The prospect of a rival opportunistically pressing for gains while one is at war with another rival highly influenced Britain's “two-power standard” as well as the US's “two-war standard.” Conflict scholars have documented numerous instances of third-party opportunism. I analyze a game-theoretic model of crisis bargaining in the shadow of third-party opportunism. Under complete information, a country

In recent decades, gender equality goals have been adopted widely in global policymaking, creating a demand for specialized knowledge and evidence to support the design and implementation of gender equality policies. Bridging feminist scholarship on gender expertise and practice–theoretical literature on knowledge production, this article examines a knowledge production initiative of the World Bank

How do heterogeneous patterns of violence affect people's decision to flee? We provide individual-level evidence on flight decision-making in light of violence with a conjoint experiment in Turkey. The results suggest that intense indiscriminate violence nearby forces individuals into the decision to leave. In contrast to previous studies, we find that the fear of repeated violence plays a more important

Research has demonstrated how membership in more democratic regional intergovernmental organizations (ROs) can strengthen the prospects for democracy. However, a significant number of ROs are dominated by autocratic members who have quite different preferences: to limit democratic contagion and consolidate authoritarian rule against democratic challengers. We outline a menu of mechanisms through which

Does racial discrimination persist in global mobility rights? While many states explicitly discriminated based on race far into the twentieth century, contemporary migration policymaking is now putatively objective. The rise of white supremacist violence against all varieties of migrants, politician statements, and public support for restrictive policies calls this supposed color blindness into question

Extant research links forced marriage and sexual violence in rebel groups with their respective political projects, social control, and group cohesion. However, forced marriage and sexual violence are rare in many rebel groups, including the Maoists in Nepal who claimed to have a “progressive,” “scientific,” and “modern” framework for governing marriage and sexuality. In the light of this puzzle, I

The study of multinational military interventions highlights the importance of four major factors to account for combat participation in US-led coalitions: threat perceptions, alliance considerations, domestic politics, and strategic culture. The latter, however, has been overlooked or uncorroborated by major cross-national accounts of coalition warfare. Building on the fourth generation of scholars

This paper explores the link between political institutions and the size of global bank loans received to fund project finance (PF) transactions, a commonly used funding method for domestic infrastructure construction. We theorize that lenders’ political risk assessments lead to a prioritization of political predictability over other institutional features of host countries. This indicates that, all

How do authoritative international bodies decide that states have complied with their orders? Compliance research has mostly focused on how states react to rulings and how interest groups mobilize for and against compliance. Less has been said about how international bodies certify compliance with their orders in contexts of conflicting interests and incomplete information. Because in theory the seal

This article integrates normative theoretical analysis into accounts of international order by connecting the study of international practice to debates about the nature and moral purpose of states’ social association. Combining English School and social practice theory with insights from scholarship on colonialism, race, and empire, we conceptualize international order as a dynamic, contested, but

Organizational ecology has attracted growing interest in global governance research in recent years. As a structural theory, however, organizational ecology has overlooked how organizations may shape the organizational environment by their own choices. Bridging the insights of organizational ecology and the study of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), I argue that the organizational choice of specialism

Scholars have written on the extensive risks that transnational terrorism entails for militant groups that perpetrate such attacks. However, despite these risks, transnational terrorism has become an increasingly common feature of civil wars. This raises the question: Why do rebel groups launch terrorist attacks outside of the countries they are fighting civil wars in? I argue that weaker rebel groups

Foundations provide key funds for nongovernmental organizations. We know little about what they do for transnational activism or the mechanisms via which they seek/achieve influence. We carve a middle ground between those who see donors as supporting actors in transnational advocacy networks (TANs) and those who think they distort activism through impersonal market forces. Our negotiation-oriented

Sanctions are among the most frequently used foreign policy tools to address human rights violations, but they can be highly politicized. Since the early 2000s, human rights sanctions have been increasingly triggered by standardized rankings of states’ performances. While research on economic statecraft suggests that coercive measures based on cross-national assessments may be less influenced by strategic

Existing research has identified numerous explanations for why some civil wars last longer than others. Yet, the type of labor that state militaries recruit has remained unexplored in this context. We consider how a state's military personnel system affects its ex post decision to keep fighting. We argue that conscription renders access to military labor relatively easy and, thus, less expensive. As

The international tax system is a pillar of the post-war economic order, but it faces major challenges with the rise of global value chains, digitalization, and tax avoidance. Debates over international tax reform usually occur within a small epistemic community of experts and technocrats. In this article, we step outside this restricted circle to assess the sources of bottom-up legitimacy and support

Brexit is widely acknowledged as an important event in recent international relations (IR) and emblematic of polarization in Western societies. This article challenges the conventional wisdom that the two sides of the Brexit debate (Leave and Remain) have little in common and that the division of British society into entrenched Euroskeptic/Europhile camps neatly corresponds to cleavages between liberal

How does transitional justice affect trust in government? Political trust is central to peaceful conflict resolution, but less is known about the ability of different transitional justice efforts to build confidence in government after war. Using survey-experimental evidence from post-conflict Guatemala, I compare how three commonly deployed justice policies (trials, truth commissions, and reparations)

The immediate post–Cold War era was defined by the material and ideological dominance of the United States. Thirty years on, challenges to both types of dominance proliferate. What explains the systemic change currently underway? The conventional wisdom of a shift to bipolarity or multipolarity ignores the possibility of changes within unipolarity. Recent instability is better explained by the decreased

Although often omitted from final texts, armchair speculation is vital to much politics research. This article argues that thought experiments are a powerful tool for harnessing scholarly imagination with enormous potential for international relations (IR). To provide guidance for thought experiments’ incorporation into IR research, the article begins by clarifying thought experiments’ epistemological

What relations matter? This question sits at the heart of this article and addresses in a more thoroughgoing way the methodological and ethico-political problems that some relational thinkers have debated. We are interested in deep relationalism and the methodological problem of delineating which relations matter in a reality defined by an ever-unfolding web of relations. By acknowledging the relationality

In contrast to earlier, more celebratory accounts, more recent scholarship on the United Nations Security Council's Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda reveals the racial–colonial logics deeply woven into the very fabric of the agenda that contribute to reproducing hierarchies, inequalities, and exclusions. Building on this body of literature, this article investigates in more detail how race shapes

This article contributes a step towards the consolidation of the wide-ranging intellectual history and rapidly growing literature of international order theory. It traces the development of international order theory across three eras: 1919 and the interwar era; 1945 and the Cold War era; and 1989–1991, the post-Cold War era and rise of the “liberal” order debate. Gathering this history finds that

One widely derided aspect of autocratic regimes is that they frequently feature nepotistic systems for political organization and management of power transfers, with inexperienced or unqualified individuals taking power solely because of their familial relation to the prior ruler. Such systems are thought to be more unstable and ineffective, reducing desirable outcomes for autocratic leaders, as well

Great powers often extract concessions whether they intervene during or after other states’ wars. I analyze crisis bargaining between two primary disputants and a great power that may intervene to extract concessions from the victor. When disputants face commitment problems, the threat of intervention discourages declining states from attacking and enables rising states to make otherwise-incredible

Do foreign firms engage in domestic politics, and if so, why? I argue that foreign firms, impacted by US policies, employ subsidiaries in the US to represent their political interests in federal elections. Using original data collected for the population of corporate givers during the 2014 and 2016 election cycles, I find US subsidiaries of foreign firms to be significantly more politically active

That economic integration constrains state sovereignty has been a longstanding concern and the subject of much study. We assess the validity of this concern in the context of two very particular components of contemporary economic globalization: global value chain (GVC) integration and Investor–State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). First, we document that host states have abandoned nearly 24 percent of

States support transnational insurgents in an important variety of ways, from highly public efforts to transform the status quo to covert backing with limited ambitions. In this paper, we introduce a new theory to help explain variation in these strategies of external support. We argue that the offensive or defensive goals of state sponsors interact with their fears of escalation to shape how they

Using fictitious country names in hypothetical scenarios is widespread in experimental international relations research. We survey sixty-four peer-reviewed articles to find that it is justified by reference to necessary “neutralization” compared to real-world scenarios. However, this neutralization effect has not been independently tested. Indeed, psychology and toponymy scholarship suggest that names

A defining feature of public (and, often, scholarly) discussion of international affairs is the treatment of states as unitary actors, that is, akin to individual persons. Drawing upon social–psychological research, we theorize that such unitary actor (UA) framing increases the degree to which adversarial states are perceived as entitative—that is, as relatively united—and, thus, the perceived complicity

This article examines the arbitrary and oftentimes violent nature of loyalty and belonging in the case of Syria but with applicability to other authoritarian or high-surveillance contexts. It shows how the new “settlement of status” process is an extension of the governmentality of violence used by the Syrian regime to delineate loyal citizens from traitors. However, the article argues that this process

The environmental implications of international trade appear to be associated with public backlash against trade liberalization and efforts at greening international trade. Because public support is essential to environmental and trade policy-making alike, we examine the trade–environment nexus from a public opinion perspective. We investigate whether negative attitudes toward trade are in fact fueled

Do nuclear weapons deter low-level military conflict? Although the political effects of nuclear weapons have been debated for more than seventy years, scholarship has yet to produce a clear answer. We design a study that reduces the risk of omitted variable bias relative to prior research. Our analysis compares the rates of conflict among eventual nuclear powers in the periods before and after they

Why do some rebel groups perpetrate sexual violence in armed conflict while others do not? A growing literature explores factors impacting the occurrence of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). We contribute to this literature, arguing that the composition of rebel groups can provide insight into patterns of sexual violence. We contend rebel groups that use child soldiers, and especially those

Which armed organizations form coalitions despite the inherent difficulties of cooperation in civil wars? We introduce the concept of tacit coalitions, which pertains to strategic and informal coalition behavior between civil war actors to address this puzzle. Our theoretical model of coalition behavior takes in theater-wide conflict behavior to allow for predictions that coalitions are more likely

Stories of miracles, or karamat, are ubiquitous and influential in jihad. Yet, they remain poorly understood. Current treatments are limited to descriptions of reports in individual conflicts. None have systematically studied their genesis: from whom, and where do they originate? Some, to be sure, imply origins—especially in deception. But they have done so based on impressions, and not systematic

Compliance with World Trade Organization dispute rulings declined in recent years. Governments frequently accuse the Appellate Body (AB) of exceeding its mandate by relying on precedent despite having no such authority. Is this criticism fair? We use new data on over 5,000 applications of legal precedent in AB rulings to test competing hypotheses. The “legal coherence hypothesis” says that legal systems

Although attempts to conquer entire states became rare after 1945, attempts to conquer small pieces of territory persisted. Why do states so often seize—and even fight wars over—remarkably small areas? We argue that traditional explanations predicated on the material or ethnic value of disputed territories largely cannot explain the escalation of territorial disputes since 1945. Instead, actors more

Existing studies show that democracies are no better than autocracies in terms of women's legislative representation. This finding seems counterintuitive because democracies are more politically inclusive and foster greater respect for civil and political rights, compared to autocracies. We revisit the relationship between democracy and women's legislative representation by considering the interaction

Countries around the world are increasingly investing in artificial intelligence (AI) to automate military tasks that traditionally required human involvement. Despite growing interest in AI-enabled systems, relatively little research explores whether and how AI affects military decision-making. Yet, national security practitioners may perceive the judgments of and actions taken by algorithms differently

In recent years, researchers have shifted their focus to studying the effects of peacekeeping in a geographically disaggregated manner. One of the factors that is yet to be fully examined is the variation among peacekeeping troops at the local level and its impact on peacekeeping effectiveness. Specifically, peacekeeping troops greatly vary across two dimensions: unit types, e.g., infantry, engineering

Pacifism and anarchism have been until recently largely missing on the landscape of international relations (IR) theories, even though they help articulate valuable and nuanced reflections on core IR themes such as war and peace, the structure of the international order, and the multiple effects of political violence. In particular, an analysis grounded in the territory shared by pacifism and anarchism

How does funding from foreign aid shape public opinion toward development programs? Existing research suggests that citizens of recipient countries prefer aid-funded programs, particularly if they view the domestic government as corrupt and ineffective. However, these studies have been implemented in contexts where major donors are relatively popular. We extend this literature by analyzing attitudes

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

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

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,

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

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

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

Researchers studying international organizations have access to growing and varied archives due to digitization efforts. While developments in computational methods confer efficiency gains for examining these materials at scale, they raise concerns about their validity when applied to interpretive tasks in historical settings. In response, we present a general and flexible workflow that uses simple