How might changes in the credibility of one alliance relate to the credibility of other alliance commitments? Debate between competing views on this question spans decades in part because systematic tests are difficult. We contribute systematic evidence with a new measure of credibility in U.S. alliances and novel technique to estimate interdependence. Our measure draws on expert ratings of allied beliefs over U.S. credibility and our analysis employs Gaussian process regression to analyze credibility. We find strong correlations in allied credibility perceptions within regions and little correlation across regions. Supplementary analyses suggest that these correlations reflect common unobservables and a small impact of shared perception of past U.S. behavior.

This article uses the Kenya Office in Cairo (KOC) to explore the intersections and tensions between territorial nationalism and supranational networks of anticolonial patronage during a brief window in the broader era of decolonization. It argues that the principal staffers of the KOC were in many ways marginal figures in Kenyan nationalist politics, but were able to build a degree of political capital and stature due to their proximity to external patrons in a period when more established nationalist figures were restricted to the physical space of colonial Kenya. The article then analyzes a factional schism within the KOC to highlight how nationalist outposts and exilic activists became imbricated in competition between political rivals and visions operating at multiple geographic and ideological scales. That the figures involved in the KOC and its post-schism rival would be sidelined by the official infrastructures of Kenyan nationalism and anticolonial internationalism and the “Big Men” who came to control them shows, first, that mobility is not always the most productive framework for apprehending these histories and, second, that proximity to internal and external patrons and the clout that accompanies this proximity were contingent and could both make and break political capital.

This article challenges the image of Cold War Pakistan as a passive client state, arguing instead that Pakistan’s early international history was shaped by friction between a pro-Western elite and a domestic polity animated by anti-imperial solidarity, socialism, and Muslim internationalism. Examining the 1955 Bandung Conference, the 1955 Baghdad Pact, and the 1956 Suez Crisis, the article shows how domestic contestation shaped Pakistan’s foreign policy, introducing the concept of agency-in-effect to argue that polities lacking formal diplomatic power can influence states and, through that influence, help shape world events. These social forces, preconditioned by Bandung and the Baghdad Pact, erupted during the Suez Crisis, provoking a domestic legitimacy crisis and contributing to broader anti-imperial struggles that rendered European colonialism untenable. Together, these events reconceptualize world order from below, revealing the contested role of Pakistan’s domestic polity in the transition from British-French colonialism to American hegemony in West Asia during decolonization.

Previous attempts at explaining how geographically distant and disparate Bronze Age polities, like the chiefdoms of northern Europe and the urban states of the Mediterranean, were connected have focused on exchange networks. By combining insights from political science with archaeology, this article sets out to do two things. First, to reintroduce system thinking to model interconnectivities in the Bronze Age world, using an old trope in international relations studies as a lens and analytical tool. Second, to argue that diplomacy and war must be treated on a par with trade as institutions of such a system, of major importance for understanding international relations during the Bronze Age. The authors discuss the so-called Amarna system’s scope in time and space, exploring whether and how Bronze Age polities in the far north of Europe, as outsiders, can be plausibly construed as constitutive ‘others’.

This article offers a state-of-the-art review of a new and growing research program in International Relations (IR) that analyzes the far right’s inter- and transnational politics. Responding to the rise of far-right leaders, parties, and movements worldwide, this nascent literature sheds light on the inter- and transnational drivers, patterns, connections, and effects of far-right politics. To further consolidate and develop this emerging research program, as this article argues, it is imperative to integrate this literature into a wider framework that delineates different analytical approaches and research agendas. For this purpose, the article identifies and examines five research strands: (1) foreign and security policy, (2) international thought, (3) the global causes of the rise of the far right, (4) trans- and international collaboration, and (5) international norms, institutions, and orders. It appraises their different analytical perspectives and insights, connects each research strand with various IR paradigms, subdisciplines, and literatures, and identifies unexplored lines of inquiry. Thereby, the article aims to broaden and diversify the theoretical, empirical, and methodological scope of this research program and to further facilitate synergies between IR and far-right studies. It then discusses a series of limitations and challenges facing this research program and proposes a level-of-analysis approach to advance it.

International Relations (IR) has come under increasing and sustained criticism for marginalizing Africa’s intellectual traditions, rich history, Indigenous knowledge systems, and lived experiences. Several scholars of IR have argued that meaningful engagement with African contexts and thought would lead to better theory and pedagogy, more robust concepts, sharper analysis, and the study of issues that have greater relevance to contemporary global life. Despite the seriousness and widespread nature of the criticism, it is rare to find manuscripts in major IR journals that move beyond critique to demonstrate concretely how centring Africa in IR scholarship could transform the discipline or substantially enhance its analytical tools. This symposium takes up that difficult task by showing how a focus on African systems of thought can enrich IR’s conceptual vocabulary, reorient core assumptions, and expand the range of questions the discipline is equipped to address.

One of the most prominent theories in modern international relations is the democratic peace theory, which posits that democracies tend not to engage in armed conflicts with fellow democracies. Recently, Rathbun, Parker, and Pomeroy examined this effect at a microstructural level, performing surveys, computational studies, and meta-analysis. Of particular originality in their work was embedding analysis, which I review and offer a systematic critique of. Then, I propose a new and improved methodology that addresses its issues while leveraging foundational embedding models. My replication results agree with their findings that the democratic peace effect is racialized, that is, it is associated with racial and ethnocentric motivations. The findings offer a timely guide in conducting embedding analysis in political science research.

This article examines how artificial intelligence (AI) became framed as a critical node of U.S.–China strategic competition between 2015 and 2023, arguing that “hybrid epistemic experts” – figures who straddle technical expertise, corporate leadership and policy influence – played a decisive role in shaping elite understanding of AI. Through a critical review of policy documents, news media, public statements and institutional developments, this article examines how the “U.S.–China AI Race” narrative did not emerge along the usual pathways of state-driven, top-down bureaucratic processes or traditional lobbying but was actively constructed and amplified by figures like former Google executive Eric Schmidt. Schmidt’s role as a hybrid actor allowed him to translate AI from a narrow technological domain into an existential competition requiring massive policy investment. This overarching capability was driven by AI’s speculative, technically complex and general-purpose nature, which has concentrated knowledge production in private hands, enabling hybrid actors to achieve disproportionate influence over AI policy discourse. This phenomenon raises concerns about democratic governance, the collapse of independent expertise and the self-reinforcing dynamics between private power and public policymaking in emerging technologies.