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.

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.

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.

Do advisers affect foreign policy and, if so, how? Recent scholarship on elite decision making prioritizes leaders and the institutions that surround them, rather than the dispositions of advisers themselves. We argue that despite the hierarchical nature of foreign policy decision making, advisers’ predispositions regarding the use of force shape state behavior through the counsel advisers provide in deliberations. To test our argument, we introduce an original data set of 2,685 foreign policy deliberations between US presidents and their advisers from 1947 to 1988. Applying a novel machine learning approach to estimate the hawkishness of 1,134 Cold War–era foreign policy decision makers, we show that adviser-level hawkishness affects both the counsel that advisers provide in deliberations and the decisions leaders make: conflictual policy choices grow more likely as hawks increasingly dominate the debate, even when accounting for leader dispositions. The theory and findings enrich our understanding of international conflict by demonstrating how advisers’ dispositions, which aggregate through the counsel advisers provide, systematically shape foreign policy behavior.

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.

While there is increasing recognition of the role of race in shaping global politics, the extent to which the construction and operation of international order is entangled with race remains underexplored. In this article, I argue for the centrality of race and racialization in understanding the constitution of international order by theorizing the constitutive connections between race and international order and showing how the two can be examined as intertwined. I do this, first, by articulating conceptualizations of both international order and race that center on processes of regulation and regularization. Second, I bring these together to suggest that race be understood as a form of order that functions to reproduce a historically emergent form of hierarchy and domination across a range of spaces and contexts. Third, I operationalize these conceptualizations by outlining and historicizing some of the key features of this racialized and racializing international order, specifically coloniality, the racial state, and racial capitalism, and thereby illustrate important aspects of the persistence of this order. Centering race in the study of international order, I suggest, helps us better understand how racializing hierarchies and racialized inequalities persist in the present and are reproduced through structures and practices of international order.

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 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 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.

What are the distributional consequences of migration, and how do they affect attitudes toward migration? In this paper we leverage a natural experiment generated by the ousting of former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, which created an unprecedented influx of economic migrants from African countries to Europe. This surge of low-skilled labor benefited low-productivity firms by lowering their production costs and expanding their labor supply. Employing a triple difference-in-differences design, we document that attitudes toward migration became more positive in Western European regions with large shares of migrants and low-productivity firms. Evidence from Sweden, which provides finely grained geographical data, confirms these findings. We then test the economic microfoundations of this attitudinal shift. We show that the surge in the supply of low-skilled labor increased the profitability of low-productivity firms more in areas that experienced larger migration flows. We find no evidence that migration worsened natives’ labor market conditions.

What are the conditions under which governments form more ethnically inclusive coalitions? Previous contributions highlight strategic incentives as well as colonial and precolonial legacies as determinants of ethnically inclusive government coalitions but overlook the impact of political mobilization during the decolonization period. We argue that ideological exposure and commitment to the Pan-African anticolonial movement played a vital role in African leaders’ decisions to share power with other ethnic communities. We leverage novel data on African government leaders’ attendance at decolonization-era Pan-African conferences through a unique collection of conference delegate lists. Accounting for rival mechanisms, we find that African political elites who attended Pan-African conferences formed ethnically more inclusive government coalitions when they became government leaders. Our findings imply that the ideological influence and commitment signaled by conference attendance affected political leaders’ approach to form more inclusive governments and that ethnic coalitions have systematically unexplored legacies in the Pan-African decolonization movement.

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.

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.

Does whataboutism work in global affairs? When states face international criticism, they often respond with whataboutism: accusing their critics of similar faults. Despite its prevalence in policy discussions, whataboutism remains an understudied influence strategy. This study investigates how states use whataboutism to shape American public opinion across various international issues. We find, using survey experiments, that whataboutism mitigates the negative impacts of criticism by reducing public approval of US positions and backing for punitive actions. Whataboutist critiques referencing similar, recent misdeeds have more power to shape opinions. However, the identity of the whataboutist state does not significantly affect effectiveness. US counter-messaging often fails to diminish the effects of whataboutism. These results show that whataboutism can be a potent rhetorical tool in international relations and that it warrants greater attention from international relations scholars.

Rebels regularly provide public services, especially legal services, but the consequences of such programs are unclear. We argue that rebel courts can boost civilian support for insurgency and augment attack capacity by increasing the legitimacy of the rebellion, creating a vested interest in rebel rule, or enabling rebel coercion of the civilian population. We study the impact of the Taliban's judiciary by leveraging cross-district and over-time variation in exposure to Taliban courts using a trajectory-balancing design. We find that rebel courts reduced civilian support for the government and increased it for the Taliban, and were associated with more attacks and more coalition casualties. Exploring mechanisms, we find that courts resolved major interpersonal disputes between civilians but also facilitated more insurgent intimidation of civilians, and that changes in public opinion are unlikely to have been driven solely by social desirability bias. Our findings help explain the logic of rebel courts and highlight the complex interactions between warfare and institutional development in weak states.

Recent years have witnessed the theorizing of international order from a global, rather than purely Western, perspective. We contribute to this approach by reviewing recent book-length theorizations by four prominent contemporary Chinese scholars. We outline how these conceptions of international order converge and diverge, identify their contributions and limitations, and compare them with Western paradigms of international order, such as realism and liberalism. We then demonstrate how insights from these Chinese approaches enrich existing international relations debates and shed light on contemporary Chinese foreign policy.

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.

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.

Explanations for the successful expansion and consolidation of the European Union and its legal system have long emphasized the importance of domestic courts’ sending preliminary references to the Court of Justice. Key to many of these theoretical accounts is the claim that domestic courts are better equipped than the Court of Justice to compel national governments to comply with EU law. Integrating insights from the comparative judicial politics literature into the context of the EU's preliminary references system, we provide a theoretical and empirical foundation for this claim by arguing that incorporating domestic courts into the EU legal process enhances public support for expansive judicial interpretations of EU law. We go on to argue, however, that this transfer of legitimacy depends on citizens’ views of the national and European courts. We support our argument with evidence from a preregistered survey experiment fielded in Germany.