How does diaspora sponsorship of rebel organizations impact civilian victimization? This article argues that diasporas have an affinity for their kin and therefore, an interest in civilian protection. By applying a principal–agent framework to understand diaspora sponsorship to rebel organizations, it highlights how a diaspora, acting as a principal, can reduce violence against civilians perpetrated

This article focuses on researcher distress and well-being. It presents a survey carried out with scholars engaged in conflict-related sexual violence research from various disciplines. Respondents were asked about how they reacted to the research they engaged in and how their respective academic institutions supported them. Academia’s understanding of and preparedness for research-related distress

Scholars and pundits focusing on the changing international order and its possible fragmentation often pay little attention to the manifold relationships between international organizations (IOs). Neglecting inter-organizational relationships, we argue, biases discussions towards doomsday predictions and reinforces the perception of global fragmentation. In this Forum, we address these biases by bringing

International law reparations follow the principle of restitutio in integrum — to make the victim whole. But how do human rights judges apply this principle in practice when the victims are not states, but people whose lives may have been irreparably damaged? We examine this question in the context of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, where judges have frequently dealt with cases of forced

s How do international institutions respond to unilateral challenges by its member states, such as non-compliance, blocking of reforms, renegotiation requests, or withdrawal? This paper argues that this response depends on a trade-off between the risks of not accommodating the challenge, which could disrupt cooperation gains, and the risks of accommodating, which may embolden future challengers. International

This research note presents a dataset on budgeted civilian personnel posts in UN peacekeeping operations by mission, unit, rank, and staff category in the 1991–2020 period: the UNCIPPO (UN Civilian Posts in Peacekeeping Operations) Dataset. Civilian staff in UN peacekeeping operations include specialists in political affairs, human rights, gender, child protection, electoral support, security sector

Does commemoration of violence enhance or undermine everyday security? Whilst memorialization has become a staple of peacebuilding processes, the everyday security dimensions of memory remain understudied. Drawing on three case studies of recent transitional justice memory initiatives in Eastern and Central Africa—Rwanda, Burundi, and Kenya– and on qualitative fieldwork in all three countries, the

Whereas United Nations Special Political Missions are established following UN Peacekeeping Operations or as substitute measures to enhance peace and security, studies have paid little attention to what United Nations Special Political Missions do and whether they are effective. The UN Special Political Mission Mandated Tasks Dataset provides new data on United Nations Special Political Mission-mandated

Sovereign default should theoretically lead to creditor punishment through higher borrowing costs or market exclusion. However, empirical evidence shows that punishment is inconsistent across defaulters. We argue that this disconnect can be explained by examining the role of geopolitical relationships, particularly with the United States. US support conditions expectations of both borrowers and creditors

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has recently expanded its policy scope to include a broader set of policies to promote green, inclusive, and resilient growth. How does this expansion affect the support for the IMF and its loans among the populations of borrowing countries? We conducted a pre-registered survey experiment with 2,694 respondents from three borrower countries—Argentina, Kenya, and

While United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions are widely studied, there is only limited information about their authors. Previous studies have argued that the states that draft resolutions exert sizeable influence over their content, but the lack of comprehensive data has hindered any systematic investigations into their agency, role and motivation when authoring resolutions. This article

This study examines how the public views the use of artificial intelligence (AI) on the battlefield. We conduct three survey experiments on a representative sample of the US public to examine how variation in the level of human-machine autonomy affects the public’s support for the use of military force, the public’s trust in such systems (both in their reliability and interpersonal trust), and the

We examine whether harvest-time transitory shifts in employment and income lead to changes in political violence and social unrest in rice-producing croplands of Southeast Asia. Using monthly data from 2010 to 2023 on over 86,000 incidents covering 376 one-degree cells across eight Southeast Asian countries, we estimate a general increase in political violence and a decrease in social unrest in croplands

Sexual violence (SV) in secessionist conflicts reflects distinct political intentions behind rebels’ pursuit of statehood and incumbents’ commitment to territorial integrity. I argue that, compared with their counterparts in non-secessionist conflicts, (1) secessionist rebels are more motivated to eschew SV to garner domestic support and international recognition, while (2) central governments are

In this article, we examine the three Unfairy Tales advertising videos as part of the United Nations Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF) Act of Humanity campaign, which depicts the stories of Syrian refugee children fleeing armed conflict. Shared on UNICEF’s digital platforms, these videos sensibilize the audience to the challenges these children have faced in their migrations and stimulate the adult public

Global warming and nuclear war are frequently described as the world's greatest threats. Both challenges could be understood as expressions of modern science and technology, and both present tough collective action problems. They are also mutually entangled. Yet students of security have still to systematically unpack the relationship between climate change and the politics of nuclear weapons. In this

Why do states sign international agreements with varying commitment lengths? Growing literature examines when states exit international institutions. However, international agreements differ in how long a state must commit before it is legally free after a withdrawal decision. Notably, bilateral investment treaties (BITs) exhibit significant variation in commitment periods even in the same issue area

Do international adjudicators align with the foreign policy interests of their home country? This article contributes new evidence that judges on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) diverge along similar lines as their home states in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Ideal points for judges and countries are estimated from nonunanimous judicial votes up to January 2023 using Item Response

The article examines the performance of crisis in the UK Government’s push toward the Illegal Migration Act 2023. It considers political operations underpinning this campaign as “crisis work,” drawing attention to the staging of dangerous, harmful, and tragic subjects in a panoramic space of spectacular visibility. I develop this perspective based on a review of programmatic speeches, parliamentary

One of the most shocking aspects of civil war is the prevalence of sexual violence committed by armed groups. Recent research identifies many of the factors driving this horrific phenomenon. What is generally lacking, however, is an understanding of the factors that can prevent conflict-related sexual violence. We argue that women’s economic rights are key. Women’s economic rights provide women with

What drives host community preferences towards the reintegration of former Islamist militants? While recognizing the importance of host communities in the reintegration process, empirical evidence on the factors influencing community support for reintegrating former Islamist militants remains limited. We hypothesized that community preferences are shaped along the perceived threat level influenced

Despite representing a crucial day-to-day diplomatic tool, travel by heads of government and state (HOGS) has remained an under-investigated topic in international relations, inhibiting our ability to better understand how these visits change foreign aid, interstate conflict, diplomatic affinities, and more. Here, we fill that gap by introducing the first global dataset on the foreign visits of state

To what extent does minority distinctiveness from the majority mitigate or exacerbate discrimination? Similarities between majority and minority groups may reduce societal and political discrimination. Yet shared identities along one cleavage coupled with distinctive characteristics along another may also render commonalities salient for inter-group competition and conflict. We examine how cross-cuttingness

Under what conditions do insurgents challenge gender norms in the midst of conflict? And what do they gain by doing so? Using an original data set of 137 armed groups fighting between 1950 and 2019, I argue that armed groups challenge gender customs to reshape local power relations. With 40 percent of rebel groups regulating civilian gender customs during civil war, this strategy is remarkably widespread

We introduce a dynamic game of outbidding where two groups use violence to compete in a tug-of-war fashion for evolving public support. We fit the model to the canonical outbidding rivalry between Hamas and Fatah using newly collected data on Palestinian public support for these groups. Competition has heterogeneous effects, and we demonstrate that intergroup competition can discourage violence. Competition

How is diplomacy, a profession long premised on face-to-face interactions, adjusting to life with and on the screen? In this article, I present insights from 5 years of fieldwork (2018–2023) focused on the diplomatic scene in Brussels. I approach this material through Sherry Turkle's concept of the “evocative object” to theorize how digitalization relates to diplomatic practice. In contrast to most

A growing body of literature builds on the observation that power is relational and directs attention to the diplomacy of marginal and liminal subjects, implying that they harbor a potential to change the structures undergirding international politics. However, performances of state power routinely find other loci than diplomacy, and all states are more or less marginalized from the conceptual core

Military Gender Advisors (GENADs) are an increasingly common feature in global armed forces and military operations. Their role is designed to operate at the strategic level of military organizations to the facilitate implementation of the United Nations Women, Peace, and Security agenda. Despite an overarching policy framework and official discourse that value and support their work, GENADs face significant

Paradoxically, research on the international dimensions and effects of populism finds that populist leaders’ politicization frequently portrays domestic and foreign “elites” as intertwined—but that their decision-making tends to be considerably more antagonistic vis-à-vis internal opponents than established external actors. Combining structural and agential perspectives, this paper unboxes the individual

International organizations (IOs) need to learn from their mistakes in order to improve their performance. Over the past decades, IOs have therefore invested significantly in building a professional learning infrastructure. However, as recent studies show, many IOs still struggle to learn from their mistakes. Why do IOs not learn despite all these formal learning processes and tools? I argue that the

Multinational firms frequently route their foreign investments through intermediate shell companies. Increasingly, firms engage in proxy arbitration, using these shell companies to access other states’ bilateral investment treaties and file investor–state disputes against their host states. I argue that proxy arbitration is actually a spillover effect of firms’ efforts to reduce their tax burdens.

Initiatives by agents in a favorable contingency can reshuffle transnational areas of practice and show how fields shape communities of practice (CoPs). The article examines how CoPs emerge and develop and why this happens in some areas and not others. It also explores whether CoPs should be situated within conflictual theories of the international, like field theory. The article argues that CoPs emerge

Do states constrain non-state hackers? This article extends research on the role of transnational cyber aggression in international relations, showing that governments can be incentivized to mitigate non-state hacking. To test this argument, I leverage competitive elections to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which requires states to campaign on their cybersecurity record. By exploiting

Research on the relationship between repression and dissent has mostly ignored the mechanisms through which repression affects dissent. I distinguish two distinct channels through which repression can deter dissidents. First, preemptive repression works through a functional channel by directly reducing the opposition’s capabilities. Second, the severity of preemptive repression provides information

How do observers abroad assess the intentions of rising powers? Influential research in international relations suggests that rising powers can reassure others by using both behavior and rhetoric, but there is scarce rigorous evidence on the relative effectiveness of these strategies. In this article, we study whether and to what extent variation in behavioral and rhetorical foreign economic policies

This study presents the “Russia Visits Dataset,” which records high-level visits by Russian leaders to foreign countries from 1991 to 2023, including official trips by presidents, prime ministers, and foreign ministers. Using probit regression analysis, the study reveals that strategic interests—such as political, economic, and military factors—predominantly shape the distribution of Russian leader

We explore the role of global value chains (GVCs) in the design of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). We propose a theory that focuses on firms involved in GVC activities to identify the main actors pushing for deep trade integration. To address the critical issue of endogeneity of GVC trade flows for trade policy, our identification strategy exploits a transportation shock: the sharp increase in

The mobilization of opposition mass movements may spur regime change via different processes, including popular revolutions or coups. We zoom in on one salient channel through which mass mobilization may induce regime change, namely via provoking incumbent responses. Synthesizing different arguments, we detail how incumbent elites sometimes preemptively alter the regime to diffuse threats by incumbent-guided

This forum proposes a practice-oriented approach to (de)legitimation processes in world politics. Drawing on international practice theory and visual IR, among other fields, our approach offers an important extension of existing literature on (de)legitimation that mostly concentrates on discursive (de)legitimation. Instead, this forum focuses on a broader variety of practices of (de)legitimation, such

I introduce a new dataset of all United Nations Security Council and United Nations General Assembly resolutions passed from 1946–2018, as well as machine-learning-based measures of their references to other resolutions, textual alignment, and topics. I suggest applications of this data for a variety of questions in international relations from the development of international law to the influence

Armed conflicts expose states to extraordinary fiscal stress and leave poverty and inequality in their wake. Yet, the fiscal policy responses in contemporary conflict-affected states appear feeble, in striking contrast to historical antecedents, having led to radical and distinctly progressive tax reforms. Whereas extant literature cautions against generalising Western wartime experiences, emphasising

Member state participation is essential in global governance, affording international organizations (IOs) legitimacy and translating member state preferences into institutional attention. We contend that institutional leadership positions bolster states’ authority via “proxy representation,” in which states are grouped together and indirectly represented by one leader. We argue that by serving as proxy

Under what conditions are new democracies more committed to human rights? Existing explanations focus on the logic of the democratic lock-in as elites in new democracies commit their countries to international human rights treaties and organizations to safeguard against future nondemocratic threats. However, this proposition receives mixed empirical support within the literature, and suffers of endogeneity

s The Russian invasion of Ukraine has escalated geopolitical rivalry and debate about the demise of the liberal international order and the changing distribution of power within the international system. Peacekeeping has been a key component of the liberal international order at least since the end of the Cold War, if not before. Peacekeeping boomed in the era of US unipolarity, with twenty new United

How do countries narrate their values and priorities in artificial intelligence infrastructures in comparative national and global contexts? This paper analyzes the policies governing national and regional artificial intelligence infrastructures to advance an understanding of “entangled narratives” in global affairs. It does so by utilizing artificial intelligence techniques that assist with generalizability

Despite intensive scholarly interest in power transition theory (PTT) and its relevance to contemporary Sino–US relations, this article addresses three aspects central to policy discussions that have been largely neglected or taken for granted in the existing scholarly works on PTT. This article first establishes an analytical framework to analyse the course of power transition, enabling an in-depth

Armies sometimes use fratricidal coercion—violence and intimidation against their own troops—to force reluctant soldiers to fight. How this practice affects battlefield performance remains an open question. We study fratricidal coercion using a mixed-methods strategy, drawing on (1) monthly panel data on Soviet Rifle Divisions in World War II, built from millions of declassified personnel files; (2)

There is substantial evidence that various aspects of violent civil conflict are tied to natural resources, of which diamonds are perhaps the most notorious. While the presence of resources themselves have been given substantial attention, existing works have overlooked a key issue: substitute resources. This article focuses on the geographic distribution of violent conflict relative to natural resource

Disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) provisions in peace agreements (PAs) are critical pillars of global peacebuilding efforts. Leading theories suggest that different DDR components address different peacebuilding challenges. Yet existing datasets conceptualize DDR as a binary variable, hindering our ability to observe which DDR components and in what combination are agreed upon by

Sanctions episodes, like those imposed by the United States against Cuba and North Korea, can persist for decades. What are the consequences of lifting sanctions? Do the harmful consequences of economic sanctions outlast the sanctions? How do target states adjust after these coercive policies end? A growing literature identifies a range of adverse effects of economic sanctions for targeted states including

It is generally accepted that violations of state-nation congruence can cause conflict, but it remains unclear which configurations cause civil and interstate conflict, and how these conflict types interact. Inspired by Myron Weiner’s classical model of the “Macedonian Syndrome,” we propose an integrated theoretical framework that links specific nationality questions to both conflict types. Using spatial

Peacekeeping has been found to be effective in containing conflict and civilian victimization, while the findings for the effect of aid on violence are indeterminate. So far the effects of peacekeeping and aid on violence have mainly been studied separately, this article investigates, at the subnational level, the effect of humanitarian aid on one-sided violence conditional on the deployment of peacekeeping

Scholars are increasingly drawing attention to the societal consequences of conflict-related violence. What remains unclear is the interplay between short-term and long-term legacies of wartime traumas. We consider the case of Mosul, Iraq, a setting in which inhabitants have experienced wide-ranging victimization during both recent and historical contexts. In a 2022 survey, we inquired across a broad

This article examines strategic narratives in the United States’ 2022 National Security Strategy (NSS) through the lens of ontological security theory. The analysis suggests that the US is challenged in its ontological security by the current state of the international order and the rapid evolution of the global economy into an unfamiliar entity, largely as a result of the destabilising actions of

Past studies in political economy have established a link between domestic property rights protection and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows. However, the underlying mechanism remains unclear, given that foreign investors often enjoy more robust property rights protection through international arbitration under investment treaties or potential intervention by their home governments. In this article

In the last decade, international relations scholarship on shaming by non-governmental organizations has grown dramatically, providing us with many insights into how country-level improvement occurs in the areas of human rights and the environment, among other issues. Using machine learning techniques, this project built an updated dataset on NGO shaming from almost 1.5 million articles in the media

The study of international organizations’ (IOs) peer review systems has focused largely on their efficacy in disseminating best practices, with mixed results. This paper informs the debate from a new angle: We evaluate the extent to which decisions about who reviews whom and where result from bureaucratic guidelines, or whether these decisions are shaped by the particularistic interests of member states