How do state builders reshape society? While existing work shows they often rely on violence, education, elite co-optation, and institution building, this article underscores the importance of symbolic programs. When intensely enforced, symbolic programs reshape social orders by forging new social bonds and socializing individuals into state builders’ governing principles. I test this argument using subnational variation in the enforcement of the French Republican calendar—a symbolic program that politicized time, labor, and rest, rightfully regulated by the state, rather than sacred duties governed by the Catholic Church—and its association with labor conflicts. In departments where the calendar was more strongly enforced, it fostered political understandings of labor and rest, reduced coordination costs, and increased mobilization potential. Using original data and a difference-in-differences design, I find that more intense enforcement of the calendar is associated with a higher likelihood of labor conflict onset, demonstrating the long-term social effects of symbolic state-building programs.

If change is the only constant, how does the law keep pace with technology? Without a centralized judiciary, international law should be especially susceptible to disruption, yet it can be remarkably resilient in practice. I argue that efforts to minimize legal ambiguity, long seen as integral to compliance, can hinder its application to new technologies. Drawing on first principles from psycholinguistics, my theory differentiates between what I call convergent and divergent forms of flexibility. Unlike divergent flexibility, which gives rise to contestation, convergent flexibility tends to promote consensus, even when (1) technology is unprecedented and (2) regulatory interests sharply diverge. To test the theory, $450$ trained legal professionals were commissioned to take part in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) that varied technological novelty, legal precision, and political incentives. Participants collectively contributed 280,000 words over 10,000 hours in defense of their professional legal opinions, offering a novel (agent-subjective) measure of compliance. To establish external validity, the experiment is complemented with research into the legal impact of two breakthrough chemical weapons technologies: “super tear gas” and novichok. The findings contribute a general theoretical framework for understanding when and why emerging technologies are legally disruptive.

Scholars and policymakers alike now view competition between states as the primary threat to international security. Yet the nontraditional threats that previously defined the global security landscape, such as terrorism and civil war, continue to flourish. Recent interstate conflicts have featured nonstate armed groups as central actors, and governments rely on these groups to extend their interests. This article examines how government support for foreign nonstate actors affects interstate competition. We conceptualize state–nonstate ties as transnational networks comprised of cooperative relationships between governments and foreign terrorist organizations, rebel groups, militias, and civilian groups. We argue that these transnational networks exacerbate interstate tensions in two ways. First, they increase a state’s capacity relative to adversaries, which emboldens the government, increases its bargaining leverage, and leads to increased aggression toward other states. Second, they increase a government’s liability for the actions of sponsored groups, which leads to unintended confrontations and retaliatory actions by affected targets. To measure interstate competition, we use high-resolution event data on verbal and material conflict between governments. We incorporate these data into network models that allow transnational ties and interstate conflict to co-evolve, such that states form ties to nonstate actors in response to interstate conflict, and those ties in turn influence conflict probability. We find that both the size and structure of governments’ respective transnational networks are associated with an increase in verbal and material conflict. Further, this association is particularly strong for states that lack conventional military strength. These findings suggest that cooperation between governments and nonstate actors is integrally connected to, and often exacerbates, interstate competition.

We examine how relative exposure to negative economic shocks across racial groups impacts racial animus and voting patterns. Guided by group position theory, we argue that when dominant groups experience greater economic harm than nondominant groups within the same labor markets, racial animus intensifies. In the US context, the historically central boundary between white and Black Americans provides the most meaningful test of this mechanism. Using data from US commuting zones (2000 to 2020), we focus on the impact of the China shock on anti-Black racial animus. We measure relative exposure as the gap in import exposure between white and Black workers. Our findings show that negative economic shocks disproportionately affecting white workers, compared to Black workers, lead to increased anti-Black animus and increased Republican presidential vote share, even when controlling for overall import exposure. Taken together, these findings suggest that it is economic decline relative to another group that generates racial animus and outwardly racist behavior, as well as influences political behavior.

Why do some economic shocks have political consequences, upturning elections and ushering in radical candidates, while others are brushed off as structural change? We address this puzzle by looking to geographically concentrated industries, and how they relate to regional identity. While most often presented as a source of regional strength, we show that industrial hubs in the United States have accounted for more job losses than gains over the last twenty years. We then show how this matters through three original survey studies. Workers in geographically concentrated industries belong to denser, more deeply-rooted peer networks; these are associated with a stronger view that politicians are responsible for preventing layoffs. Those same individuals also perceive economic shocks of equal magnitude as more damaging to their region’s standing, compared to the rest of the country. Perceptions of lost regional standing, in turn, are associated with greater demand for populist leadership traits. Finally, we show how these individual attitudes translate into aggregate political behavior. Employment losses in industrial hubs are tied to greater support for Republican candidates, while equivalent losses in non-hubs show no analogous effect. Our account presents a competing picture to the dominant narrative of industrial hubs as founts of innovation and productivity. When threatened by structural forces, such hubs can turn instead into founts of political resentment.

Serious human rights violations have commonly been reported in border regions and against migrants. We develop a theory of torture by persons whose job it is to secure the border from irregular entry. We contend that when states commence highly visible and costly border hardening programs, border and immigration officials (BIOs) tend to internalize stringent border security priorities and interpret border barriers as license to enforce the border at all costs. We find that when states start new or extended border walls, torture allegations by BIOs increase. In addition, there is corroborative evidence in the press releases of Europe’s border security agency, Frontex, that attention to security increases and attention to human rights wanes when reporting on situations in states with border walls. Taken together, these results suggest a tension between border hardening and human rights, and an urgent need to critically examine border hardening through a human rights lens.

Despite their significant influence on the development trajectories of recipient nations, we know little about the lending strategies of international financial institutions (IFIs) dominated by authoritarian regimes. In this paper, we provide new evidence that autocratic IFIs are not merely neutral economic actors. Our findings suggest that these institutions provide financial support to authoritarian governments facing acute threats to their survival. We introduce an original data set tracking the lending behavior of eighteen autocratic IFIs across 143 recipient countries from 1967 to 2021. Our findings uncover that aid flows from autocratic IFIs increase precisely when authoritarian regimes are most vulnerable. By situating these insights within the broader aid allocation literature, we provide a fresh perspective on the political calculus of international development lending, with profound implications for understanding global power dynamics.

Through comparative analysis of two historical cases of transition from hierarchical to competitive international orders—from the Han dynasty to the Period of Disunion in third-century China, and from the Abbasid Caliphate to the Islamic Commonwealth in the tenth century—we consider how social movements have long been significant facilitators of international change. With reference to the contributions to these transitions of early Daoist and Sunni movements respectively, we offer a comparative framework for understanding how social movements may undermine established hierarchies and induce legitimacy contests that contribute toward the emergence of new international orders. Moreover, by contrasting these cases against the role of the Reformation movement in the development of European international order, the article both decenters the European experience and illuminates how social movements can be central to crafting fundamental, yet varying, relationships between political authority and society across highly diverse cultural and temporal contexts.

How does asset mobility affect the provision of property rights? Existing research anticipates that firm owners with mobile assets are effective at pressuring the government for property rights. In this research note, I examine not just the influence of firm owners but also their preferences. I develop a formal model to show that owners of mobile assets, who may move their assets out of the government’s reach, have less to gain from property rights enforcement than owners with less mobile assets. Moreover, once one considers heterogeneous firms competing with one another, firms with more mobile assets may gain a competitive advantage from policies that are disproportionately costly for their competitors (like violations of property rights). I evaluate the model propositions drawing on empirical analyses of survey data from business executives in Latin America and cross-national, time-series data on firm profits. The findings from Latin America show that business executives with less mobile assets report greater need for property rights improvements. Cross-nationally, property rights increase the profits of firms, but the effects are confined to firms with substantial immobile assets. These findings are consistent with the smaller benefits of property rights among firms with more mobile assets. The research note unites the literatures on heterogeneous firms and the development of property rights to challenge the conventional wisdom about how asset mobility affects property rights.

Following pressure from investors, Congress passed the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) to facilitate lawsuits by nonstate commercial actors against sovereign states in US courts. This legislation redefined sovereign debt as a commercial activity, seemingly favoring creditors. Yet case outcomes proved variable. While the FSIA established clear procedural guidelines, judicial discretion remained, raising questions about what factors influence outcomes. How deep is the effect of judges’ partisan leanings? To what extent does a left–right divide exist in this issue area? Although sovereign debt of other countries rarely sparks US political debate, I argue that partisan influence persists in these cases, particularly when defendants are democracies. Republican-nominated judges consistently apply the FSIA’s pro-creditor framework regardless of defendant characteristics, reflecting their party’s historical support for transnational commercial actors and contract enforcement. Democratic-nominated judges, however, exhibit conditional deference: when democracies demonstrate fiscal restraint before defaulting—signaling genuine economic distress—Democratic-nominated judges more readily defer to the sovereign defendant within the FSIA’s constraints. When democracies maintain high government consumption while defaulting, suggesting strategic choice rather than necessity, Democratic-nominated judges enforce more strictly. By contrast, both Democratic- and Republican-nominated judges converge on pro-creditor positions when adjudicating autocratic defaults because the absence of credible fiscal signals eliminates conditions for conditional deference. I test this argument with an original data set of sovereign debt litigation cases brought to the United States from 1977 to 2022.

Scholars and policymakers have argued that territorial revisionism is dangerous because it risks setting off a cascade of claims by states dissatisfied with their borders. This Pandora’s box logic suggests that states that are vulnerable to an unraveling of the status quo have incentives to restrain their territorial ambitions to preserve stability. This paper explores this claim theoretically and empirically. It provides descriptive evidence to determine whether vulnerability to territorial threats has historically been associated with a lower likelihood of initiating territorial disputes. We find some evidence of such an effect in postindependence Africa, where this logic is most frequently invoked, and to some extent in Asia, but not in other regions. To help explain these empirical observations, we develop a multistate model of territorial conflict that identifies the conditions under which cooperation to preserve the territorial status quo can be sustained. The model shows that while an equilibrium of mutual restraint can exist, the necessary conditions are quite restrictive, and this cooperative equilibrium is never unique. Thus while a Pandora’s box of potential claims can provide the basis for a norm of restraint, the emergence of such a norm is neither straightforward nor guaranteed.

How does the threat of a dominant ally withdrawing affect public attitudes toward defense spending and defense cooperation in alliances? Despite extensive literature on foreign policy attitudes, we lack research that causally examines this pivotal question in a realistic setting. Addressing this gap, we utilize the novel circumstances surrounding the coin-toss 2024 US presidential election to test how the unprecedented uncertainty of the US commitment to NATO affects public attitudes toward defense in allied countries. Using a preregistered survey experiment in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany, we investigate how an uncertain election defined by contrasting candidate rhetoric influenced European public opinion in an era of renewed Russian military threats. We find that US threats of withdrawal made respondents significantly more willing to spend on defense, and less willing to support continued defense cooperation in NATO. We demonstrate that threats of withdrawal also increased the public’s preference for national security autonomy, and explore whether declining confidence in NATO allies explains this effect. By inciting fears of abandonment, threats of withdrawal create concrete consequences not only for defense spending preferences, but also the types of cooperation that allies may pursue in lieu of the dominant ally’s commitment.

How does racism structure the patterns of cooperation and contestation in international relations? We propose a theory of institutional racism in international relations, examining how international organizations perpetuate racial disparities despite their nominally race-neutral principles. Based on our original data, language in the founding charters of international organizations has shifted from open expressions of racism to the espousal of antiracism. However, membership patterns suggest a persistent bias in favor of white-majority countries: (1) such countries remain overrepresented as inception members of newly formed organizations, and (2) even after accounting for a variety of potential confounders, organizations that overrepresent white-majority countries tend to disproportionately draw new members from other white-majority countries. International organizations that explicitly profess antiracist principles, such as the International Criminal Court, exhibit similar bias. The findings suggest that understanding the structure and biases of the international order requires careful attention to the role of race.

We analyze a model of collective deterrence in which (1) one state may challenge a status quo defended by a great power and an arbitrary number of partners and (2) defender war costs are private information. We show first that the great power’s intra-coalition dominance shapes which cooperative failure, free riding, or uncertainty over others’ willingness to fight may weaken deterrence. Second, increasing the great power’s war payoffs increases both deterrence and partner free riding. Third, the extent of great power dominance determines whether a larger or more capable coalition enhances or weakens deterrence and ensures that size and capabilities work in opposite directions. Finally, increasing uncertainty over a great power’s war costs can decrease or increase deterrence, depending on the prior strength of its commitment. We also use the model to illuminate differing responses of American allies in Europe and East Asia to the 2016 election of Donald Trump.

Can a leader’s use of social media in an external crisis increase domestic nationalist mobilization? In this research note I leverage an original writing simulation on serving national security elites in Pakistan to demonstrate that the vocabulary that leaders employ is endogenous to their messaging platform, with crisis messages composed for Twitter/X communicating greater levels of affective content than similar content composed for official communiqués. I then randomize elite-curated content across an online sample of Pakistani social media users to show that bundling escalatory intent with affective platform-specific vocabulary reduced respondent sensitivity to crisis details, increased public jingoism, and slightly increased domestic willingness to engage in street protest. I discuss the strategic implications of these findings for leaders who, conscious of the mobilizing risks of social media, may wish to avoid tying their hands in a crisis.

How do armed groups waging asymmetrical wars assert political and legal subjectivity in an international order that historically excluded them? This article recovers the FLN’s groundbreaking legal activism during the Algerian War of Independence, arguing that it staged the most far-reaching challenge of its kind to international humanitarian law’s (IHL) imperial order from below through South–South legal politics. Acting as norm entrepreneurs, FLN jurists contested the existing limits on IHL’s scope and applicability while developing new institutional practices of insurgent normativity that established a disseminable model for other armed groups. In doing so, they put forward a set of legal arguments and practices that helped structure how later armed groups would invoke and substantially develop IHL under conditions of asymmetry. Based on previously inaccessible Algerian, Southern African, and state socialist archival materials, this article deepens existing accounts of normative change by reconstructing the concrete legal practices, institutional strategies, and legal-political thought through which Southern actors challenged IHL and international organizations from the margins of the international order.

We argue that transboundary pollution can simultaneously undermine domestic accountability processes and heighten international tensions. We examine this empirically in the context of South Korea, notorious for severe air pollution that partly originates from China. We first show that most media stories and popular public petitions on air pollution emphasize China’s responsibility. We then combine data on daily air quality with survey data (2015–2022) and use instrumental variable regressions to show that on bad air days, South Koreans’ assessments of their own government’s environmental efforts remain consistent but their opinions of China’s leadership worsen. We thus find causal evidence that transboundary pollution contributes to growing public hostility between China and Korea. The findings may also help explain why Korea ranks lowest among OECD countries on air pollution and climate change policies. The research note concludes with broader implications for studying transboundary environmental issues.

This research note is the first to systematically examine the naming and shaming of nonstate armed groups (NSAGs). While previous research has focused on naming and shaming that targets states, we leverage novel data to show that the practice extends to NSAGs, accounting for almost half of all admonishments made at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) from 1995 to 2016. We develop and test two explanatory theories: one suggesting that partnerships between states drive states to name and shame NSAGs, and another positing that states condemn NSAGs to support the multilateral system and signal their commitment to global norms protecting civilians from violence. We argue that states employ the diplomatic tool carefully and selectively, and as a consequence, the UNSC’s five permanent members (P5) and the ten elected members (E10), name and shame for different purposes. Our findings indicate that strategic partnerships between UNSC member states and governments engaged in conflicts with NSAGs influence the P5’s decisions to name and shame NSAGs. In contrast, the E10 are more likely to publicly condemn NSAGs that deliberately target civilians, suggesting that adherence to global norms better explains their behavior. However, the E10’s naming and shaming may not be aimed at enforcing compliance from NSAGs, but rather at showcasing to domestic and international audiences their own commitment to these norms. Our study marks the opening of a new research agenda on the naming and shaming of NSAGs.

Are nuclear weapons useful for coercion, and, if so, what factors increase the credibility and effectiveness of nuclear threats? While prominent scholars like Thomas Schelling argue that nuclear brinkmanship, or the manipulation of nuclear risk, can effectively coerce adversaries, others contend nuclear weapons are not effective tools of coercion, especially when designed to achieve offensive and revisionist objectives. Simultaneously, there is broad debate about the incorporation of automation via artificial intelligence into military systems, especially nuclear command and control. We develop a theoretical argument that nuclear threats implemented with automated nuclear launch systems are more credible compared to those implemented via non-automated means. By reducing human control over nuclear use, leaders can more effectively tie their hands and thus signal resolve, even if doing so increases the risk of nuclear war and thus is extremely dangerous. Preregistered survey experiments on an elite sample of United Kingdom Members of Parliament and two public samples of UK citizens provide support for these expectations, showing that in a crisis scenario involving a Russian invasion of Estonia, automated nuclear threats can increase credibility and willingness to back down. From a policy perspective, this paper highlights the dangers of countries adopting automated nuclear systems for malign purposes, and contributes to the literatures on coercive bargaining, weapons of mass destruction, and emerging technology.