Abstract We argue that large-scale nonviolent mobilization in post-civil war settings reduces the likelihood of conflict recurrence by diffusing a pluralist political culture and by incentivizing governments to respect political civil liberties, a process conceptualized here as horizontal democratic norm diffusion and vertical democratic norm change, respectively. Using causal mediation analysis and an instrumental variable approach with data from V-Dem and the Phoenix Historical Event Dataset, this study shows that post-conflict nonviolent mobilization lowers the risk of civil war recurrence through its positive effects on societal pluralism and governmental respect for political civil liberties. These findings contribute to the literatures on nonviolent resistance and peacebuilding by demonstrating the peace-promoting potential of nonviolent mobilization in post-civil war contexts and by clarifying the mechanisms through which it influences the recurrence of armed conflict.
Abstract Prominent theories of state formation hold that the origin of the state is rooted in warfare. Heightened insecurity incentivized rulers to develop institutional innovations in taxation, administration, and military organization. Emerging evidence from the medieval world, however, suggests a more complex picture. Early royal governments were tiny and had relatively small resource bases. During the early periods of state formation, existential security threats might divert the kinds of resources needed to enact comprehensive state reform. We refer to this as a security-reform tradeoff. Existential security threats can divert attention and resources away from comprehensive state reforms. We examine patterns of state formation in post-Alfredian Anglo-Saxon England, from the end of the ninth century to the late eleventh century, measuring political centralization using prosopographic data. We find a relationship between periods of peace and political centralization. We examine the causal mechanisms through a comparative case study of four Anglo-Saxon kings’ reigns.
Abstract The apparent turmoil in the US-led liberal international order has left international relations scholars without a settled framework for explaining—or teaching—global governance. This Special Section addresses that gap by developing subsystems theory as an analytical approach for understanding change and continuity in an interdependent, contested international order. Subsystems—collections of state and nonstate actors organized around a single core governance question—offer a more disaggregated unit of analysis than the “issue areas” central to regime theory, allowing analysts to identify variation in strategic benefits and punishments for noncompliance that issue-area-level frameworks obscure. We situate subsystems theory alongside other post-regime-theory approaches, particularly regime complexity and weaponized interdependence. We argue that subsystems theory offers complementary analytical leverage, especially for tracing de facto cross-issue interactions and nonstate behavior. The Section’s three articles apply this framework to election monitoring, international finance and antitrust enforcement, and oil sanctions and maritime safety, demonstrating the theory’s utility across strikingly different empirical domains. Read together, the articles illuminate two concepts central to any theory of global governance—punishment and participation—and show how multiple, subsystem-specific international orders, rather than a single liberal order, increasingly characterize world politics.
Abstract How does US economic statecraft shape public attitudes toward Chinese investment in third countries? As great power competition intensifies, middle powers face increasing pressure to align their economic relationships with geopolitical demands. How these pressures translate into policy depends critically on public opinion, yet we know little about how citizens in targeted countries respond to economic coercion. Using a pre-registered survey experiment conducted in Chile, we provide the first experimental evidence that US sanctions threats significantly reduce support for Chinese investment in a potential target country. Sanctions threats reduce positive evaluations by over 40 percentage points, a dramatic shift that persists across ideological groups, including left-leaning respondents typically skeptical of US influence. These findings suggest that, under conditions of credible economic threat, concrete costs can override abstract geopolitical loyalties, challenging theories that emphasize the primacy of ideological filters in foreign policy preferences. Our results speak to broader debates about economic statecraft effectiveness, demonstrating that threatened costs can reshape public preferences before any economic pain materializes, even among citizens predisposed against the sanctioning power.
Abstract Studies have shown that international law can influence attitudes toward foreign policy. We know less about how law exerts this influence. We develop four theoretical models to explain how international law affects foreign policy attitudes. Drawing on survey experiments with 4,900 US citizens about arming a foreign government involved in a civil war, we find some support for three of the models: When respondents are told that sending arms would be illegal, they are more likely to believe that the United States would (1) face sanctions, (2) break a commitment, and (3) contribute to harmful moral outcomes. We also examine whether international law amplifies these concerns beyond the effects they might have without international law. We find that sanctions reduce support more strongly when they result from violating international law than when they result from ordinary political retaliation by other states. However, illegality does not strengthen the effects of violating commitments or causing harmful moral consequences. This suggests that international law primarily shapes public opinion indirectly. Rather than serving as an independent reason to oppose a policy, violations of law draw attention to moral and practical concerns that citizens might otherwise overlook.
