Scholarship on legalization and nuclear proliferation often relies on aggregate measures of institutional design that obscure variation across provisions. We introduce the Nuclear Arms Control Index (NACI), a dataset of 91 nuclear arms control and nonproliferation instruments (1945–2025), and an original nuclear weapons capability life-cycle framework that categorizes the different stages of nuclear control. NACI codes 53 variables capturing life-cycle stages and additional institutional design features across instruments and time. Clause-level indicators are generated through a large language model-assisted, application programming interface-based analysis of the full treaty corpus and then adjudicated and verified by the authors. We illustrate three empirical applications by showing associations between life-cycle indicators and entry into force, replicating Kreps to disaggregate legalization measures into treaty-specific components associated with arms control cooperation, and replicating Katagiri to replace the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons membership with design-level provisions. These applications show how NACI enables provision-level research on the design of nuclear arms control.
Mass nonviolent campaign onset can move diaspora communities around the globe to action. Alongside offering direct support, diaspora pressure their host governments to adopt policies compatible with activists' objectives. This article uses a newly released global dataset to explore the degree to which diaspora pressure translates into state action. The results of an analysis applying Item Response Theory indicate that diaspora positively influence state willingness to offer public displays of support, but not material assistance such as imposing sanctions or offering funds. This finding holds for democracies and non-democracies, underscoring the headwinds diaspora face in enabling campaign success from abroad.
How do terror groups make strategic decisions regarding when to time their attacks? This study examines the logic underpinning attack timing and argues that non-state groups weigh the benefits of amplified psychological impacts during focal points for violence against the costs of conducting attacks during periods of heightened security. I test this proposition by examining religious holidays, which create unique opportunities for terror groups to maximize visibility and instill fear yet are also characterized by increased state security efforts since governments anticipate the risk of violence. I leverage the duration of holidays to illustrate the strategic logic of attack timing: while security measures are at their peak during short holidays, prolonged religious observances impose a strain on state resources, thereby reducing the cost to terror groups and increasing the likelihood of attacks. I test this theory using data from Arab League countries and illustrate the mechanism by analyzing news reports in Syria. The findings advance our understanding of how terror groups allocate scarce resources in response to security dynamics and have implications for counter-terrorism policies.
This research note revisits the link between natural disasters and civil unrest and argues that the relationship is inverted U-shaped. Natural disasters are likely to stimulate political violence, but only when the severity of the disaster is modest. We test this argument by replicating five existing studies and find partially supportive results. After we add a squared term of the variable that measures disaster severity to the model, we find an inverted-U relationship between natural disasters and conflict incidents, conflict duration, and rebel resilience. Models that use conflict onset as the dependent variable, however, do not show clear nonlinearity.
How does the public assess corporate behavior regarding economic sanctions? Private companies play a critical role in making sanctions work—circumventing, complying, or limiting their business beyond what is legally required. We theorize that stigma and information cues make citizens likely to support domestic firms withdrawing from a foreign market and disapprove of companies continuing business. We ran two pre-registered survey experiments about the 2022 Russia sanctions in Germany. Germans disapprove of firms remaining, even when not violating sanctions regulations. Firms continuing legal business cannot justify their actions in a way that mitigates negative public perception. Three replications establish generalizability.
