Research on psychology and foreign policy offers compelling evidence that leaders’ predispositions to aggression influence their decisions to initiate military conflicts. However, most indicators of leader proclivities are limited both spatially and temporally, reducing their generalizability. To mitigate these issues, this study employs the facial width-to-height ratio (FWHR), a measure of aggression drawn from theories of evolutionary psychology, and available for most leaders in the post-World War II era. FWHR not only provides broad coverage but it also taps into a dimension of leader characteristics overlooked in most international conflict research. Empirical analysis of over 1,700 leaders across 174 countries during 1947–2010 reveals that higher-FWHR leaders are significantly more likely than their lower-FWHR counterparts to initiate conflict. The results are particularly strong early in a leader’s tenure.

During the Cold War, leaders with combat experience engaged in attritional bargaining over territory and arms limitation with groups of advisors to offer pluralistic opinions. Hegemonic leaders today exhibit little tolerance for diverse interpretations and appear less likely to consider analogies informed by international law and codes of conduct.

This article provides a leader-centred account of how ontological insecurity is managed in foreign policy. Building on Jim Marlow’s work and following a Lacanian-inspired understanding of the Self as fragmented and anxiety as a permanent condition of political life, it conceptualises ontological insecurity as a key driver of leadership agency rather than a problem to be resolved. Also investigated is how analogies and metaphors work as micro-narrative mechanisms, as a key part of leaders’ repertoire when triggering insecurity while projecting futures of continuity and renewal. By lending fluidity to storytelling, analogies and metaphors make unfamiliar situations intelligible to domestic and international audiences. Using interpretive narrative analysis, the illustrative case study of El Salvador’s populist leader, Nayib Bukele, is then turned to. The analysis reveals how leaders rely on analogies and metaphors to amplify collective anxieties while offering reassurance, thereby stabilising political authority without eliminating insecurity. By integrating ontological (in)security scholarship with leader-centred approaches in foreign policy analysis, the article demonstrates how narrative stability reflects not ontological security being achieved but ontological insecurity becoming governable. Thus, it contributes to a more process-oriented and agency-focused understanding of leaders, narrative, and ontological insecurity in the foreign policy domain.

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.

This paper examines the role of leadership development in NGO capacity building and assesses some of the challenges of developing a new generation of NGO leaders. The paper draws on the analysis of new and existing research into the dimensions of NGO leadership highlighting the importance of both individual attributes and contextual relevance. Effective NGO leaders are able to balance a range of competing pressures from different stakeholders in ways that do not compromise their individual identity and values. Leadership development programmes therefore need to focus on both the values and identity of individual leaders while also assisting leaders understand and proactively respond to their rapidly changing external environment. We conclude that there is an urgent need to build the capacity of NGOs to develop their leadership capability. Unless systems and processes to support this work are put in place then the apocryphal warning “trees die from the top” will have more than a ring of truth in it.

Scholars have identified several temporal challenges in foreign policymaking, such as variable time horizons and maintaining commitment or resolve over time. While the behavioural turn has emphasised leaders and their subjective perceptions, research often relies on rationalist conceptions of objective and linear time and struggles to assess leaders’ subjective perceptions of it. This paper theorises time as an intrinsic aspect of narrative reasoning in foreign policy, introducing a ‘temporal definition of the situation’ (TDoS) framework to capture leaders’ situation-specific subjective time perceptions. I then operationalise the TDoS framework’s key temporal features and show how it can be empirically examined. The value of the TDoS is illustrated by assessing the temporal perceptions of Bush and Obama regarding Iran’s nuclear programme, showing how their distinct definitions of the foreign policy situation shaped their subjective time perceptions and their corresponding responses. I conclude by discussing how this advancement can enhance behavioural research, provide insights into the ‘why now?’ questions surrounding leaders’ actions, and challenge existing understandings of time’s impact on foreign policymaking.

Since the initiation of its Belt and Road Initiative, China’s economic statecraft has drawn considerable attention in academic circles. Yet less attention has been given to why the Chinese leadership first chose to pursue its national interests through economic means in the post-Mao period. This underexplored part of China’s economic statecraft can serve as a useful starting point to understand China’s foreign economic policies on their own terms. Employing a neoclassical realist framework and surveying statements made by Chinese leaders throughout the reform era, this study argues that the country’s leaders have gradually modified the strategic importance of the country’s economic statecraft in response to changes in their perceptions of the world order. Meanwhile, China’s form of economic statecraft has largely been determined by reform of its state-owned enterprises in the domestic realm.

Leaders play a central role in world politics, and threat perception is a crucial element in the study and practice of International Relations (IR). Yet existing accounts of how leaders perceive threats are inadequate, drawing on an incomplete notion of leaders as (ir)rational information processors that pays no attention to the leader’s experience of danger as it unfolds in time and how such experience is structured. By integrating a framework developed by linguist Ray Jackendoff to describe the experience of language with the study of danger in International Relations, and by employing an interpretive textual analysis technique to danger descriptions made by world leaders embedded in different historical and cultural settings constructing different security dangers, I develop and illustrate the ‘danger framework’. In describing the unique features with which leaders experience security dangers, the danger framework theorises the qualia of danger experience and how it is organised into the conscious field of leaders. In doing so, the paper makes progress on three problems for existing accounts of threat perception in IR, illuminates important research puzzles, and provides the literature on experience and Ontological Security Studies (OSS) with micro-foundations.

While much of the scholarship on gender and corruption suggests that women in political office are, or are perceived to be, less corrupt than men, in just the past few years corruption accusations against Brazil's Dilma Rousseff and South Korea's Park Geun-hye have made headlines and led to their impeachment. In this article, we argue women heads of government are actually more likely to be charged with corruption due to pervasive beliefs that women, by their very presence, corrupt public office. Using cross-national data, we first demonstrate that women executives are significantly more likely to be formally accused of corruption than their male counterparts. We then present case studies of Brazilian President Rousseff and Turkish Prime Minister Çiller to demonstrate the powerful role of gendered discourse in motivating suspicion and inflaming elite and public sentiment and thereby driving corruption charges. These findings make a substantial contribution to the literature on gender, leadership and the politics of corruption.

This study investigates the nexus between the rise of female leaders and the appointment of women to cabinets and how family ties, crucial for women’s political ascendance, impact these appointments. Using a unique dataset across 160 countries from 1966 to 2021, we find that female leaders generally appoint more women to their cabinets and key cabinet roles. However, this effect is significantly moderated by the “Goldilocks” principle, defined by the nature of a leader’s family ties. Specifically, female leaders with moderate family ties are most likely to appoint women. In contrast, their counterparts from political dynasties and those without familial political ties are less inclined to do so. The exploratory analysis suggests potential mechanisms driving this dynamic: female leaders with a “just-right” degree of political lineage are more likely to have advanced degrees and Western education, potentially aligning them more closely with liberal and feminist values.