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) paired comparisons of Rifle Divisions at the Battle of Leningrad; and (3) cross-national data on 526 land battles and war outcomes from 75 conflicts (1939–2011) to assess generalizability. We offer three sets of empirical findings. First, coercion keeps some soldiers from fleeing the battlefield, but at the cost of higher casualties and reduced initiative. Second, wartime and prewar coercion (such as mass repression and officer purges) affect soldiers’ behavior in similar, mutually reinforcing ways. Third, the resolve-boosting, initiative-dampening effects of fratricidal coercion generalize across belligerents and wars. Fratricidal coercion generates compliance through fear, compelling soldiers with variable levels of resolve to conform to a uniform standard of battlefield behavior. But the net utility of this approach is dubious. On balance, countries employing fratricidal coercion are less likely to win wars.

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, comparable to taxation or the provision of basic security in its prevalence. I demonstrate that armed groups exploit pre-existing gender grievances, using strategies like punishing domestic violence (9 percent of groups), banning dowries (15 percent), and enforcing dress codes (11 percent) to empower targeted subsections of the population and undermine local elites. I combine cross-national analysis with qualitative case studies of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Katiba Macina, two Islamist groups in Mali. This allows me to demonstrate how the approach to local elites drives gender governance in two groups with a shared ideology, goals, and societal context.

How does power affect threat perception? Drawing on advances in psychological research on power, I find that the sense of state power inflates the perception of threats. The sense of power activates intuitive thinking in the decision-making process, including a reliance on gut feelings and cognitive shortcuts like heuristics and prior beliefs. In turn, as psychological IR research shows, these mechanisms tend to inflate threat perception. The powerful assess threats from the gut rather than the head. Experimental evidence from the US and China, a reanalysis of a survey of Russian elites, and a large-scale text analysis of Cold War US foreign policy elites lend support to this expectation. The findings help to psychologically reconcile enduring theoretical puzzles—from “underbalancing” to “overextension”—and generate entirely new ones, like the possibility that decision makers of rising, not declining, states feel more fear. Together, the paper offers a “first image reversed” challenge to bottom-up accounts of psychological IR. Decision-maker psychology is also a dependent variable shaped by the balance of power, with important implications for a world returning to great power competition.

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 from Hamas leads Fatah to use more terrorism than it would in a world where Hamas abstains from terrorism, but competition from Fatah can lead Hamas to attack less than it otherwise would. Likewise, making Hamas more capable or interested in competing increases overall violence, but making Fatah more capable or interested discourages violence on both sides. These discouragement effects of competition on violence emerge through an asymmetric contest, in which we find that Fatah uses terrorism more effectively to boost its support, although Hamas has lower attack costs. Expanding on these results, we demonstrate that outbidding theory is consistent with a positive, negative, or null relationship between measures of violence and incentives to compete.

Experts argue that resource transfers from developed to developing countries are central to international climate policy efforts. Yet as countries grapple with the political difficulties of provisioning and accepting climate funds, understanding why voters support or oppose international climate finance becomes critical. Focusing on domestic audiences in both donor and recipient countries, we investigate the determinants of public support for cross-border climate transfers. Theoretically, we focus on the effects of emphasizing the compensatory purposes of funding, favoring mitigation over adaptation activities, and prioritizing partnerships between donor and recipient agents—three factors that generate both normative and material benefits, and thus build support among broader coalitions of voters. Paired survey experiments in the United States and India corroborate the relevance of these transfer features for citizens in donor and recipient countries. Taken together, our findings shed light on the domestic political-economy attributes of transfer agreements that can unlock support for cross-border climate cooperation.

Thomas Schelling argued that “The most spectacular event of the past half century is one that did not occur. We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger.” To this, he added a question: “Can we make it through another half dozen decades?” Contemporary technological innovation, weapons proliferation, increased modernization efforts, and nuclear saber-rattling have made Schelling's question an urgent one. Recently, there has been an explosion in scholarship attempting to test the resilience of nonuse. These scholars have focused primarily on methodological innovations, generating an impressive body of evidence about the future of nonuse. Yet we argue that this literature is theoretically problematic: it reduces mechanisms of nuclear nonuse to a “rationalist” versus “normative” dichotomy which obscures the distinct pathways to nuclear (non)use within each theoretical framework. With rationalist theories, the current literature commits the sin of conflation, treating what should be distinct mechanisms—cost and credibility—as a single causal story. With normative theories, scholars have committed a sin of omission, treating norms as structural and overlooking mechanisms of norm contestation. We show that teasing out these different causal pathways reveals radically different expectations about the future of nonuse, especially in a world of precision nuclear weapons.

Are publics in great power democracies more likely to approve of foreign armed combatants that comply with international humanitarian law (IHL)? There is a wealth of evidence that armed combatants with an incentive to seek the support of outside compliance constituencies are more likely to adhere to IHL. Yet a key mechanism underlying these claims—that people in great power democracies are more likely to support armed combatants that comply with IHL—has not been directly tested. We address this question using a series of experiments embedded in nationally representative surveys conducted in three democracies that have frequently been involved in foreign interventions: France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We find that belligerents—both governments and rebels—that comply with the laws of war are significantly more likely to garner support from publics in likely intervening countries compared to those who do not comply. In all three countries, compliance with international law caused greater approval of armed combatants as well as greater support for economic or military intervention (although support for military intervention remained relatively low in the treatment groups). This lends support to arguments that, to the extent combatants seek support from outside audiences, this can serve as a mechanism by which international law constrains armed combat.

How do states as social actors cope with stigma-induced status anxiety? I propose the concept of “stigma shifting” as a way in which status-anxious states overcompensate for their stigma-induced inferiority and reaffirm their place in the world: by seeking identification with higher-status states and differentiation from lower-status states. In identifying with the desired group of states, stigmatized states engage in approval-seeking behavior and reaffirm their in-group status in areas where they feel discredited. In differentiating themselves from the undesired group, stigmatized states engage in distinction-seeking behavior, claiming their superiority over this “lesser” group in areas that gave rise to their status anxiety in the first place. Stigma shifting, in other words, allows a stigmatized state to take the role of a stigmatizer. To demonstrate the concept's depth and analytical utility, I draw on the case of East Asia in three disparate issue areas: colonial redress, nuclear disaster, and international order making. Japan, stigmatized in all three areas, has reaffirmed its status by shifting the stigma onto its significant but “lesser” others: China and Korea. Ultimately, stigma shifting solidifies status hierarchies in the world—not just the hierarchy as represented by the “Western” dominance of international society but also the regional hierarchies of the non-Western world.

Across countries and over time, support for economic globalization is strongest among individuals with the highest levels of education. Yet despite long-lasting debates on the sources of this correlation, reliable evidence that isolates the causal effect of education from the nonrandom selection of individuals into education is lacking. To address this fundamental issue, I exploit compulsory-schooling reforms that increased the minimum school-leaving age in eighteen countries. Employing a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, I find that the reform-induced added years of education substantially and durably increased support for trade liberalization. And using new data on the content of school curricula, I find that the effect of schooling largely stems from instilling tolerance and pluralism in citizens and reducing the perceived cultural threat of globalization. In contrast, there is little evidence that the effect of schooling reflects the distributive consequences of international trade, separating globalization winners and losers.

“Threat perception” is frequently invoked as a causal variable in theories of international relations and foreign policy decision making. Yet haphazard conceptualization and untested psychological assumptions leave its effects poorly understood. In this article, I propose a unified solution to these two related problems: taking the brain into account. I first show that this approach solves the conceptualization problem by generating two distinct concepts that generalize across existing theories, align with plain language, and are associated with specific brain-level processes: threat-as-danger perception (subjectively apprehending danger from any source) and threat-as-signal perception (detecting a statement of the intention to harm). Because both types of perception occur in the brain, large-scale neuroimaging data capturing these processes offer a way to empirically test some of the psychological assumptions embedded in IR theories. I conduct two such tests using assumptions from the literatures on conflict decision making (“harms are costs”) and on coercion (“intentions are inscrutable”). Based on an original analysis of fifteen coordinate-based meta-analyses comprising 500+ studies and 11,000+ subjects, I conclude that these assumptions are inconsistent with the cumulative evidence about how the brain responds to threats of either kind. Further, I show that brain-level data illuminate aspects of threat perception's impact on behavior that have not yet been integrated into IR theory. Advancing the study of threat perception thus requires a microfoundational approach that builds from what we know about the brain.

Conventional wisdom holds that open, collaborative, and transparent organizations are innovative. But some of the most radical innovations—satellites, lithium-iodine batteries, the internet—were conceived by small, secretive teams in national security agencies. Are these organizations more innovative because of their secrecy, or in spite of it? We study a principal–agent model of public-sector innovation. We give research teams a secret option and a public option during the initial testing and prototyping phase. Secrecy helps advance high-risk, high-reward projects through the early phase via a cost-passing mechanism. In open institutions, managers will not approve pilot research into high-risk, high-reward ideas for fear of political costs. Researchers exploit secrecy to conduct pilot research at a higher personal cost to generate evidence that their project is viable and win their manager's approval. Contrary to standard principal–agent findings, we show that researchers may exploit secrecy even if their preferences are perfectly aligned with their manager's, and that managers do not monitor researchers even if monitoring is costless and perfect. We illustrate our theory with two cases from the early Cold War: the CIA's attempt to master mind control (MKULTRA) and the origins of the reconnaissance satellite (CORONA). We contribute to the political application of principal–agent theory and studies of national security innovation, emerging technologies, democratic oversight, the Sino–American technology debate, and great power competition.

While many scholars expect people's ideological orientations to drive their beliefs regarding the legitimacy of international organizations (IOs), research has found surprisingly limited support for this common assumption. In this article we resolve this puzzle by introducing the perceived ideological profile of IOs as a critical factor shaping the relationship between ideological orientation and such beliefs. Theoretically, we argue that citizens accord IOs greater legitimacy when they perceive these organizations as ideologically more congruent with their own orientations. Empirically, we evaluate this expectation by combining observational and experimental analyses of new survey evidence from four countries: Brazil, Germany, Indonesia, and the United States. We find that citizens indeed perceive IOs as having particular ideological profiles and that those perceptions systematically moderate the relationship between people's ideological orientations and their sense of IOs’ legitimacy. These findings suggest that political ideology is a more powerful driver of legitimacy beliefs in global governance than previously understood.

A large literature has argued that domestic competition increases a militant organization's use and severity of terrorism to differentiate their “brand” and “outbid” other organizations. However, most empirical analyses infer such competition from the quantity of groups present in a geographic area. This approach neglects specific group relationships, such as cooperation, rhetorical or violent rivalry, or peaceful coexistence. We introduce a behavioral measure of group competition and argue that variation in the quality, rather than the quantity, of competition affects the violence profile of militant groups in unexpected ways. Violent competition, where militants attack one another, imposes significant constraints on group resources and increases groups’ dependence on civilian support, which exacerbates the costs of a popular backlash against brutality. Moreover, violent competition effectively substitutes for crowding out rivals via outbidding. As competition becomes extreme, we posit that groups increasingly opt for a strategy of terrorist restraint and reduce the share of high-profile attacks on soft civilian targets. We test this argument at the macro and micro levels with cross-national data on 290 organizations in civil war (1970–2018) and granular data on the subnational targeting strategy of the Islamic State in Syria (2013–2018). Both analyses provide robust support for our argument. The findings shed light on the strategic limitations of outbidding and provide important insights for research and policy.

How do leaders select their top-level foreign policy appointees? Through a formal model of the domestic and intragovernmental politics surrounding an international crisis, I investigate the trade-offs shaping leaders’ appointment strategies. In the model, a leader selects a foreign policy appointee, anticipating how the appointment will affect the advice he receives in the crisis, the electorate's evaluation of his performance, and ultimately the policies that he and his foreign counterparts pursue as a consequence. The analysis uncovers a fundamental tension in the leader's ability to use appointments to advance his core political and policy objectives of deterring foreign aggression, obtaining accurate advice, and maximizing domestic approval: any appointment that advances one of these objectives invariably comes at the cost of another, and the leader's appointment strategy must balance across these trade-offs. Analyzing cross-national appointment patterns to the offices of ministers of defense and foreign affairs, I find descriptive evidence consistent with the model's predictions: leaders from dovish parties are more than twice as likely as leaders from hawkish parties to select cross-partisan and politically independent appointees, and such appointments are less likely for leaders of either party as they approach re-election.

This paper advances a theory for the autocratic logic of internet control. Politically motivated internet control generates a positive externality for domestic data-intensive firms and a negative externality for domestic knowledge-intensive research entities. Exploiting a major internet control shock in 2014, I find that Chinese data-intensive firms gained 26 percent in revenue over other Chinese firms as the result of internet control. The same shock incurred a 10 percent decline in research quality from Chinese researchers, conditional on the knowledge intensity of their discipline. It also reduced the research quality from Chinese researchers relative to their US counterparts by 22 percent in all disciplines. Due to the positive data externality, internet control enacted to prevent domestic threats challenges the state's competing need for data sovereignty against foreign threats. Meanwhile, the state shields certain foreign knowledge-intensive actors from the negative knowledge externality to avoid the immediate economic costs they might otherwise impose. Qualitative evidence supports both implications, highlighting the centrality of short-term interests and foreign actors in autocratic decision making.

This study explores how race impacts the legitimacy of international organizations (IOs). Specifically, we examine whether the representation of Black people in IO leadership positions influences perceptions of IO legitimacy among Black and white individuals. To do so, we fielded seven survey experiments in two racially diverse countries, South Africa and the United States, and three experiments in one predominantly Black country, Kenya. Our experiments were designed to distinguish the effects of an IO leader's race from their region of origin. We find that Black IO leadership enhances perceptions of institutional legitimacy among Black citizens, but does not strongly influence the legitimacy perceptions of their white counterparts. Our findings suggest that improving the representation of historically marginalized racial groups within IOs can enhance their popular legitimacy.

In 2014, Russia denied that its military was assisting separatists in eastern Ukraine, despite overwhelming evidence. Why do countries bother to deny hostile actions like this even when they are obvious? Scholars have argued that making hostile actions covert can reduce pressure on the target state to escalate. Yet it is not clear whether this claim applies when evidence of responsibility for the action is publicly available. We use three survey experiments to test whether denying responsibility for an action in the presence of contradictory evidence truly dampens demand for escalation among the public in the target state. We also test three causal mechanisms that might explain this: a rationalist reputation mechanism, a psychological mechanism, and an uncertainty mechanism. We do find a de-escalatory effect of noncredible denials. The effect is mediated through all three proposed causal mechanisms, but uncertainty and reputational concern have the most consistent effect.

Are states more interested in claiming territories that have economic resources? While previous theories of international relations assume that resources make a territory more tempting to claim, all else equal, I argue that certain types of economic resources can make states less willing to claim a territory. The presence of capital-intensive resources—such as oil or minerals—raises concerns about how the benefits of acquiring the territory would be distributed within the nation. These distributional concerns make it harder and costlier for leaders to mobilize widespread and consistent support for claiming resource-rich lands. Using original geocoded data on territorial claims in South America from 1830 to 2001, I show that states are indeed less likely to claim lands that have oil or minerals, even when they can be claimed for historical or administrative reasons. I then illustrate the theoretical mechanism through a case study of Bolivia, comparing Bolivian attitudes toward reclaiming its two lost provinces, the Chaco and the Litoral. By showing how the presence of economic resources can become a liability in mobilizing unified support, this paper questions the widespread assumption that resources make territories more desirable to claim.