Economic cooperation is often seen as promoting peace, yet many arrangements include some states while excluding others. Does inclusion or exclusion shape public perceptions of the including or excluding country and expectations about bilateral relations? We expect exclusion (inclusion) to produce more negative (positive) views of the excluding (including) country and of relations with it. Views always turn negative when cooperation yields military gains for the other side. We test these expectations using survey experiments with quota-based samples in China and the USA. Results support the main effect of exclusion, but evidence for the other expectations is mixed.
Why do some defeated states remain peaceful while others quickly return to conflict? Here, I argue that the severity of wartime defeat shapes postwar behavior by suppressing and redirecting the conflict tendencies of losing states. Absolute outcomes, such as foreign-imposed regime change or state death, suppress renewed aggression by reducing a state's capacity for future conflicts. Yet suppression will likely be fleeting, and these states will be ready to fight again in the future. However, when they are ready to fight, their past experiences of extreme defeat will redirect conflict behavior by reducing hostility toward the previous victor and shifting attention to new adversaries. I test these expectations using binary outcome models to examine how absolute versus limited war outcomes impact postwar uses of force among defeated states. The results show that absolute outcomes lower the probability of renewed conflict and redirect postwar disputes away from the state that imposed the outcome. These findings highlight how the experience of catastrophic defeat restructures the ways through which states reenter the arena of violent international conflict.
How does arresting protesters shape subsequent mobilization? Arrests account for approximately 14% of government responses to protest and differ theoretically from other repressive tactics, yet their effects on future mobilization remain understudied. We argue that arrests raise the costs of participation, lengthening the time until the next protest event, and that this repressive effect intensifies when protesters’ demands pose a greater threat to the government. Using survival analysis on 149 countries between 1991 and 2020, we find that arrests delay subsequent protest, with the strongest deterrent effect observed when protest demands directly challenge the government’s hold on power.
How do citizens in pacifist democracies respond to military operations under exigency conditions? We examine this question based on a preregistered, real-time survey experiment we fielded in Japan during the August 2021 Self-Defense Forces (SDF) evacuation from Afghanistan. Building on research in international relations, we test whether Japanese citizens prioritize civilian control and how sensitive they are to military casualties. Our results challenge conventional assumptions. First, respondents did not differentially penalize an illegal mission ordered by a military commander (rather than an elected leader), despite the explicit legality cue. Second, while support declined sharply when SDF casualties were reported, nearly 30% of respondents still endorsed the operation. These findings complicate the common portrayal of Japanese public opinion as uniformly pacifist and suggest greater heterogeneity in attitudes toward military risk than conventional portrayals imply. The study contributes to scholarship on democratic accountability, civil-military relations, and public opinion in non-Western democracies under exigency.
This article examines the relationship between civil conflict onsets and personalism in dictatorships. It argues that civil conflict onsets are temporary shocks that alter elites’ incentives and capacities, allowing dictators to personalize. The new wartime context reduces their capacity for coordination and their willingness to stage a coup, opening a window of opportunity for dictators to pursue strategies that would be too noticeable to elites in peacetime. Using three counterfactual estimators for panel data (fixed effects counterfactuals, interactive fixed effects counterfactuals, and matrix completion) on a global sample of autocratic regimes (1946–2010) and a latent index of personalism, I find that the onset of civil conflict is followed by higher levels of personalism for the treated leaders, who are relatively long-surviving autocrats in the sample. Sample restriction, standard diagnostic tests, and a sensitivity analysis provide mixed rather than consistently supportive evidence, warranting a cautious interpretation of the causal effects.
Does individual-level support for women's rights decrease tolerance of political violence cross-nationally? While some research demonstrates that support for women's rights decreases support for political violence, this relationship has not been explored globally. Using the World Values Survey, we demonstrate that individuals supportive of women's rights view political violence and terrorism as less acceptable, confirming prior findings. Yet, this pattern does not hold uniformly. We find that the relationship varies across regions, with few substantive relationships in Sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia and reversed associations in the Middle East and North Africa. Moreover, pro-women's rights respondents in non-conflict-affected countries decrease their political violence support more than their counterparts in conflict-affected countries. We also find differences based on the country's political institutions and women's political participation. We highlight the need for greater consideration of how country context moderates support for political violence.
Civil wars in the post-Cold War period concentrate in lower latitudes. We investigate the sensitivity of the strong negative latitude-conflict correlation to eight plausible mediating factors: climate, geography, age of first settlement, demography, culture, colonial legacy, political institutions, and economic development. Results indicate that institutions and especially development are the most plausible intermediate pathways. Yet latitude prevails as a relevant correlate of civil war even when controlling for all factors simultaneously. We suggest a possible causal chain from latitude via environmental conditions to socioeconomic development and conflict, although alternative pathways remain plausible and merit further examination.
This paper investigates how counterbalancing shapes the relationship between distance from the capital and government troops' military effectiveness. It argues that as counterbalancing intensifies, the negative effect of distance on battlefield performance becomes more pronounced. This argument rests on three mechanisms: the concentration of elite units near the capital, intensified coordination and logistical challenges in peripheral areas, and the compounding of these constraints as fragmentation increases. To test these claims, I combine battle-level data with measures of counterbalancing and estimate fractional regression models. The results show that the erosion of effectiveness with distance is greater at higher levels of counterbalancing.
Restorative transitional justice—mechanisms that prioritize truth-telling, reparation, and stakeholder participation over punitive sanction—is an increasingly prominent feature of post-conflict peacebuilding. Its success depends fundamentally on participation by all stakeholders, including perpetrators, who have strong incentives not to engage. Why, then, do some perpetrators participate while others do not, even when facing identical incentives? We argue that post-traumatic stress disorder, specifically the avoidance and arousal symptoms characteristic of perpetration-induced trauma, increases the likelihood of perpetrator participation by motivating pro-social engagement as a coping mechanism. We test this argument using original survey data from 299 former members of the Colombian Armed Forces implicated in the “false positives” extrajudicial killing scandal, all of whom face proceedings before Colombia's Special Jurisdiction for Peace. Logistic regression results support both hypotheses: increasing severity of both avoidance and arousal post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms independently increases the probability of perpetrator participation in restorative transitional justice, even under conditions of institutional abandonment and personal risk.
Recent experimental research has found citizens to be “intuitive deterrence theorists” who judge the resolve of foreign states based on their capabilities, material stakes, past behavior and costly signals. Yet there are good reasons to expect that subjective feelings toward the specific country in question—variables that are difficult to capture in genericized experimental designs—could also condition such judgements. We test this proposition using original 2022 data from an 11 country survey on China ( N = 13,051), and a three-pronged measure of resolve that disaggregates its military, economic and general aspects. On the one hand, citizens’ estimations of China's resolve in a crisis scenario do correlate with their perceptions of its military and economic capabilities, consistent with the expectations of deterrence theory. On the other hand, negative subjective feelings toward China were a similarly powerful predictor of higher estimations of its resolve. The results suggest that where states seek to convey a resolved image to foreign audiences, negatively disposed individuals will be more likely to perceive it, potentially entrenching opposition to compromise.
During ethno-territorial wars, do rebels try to impose exclusive political control over their own ethnic group or do they tolerate political pluralism? First, rebel groups in conditions making them more capable of imposing political monopolies may more commonly make the attempt. Second, rebel leaders with more extreme nationalist preferences may more commonly try to do so. The paper presents a new, binary measure of whether ethno-territorial rebels attempt to impose exclusive political control. Data from 1944 to 2024 indicate that variation in rebel leadership preferences has greater explanatory power than variation in rebel capacity to impose exclusive control.
When do ordinary citizens find protester violence permissible? Although research shows that public support for protests typically decreases when protesters use violent tactics, we argue that certain situations elicit greater toleration or endorsement of such tactics among bystanders. We examine the question with a preregistered survey experiment that randomizes protester tactics, police responses, and issue frames, while distinguishing between respondents’ private and public attitudes toward protesters’ actions. Our findings show that citizens are more likely to endorse protester violence—neither privately nor publicly criticizing protesters—when it follows police repression than when police remain restrained, as it elicits moral justification for violent tactics. Conversely, when citizens support protesters’ goals, they are somewhat more likely to tolerate violence—withholding public criticism despite private disapproval—although this effect is less pronounced. The results show how state repression can convert latent criticism into tacit acceptance, showing how people can sometimes “turn a blind eye” to protester violence. The distinction between public and private attitudes toward contentious political actions helps explain why violent flanks sometimes thrive despite prevailing norms favoring non-violence, and cautions policymakers against aggressive policing that may backfire by legitimizing violent escalation.
Across the globe, ethnic minorities experience discrimination and exclusion in contexts of rising majoritarianism. Yet many minorities suffer in silence, fearing that asserting ethnic identity and participating in protest will challenge their commitment to the nation in the eyes of broader society. In this article, I theorize that collective action frames that draw on national symbols and portray ethnic grievances as pertaining to the nation, more broadly, can strengthen support for protest among ethnic minorities. I test this theory through two original survey experiments with a sample of Indian Muslims ( N = 1311) in the context of rising Hindu nationalism. The findings reveal that “national identity frames” strengthen support for ethnic resistance while “ethnic identity frames” weaken support under exclusionary nationalism. The findings suggest that minorities are more supportive of protest movements that employ collective action frames depicting ethnic resistance as an act of patriotism.
Research on private military and security companies (PMSCs) often groups distinct actors together, obscuring variation. I develop a new typology of PMSCs using k -means clustering, providing a more systematic approach than existing classifications, and assess how well prevailing conceptualizations capture variation across actors. Applying this typology to existing datasets, I reassess findings on conflict termination and show that results are largely driven by actors conventionally understood to be private security companies, while the effects of private military companies are more ambiguous. The study offers both a stocktaking of the literature and a new framework for analyzing PMSCs.
This article studies an important transitional justice case, Mauritius, where a novel truth commission was established to address colonial violence and its legacies. In its recommendations, the commission outlined a slate of projects to commemorate victims and educate the public. Leveraging geographic information systems tools, we map atrocity sites, memory sites, and population centers, and find that contrary to the commission's recommendations, memory projects have been relegated to a few atrocity sites far from most Mauritians, rendering memorialization less effective. Our work contributes to quantitative and mixed-method approaches to studying transitional justice and nascent efforts to more systematically study memorialization.
Rebel leaders are sometimes believed by followers to be prophets or messiahs, or to possess supernatural powers. Despite their prominence in militant organizations, the consequences of such leadership for rebel group dynamics remain understudied. We examine how perceived supernatural authority shapes the longevity of armed movements. We argue that groups led by leaders believed to possess extraordinary powers survive longer because these leaders can more effectively motivate and coerce followers to sustain participation in conflict. Using novel data on African rebel organizations, we find evidence that perceived supernatural authority is associated with increased organizational durability over time.
In response to politicization and contested legitimacy, UN peace missions increasingly use social media to enhance public engagement. This study examines the UN Verification Mission in Colombia's dual Twitter strategy, comparing the institutional account with the 'personalized' account of the Special Representative. Analysing over 10,000 tweets using content analysis and negative binomial regression, the study finds that personalized communication and content focused on UN-related and justice topics generate greater online resonance. Conversely, excessive use of visuals and hashtags reduces engagement. These findings offer new insights into the digital communication strategies and audience dynamics of UN peace missions.
This Presidential Address celebrates the field of Peace Science by illustrating how our research can help us understand some of the major crises unfolding in world politics today. Using the lens of market power politics, I demonstrate how states are navigating the political challenges of China's market power over critical minerals, including cobalt, lithium, nickel, and the rare earths. I then show how market power politics are fueling violence in the civil war in Sudan and prolonging the war between Ukraine and Russia. I finish with a recognition of the intellectual value of diversity in the study of peace science.
This paper analyses the relationship between nationalism and cross-border shopping behaviour of households in a region with a history of bi-communal conflict. Traditional economic theories predict that households optimize their well-being, so patriotic feelings should be irrelevant in their consumption decisions. However, the theory of economic nationalism would predict lower cross-border activities in regions with high levels of nationalism. We test these opposing hypotheses using monthly data on gasoline sales, relative prices and the total number of border crossings on the island of Cyprus. Our results indicate that individual economic incentives prevail over nationalism. The cheaper the price of gasoline is on the 'other' side of the island relative to their own side, the higher the number of Greek Cypriots who cross borders. This result does not imply that those who cross are less nationalist but suggests that economic incentives might motivate a willingness to interact even with those whose nationalistic feelings would normally preclude it. According to contact theory, these economic interactions - especially when supported by political and social reconciliation efforts - have the potential to foster more peaceful relations.
Few studies have investigated the importance of attacks on educational infrastructure, personnel, and students on educational loss. This study overcomes this gap by examining how this type of conflict-related attack impact children's enrollment and attainment. In examining these relationships, we combine a new, georeferenced dataset on attacks on education (AoE) in Nigeria from 2000 to 2020 with georeferenced individual-level data from several Nigerian Demographic and Health Surveys. Our analysis shows that geographical proximity to AoE leads to significant educational loss: children in areas exposed to AoE are less likely to enroll in school and receive fewer years of education in total.
