How do racial stereotypes affect perceptions in foreign policy? Race and racism as topics have long been marginalized in the study of international relations but are receiving renewed attention. In this article we assess the role of implicit racial bias in internal, originally classified assessments by the US foreign policy bureaucracy during the Cold War. We use a combination of dictionary-based and supervised machine learning techniques to identify the presence of four racial tropes in a unique corpus of intelligence documents: almost 5,000 President's Daily Briefs given to Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. We argue and find that entries about countries that the US deemed “racialized Others”—specifically, countries in the Global South, newly independent states, and some specific regional groupings—feature an especially large number of racial tropes. Entries about foreign developments in these places are more likely to feature interpretations that infantilize, invoke animal-based analogies, or imply irrationality or belligerence. This association holds even when accounting for the presence of conflict, the regime type of the country being analyzed, the invocation of leaders, and the topics being discussed. The article makes two primary contributions. First, it adds to the revival of attention to race but gives special emphasis to implicit racialized thinking and its appearance in bureaucratic settings. Second, we show the promise of new tools for identifying racial and other forms of implicit bias in foreign policy texts.

International relations theory tends to build on the conventional narrative of the Wars of Religion (WoR), which holds it was the irrationality of religious violence that generated the modern international system of pragmatic secular states—resulting in the presumed secularized, rational, and unemotive nature of politics. In contrast, this article reorients our focus to Durkheim's more social view of religion as a community of believers and to the continued role of the sacred and shared emotion/affect in social and political life. Specifically, it examines how modern communities (such as nations) remain constituted by a shared faith in conceptions of the sacred and how the corresponding sense of moral order is central to the enduring pursuit of ontological security. Therefore, it argues that international relations should focus on the perennial struggles over what communities hold sacred and that we can better understand the propensity for (“religious” or “secular”) violence by examining the continual interplay between the sacred, ontological security, and the hermeneutics of morality—with the so-called WoR being the locus classicus of this argument. Historical studies exploring how participants in the WoR navigated such struggles over the sacred thus allow us to explore these dynamics and further conceptualize our understanding of the sacred within modern “secular” politics. The article concludes by examining how the prospect for violence is interrelated with the perennial struggles over the sacred within, and between, political orders—a sentiment that brings into relief some of the hazards accompanying growing intrastate moral polarization and interstate ideological rivalry.

As illustrated by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the recent revival of nationalism has triggered a threatening return of revisionist conflict. While the literature on nationalism shows how nationalist narratives are socially constructed, much less is known about their real-world consequences. Taking nationalist narratives seriously, we study how past “golden ages” affect territorial claims and conflict in post-Napoleonic Europe. We expect nationalists to be more likely to mobilize and initiate conflict if they can contrast the status quo to a historical polity with supposedly greater national unity and/or independence. Using data on European state borders going back to 1100, combined with spatial data covering ethnic settlement areas during the past two centuries, we find that the availability of plausible golden ages increases the risk of both domestic and interstate conflict. These findings suggest that specific historical legacies make some modern nationalisms more consequential than others.

This paper introduces the concept of dialogic oversight, a process by which judicial bodies monitor compliance through a combination of mandated state reporting, third-party engagement, and supervision hearings. To assess the effectiveness of this strategy in the international arena, we evaluate the supervision hearings conducted by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. We employ propensity-score matching, difference-in-difference estimators, and event-history models to analyze compliance with 1,878 reparation measures ordered by the Court between 1989 and 2019. We find that dialogic oversight has moderate but positive effects, increasing the probability of state compliance by about 3 percent per year (a substantial effect compared to the baseline rate of implementation). However, it requires the engagement of civil society to yield positive outcomes. Our framework connects related findings in distant literatures on constitutional law and international organizations.

Does war deepen gender inequalities in politicians’ behavior or help erase them? We draw from the terror management theory developed in psychology to argue that the onset of a violent conflict is likely to push politicians to conform more strongly with traditional gender stereotypes because it helps individuals cope with existential fears. To test our argument, we use data on Ukrainian politicians’ engagement on social media (136,455 Facebook posts by 469 politicians) in the three months before and after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and interrupted time series analysis, to assess the effect of conflict on politicians’ behavior. We find that conflict onset deepens gender-stereotypical behavior among politicians in their public engagement. We also show that, consistent with our argument, gender biases among the public are magnified during war.

This study examines how the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent Western responses influence Chinese public opinion on the use of force. Using two original, preregistered online survey experiments, first in June 2022 and then in June 2023, we show that the Russian invasion is associated with a modest but statistically significant increase in Chinese support for using military force in international affairs in general and against Taiwan in particular. However, information on Western military measures aiding Ukraine curbs the modest impact of the invasion. Such information is especially effective in reducing support for an outright military invasion of Taiwan. Causal mediation analyses reveal that the Russian invasion influences public opinion by inducing optimism regarding military success and pessimism regarding peaceful resolution of the conflict. These findings suggest that foreign military aggression and subsequent international countermeasures can sway domestic public opinion on using military force.