have increasingly turned to the research on norms to study behavior and identity transformation in international politics. This has led to understanding stigma as attached to global actors refusing to follow normatively shared expectations of social conduct. However, the field of nuclear politics has largely ignored this research in particularly identifying how noncompliant

Existing theories of foreign policy opinion formation tend to treat elites as a black-box category for members of the nonpublic. This misses important nuances in public perceptions of elites. We argue that elite vocation serves as an important source cue, signaling elite access to information and elite knowledge that can be brought to bear on that information. We use a survey experiment to evaluate

Since 1995, presidents from both parties have increased US government initiatives in pursuit of global gender equality, but there has been little scholarly work that explores public support for the...

Why do individuals engage in violence against the state? This research investigates the biological and environmental determinants of individual-level participation in political violence through the...

Can an individual impact a phenomenon as overwhelming and complex as war? Do leaders impact interstate war dynamics? Leaders high in grandiose narcissism focus their efforts on maintaining their in...

Foreign electoral interventions have attracted greater attention since the Russian intervention in the 2016 U.S. elections. Even though the United States has a long history of intervening in other countries’ elections, evidence about what drives public support for U.S. foreign electoral intervention is scarce. This paper uses a new set of surveys and experiments to test hypotheses about what drives

Longstanding intergroup conflict is one of the most perilous issues on the global stage, leading to violence, displacement, and loss of life. Finding strategies to bring parties to the negotiation table is therefore of utmost importance for conflict resolution. Here we address a common problem in intergroup conflict - the lack of a shared, native tongue - which is typically solved by using a lingua

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly increased the use of online tools in the conduct of multilateral environmental negotiations. Although scholars have recognized that information and communication technologies have gradually been reshaping traditional diplomatic practice, such technologies are not considered to be transformative of diplomatic practice itself. However, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic

Coethnics often work in the same industries. How does this ethnic clustering affect individuals’ political loyalties amid industrial growth and decline? Focusing on migrant groups, the author contends that ethnic groups’ distribution across industries alters the political allegiances of their members. When a group is concentrated in a growing industry, economic optimism and resources flow between coethnics

Can secessionism be a basis for affective or social polarization? Despite much research on independence movements, their relationship to polarization, a key mechanism theorized as increasing the ri...

This article explains abuse of foreigners’ rights by identifying an unexplored by-product of human rights shaming—reciprocation. By identifying this phenomenon, the article explains countries’ noncompliance with treaty obligations, focusing in particular on noncompliance with the Convention against Torture's (CAT) provisions on foreign nationals’ rights. States who learn about violations of their citizens’

In Divided Armies, I argue that inequality within armies (“military inequality”) has shaped their battlefield performance in conventional wars since 1800. Gibler and Miller (2022) are unpersuaded. They raise a flurry of concerns about the cross-national evidence and one statistical analysis in the book’s Chapter 4. In particular, they maintain that Project Mars, the book’s dataset, offers nothing new

Do armed drone programs decrease or increase terrorism? Existing studies on this question produce conflicting arguments and evidence. Drone optimists contend that armed drones reduce a country's vulnerability to terrorism, while pessimists claim that this military technology provokes higher levels of terrorism. Prior research focuses almost exclusively on one particular context: the short-term effect

Over the past decade, a growing literature has re-examined the relationship between material scarcity and conflict. Despite increasing policy salience and empirical interest, coherent theoretical accounts remain underdeveloped. This article develops microfoundations for a first-image rationalist explanation for war. It is shown that the basic physiological fact of necessary consumption induces context

This article suggests a new approach for looking at emotions. In the framework that is developed, emotions are practices that are performed in context and not only felt or had. On the theoretical side, three concepts inspired by Bourdieu's work are introduced: hexis, emotional sense, and emotional performance. On the methodological side, this framework is used to make sense of emojis in digital exchanges

Despite the prevalence of armed groups in world politics, a prominent measurement challenge obscures understanding about many of these militant actors, especially when their activities fall below the threshold of civil war. This note addresses this gap by introducing a new dataset on the organizational characteristics of 1,202 armed groups that operated in 124 countries between 1970 and 2012. It outlines

Susanne Schaftenaar (2017) How (wo)men rebel: Exploring the effect of gender equality on nonviolent and armed conflict onset. Journal of Peace Research 54(6): 762–776. DOI: 10.1177/0022343317722699.

States form defensive alliances hoping to deter adversaries and avoid war. However, scholars and policy analysts often worry that if an alliance fails to deter the promise of military support will encourage escalation, pushing disputants closer to war. We show that in many cases this concern is unwarranted. We use a game-theoretic model of alliance reliability and crisis bargaining to show that the

What prolonged implications does conflict escalation have on voting behavior? The literature focuses primarily on the immediate effect of violent events on voting in nearby elections, leaving open ...

Commitment problems make civil wars difficult to end. Research on overcoming commitment problems focuses on warring parties, however civilians’ perceptions are central to successful transitions from war to peace. While civilians residing in areas previously controlled by armed groups may be highly distrustful that governments will implement peace agreements, I argue that some armed groups are both

Scholars have found that nonviolent resistance is more effective than violence at promoting post-campaign democratization. We explore whether this relationship extends to judicial systems, specific...

Extant research highlights low or unequal access of ethnic groups to socio-economic resources as a driver of communal violence. However, less is known about how institutional factors, such as contr...

Environmental changes place severe pressure on individuals and societies. Vulnerable segments of the population, especially children, are likely to be first affected. We examine the impact of clima...

The world’s population is increasingly concentrated in cities. Research on urbanization’s implications for peace and security has been hampered by a lack of comparable data on political mobilizatio...

Reintegrating ex-combatants back into society is one of the most challenging, yet fundamental components to building sustainable peace. While previous work has extensively evaluated the reintegrati...

Despite intense public and policy debates about the termination (and re-instatement) of sanctions in cases such as Iran, Cuba and Russia, research has hitherto focused on sanctions imposition and e...

When and why do citizens living amid criminal violence pour into the streets to demand peace and justice, regardless of the risks that protesting in such a context may entail? While victimization experiences provide an initial motivation for participation in protests, this article finds that social networks play a fundamental role for mobilization against insecurity. At an emotional level, socialization

This article investigates how and when regime transitions intensify minority discrimination through an analysis of two types of religious persecution following the Arab uprisings. We argue that weakened institutions and the prevalence of religious outbidding during political transitions make societal-based religious discrimination (SRD) more likely to increase than government-based religious discrimination

A growing chorus of critics have called upon transnational nongovernmental organizations (TNGOs) from the Global North to “decolonize” their practices, to “shift the power” to the Global South, and to put an end to “white saviorism” by initiating a variety of significant organizational changes. Despite these repeated calls, the TNGO sector still struggles to reform. Explanations for TNGOs’ ongoing

Although diasporas often leave their homelands due to violence or political upheaval, these groups may engage in homeland politics by providing financial, material, or diplomatic assistance to militants engaged in civil conflicts. Conversely, diasporas may ignore homeland civil conflicts and exclusively focus on opportunities available in their host states. This study argues that variation in diasporas’

Existing literature on civil wars relies predominantly on state- and organization-level variables to understand conflict dynamics and outcomes. In this article, we propose that rebel leaders’ personal backgrounds and experiences are also key to explaining the behavior of the organizations they lead. Just as scholars have long highlighted the importance of state leaders’ biographical characteristics

Abstract Bringing together insights from feminist political economy and everyday financialization, this paper explores the complex nature of women’s pension decisions. Women in the UK experience structural constraints originating from a pension system which ignores socially reproductive activities, and they face limitations in pension planning due to prevalent gender norms. Both aspects have a significant

Published in Review of International Political Economy (Ahead of Print, 2022)

That terrorism is a “weapon of the weak” is such deeply held conventional wisdom it has become almost a cliché. “Weak” means many different things in the literature, however, and little rigorous empirical research has tested the contention that weaker groups, however conceived, are more likely to employ terrorism. This article explores prominent weapon of the weak arguments to develop testable hypotheses

We investigate whether the threat of recruitment by rebel groups spurs domestic and international migration. The existing literature on wartime displacement has largely focused on potential victims of violence. We argue that alongside potential victims, we should expect to see the out-migration of individuals who are attractive to the rebels as potential recruits. To test this hypothesis, we draw on