Are nuclear weapons useful for coercion, and, if so, what factors increase the credibility and effectiveness of nuclear threats? While prominent scholars like Thomas Schelling argue that nuclear brinkmanship, or the manipulation of nuclear risk, can effectively coerce adversaries, others contend nuclear weapons are not effective tools of coercion, especially when designed to achieve offensive and revisionist objectives. Simultaneously, there is broad debate about the incorporation of automation via artificial intelligence into military systems, especially nuclear command and control. We develop a theoretical argument that nuclear threats implemented with automated nuclear launch systems are more credible compared to those implemented via non-automated means. By reducing human control over nuclear use, leaders can more effectively tie their hands and thus signal resolve, even if doing so increases the risk of nuclear war and thus is extremely dangerous. Preregistered survey experiments on an elite sample of United Kingdom Members of Parliament and two public samples of UK citizens provide support for these expectations, showing that in a crisis scenario involving a Russian invasion of Estonia, automated nuclear threats can increase credibility and willingness to back down. From a policy perspective, this paper highlights the dangers of countries adopting automated nuclear systems for malign purposes, and contributes to the literatures on coercive bargaining, weapons of mass destruction, and emerging technology.

A growing body of work suggests that authoritarian regimes can enhance their external legitimacy by undertaking reform—from democratic or “pseudodemocratic” institutional changes at the domestic level to participation in international efforts to mitigate climate change. Yet the shared theoretical logic underlying this work has received surprisingly little empirical attention. This research contributes by offering findings from an iterative series of original survey experiments conducted over nationally representative samples of US citizens. Study 1 tested the foundational hypothesis—that reforms build external legitimacy—by adopting a simple independent groups design. Studies 2 and 3 subjected that hypothesis to harder tests via conjoint designs, and also evaluated extension hypotheses about when and in what sense “legitimacy” is gained. Across studies, the results consistently demonstrate that reforms (of a variety of types) do generate external legitimacy, offering both positive benefits as well as shielding benefits in keeping with theoretical arguments. The results also provide support for several new and previously undocumented findings concerning the role of reform type, type of legitimacy-derived gain, and the conditions under which such gains are more or less likely to accrue.

In the post–Cold War era, many authoritarian regimes engaged in strategic liberalization in response to international norms promoted by Western powers. As US support for democracy and human rights recedes, will this retreat prompt a global rollback of liberal reforms? While pessimistic accounts predict a return to overt repression, we argue that liberal norm adaptation within autocracies is likely to prove more resilient. We highlight two sources of continuity. First, autocrats’ domestic control strategies create incentives to retain certain liberal practices—such as elections, gender reforms, or limited media openness—that bolster legitimacy, co-opt dissent, and help manage opposition. Second, reforms anchored in treaties, international organizations, and domestic bureaucracies have generated expectations and mobilizational platforms, making wholesale reversals politically costly and prone to backlash. Our analysis illustrates how reforms, even when adopted instrumentally, have become sufficiently embedded in domestic politics to persist in the absence of strong external enforcement.

This special issue of International Organization is composed of fifteen short essays that consider how longer-term trends (including the rise of China, the anti-globalization backlash, the rise of populism, the emergence of new technologies, the slowing or reversal of democratization in many countries, and the existential threat of climate change), along with recent developments in US foreign policy, are likely to affect the future of global governance and world order. The contributors consider a variety of different issue areas, as well as cross-cutting trends. Some contributors anticipate significant change; others predict incremental change; and still others expect mostly continuity. The collection suggests a future research agenda focused on the impact of long-term trends and immediate shocks on local, regional, and global equilibria.

The second Trump administration has disrupted global climate politics, turning the United States away from the clean energy and environmental policies of the Biden administration. Consequently, analytical attention is turning, inside and outside of the United States, to a family of concepts referred to as “Climate Realism” (CR), which favors long-run investments in technology and adaptation over near-term climate mitigation efforts. We critically engage with CR and argue that political science identifies four key features of climate politics that shed light on CR’s strengths and weaknesses, and which will persist even in the second Trump era. Despite CR’s flaws, we contend that its emergence in reaction to the second Trump administration highlights some important dimensions of climate politics that deserve greater attention going forward. We highlight three topics for research: the political and practical strategies of the anti-green coalition; the heterogeneity in viable national economic strategies; and the implications for IR of a turn away from meaningful climate mitigation in powerful nations.

The actions of the second Trump administration pose a serious threat to the dominance of the US dollar. Erratic US policies erode global trust in the United States and force states and private actors alike to reconsider their reliance on the dollar. This is reflected across three dimensions of dollar dominance: in trade and payments, as reserve currency and safe asset, and as global investment and funding currency. What distinguishes the current moment from previous predictions of a decline of financial hegemony is that the dollar’s global role is now challenged across all three dimensions simultaneously. Following the Global Financial Crisis, growing uneasiness with US financial power, especially the use of financial sanctions, already created cracks at the margins of the system and prompted a search for alternatives, triggering partial reserve diversification and de-dollarization of trade and payments systems. Under Trump, the undermining of the global economic order, growing fiscal deficits, and continued attacks on the institutional foundations of the administrative state are fundamentally undermining trust in the United States that is fundamental for the dollar’s global role. This signals a rupture in the US-centric global financial system, altering the foundations of the rules-based liberal international order (LIO). However, existing network effects slow down this process and no alternative can yet replace the dollar. The result is a financial interregnum where rising powers seek autonomy and influence without assuming hegemonic responsibility, leading to a more fragmented, multipolar financial order.

States are reshaping the global digital economy to assert control over the artificial intelligence (AI) value chain. Operating outside multilateral institutions, they pursue measures such as export controls on advanced semiconductors, infrastructure partnerships, and bans on foreign digital platforms. This digital disintegration reflects an elite-centered response to the infrastructural power that private firms wield over critical AI inputs. A handful of companies operate beyond the reach of domestic regulation and multilateral oversight, controlling access to technologies that create vulnerabilities existing institutions struggle to contain. As a result, states have asserted strategic digital sovereignty: the exercise of authority over core digital infrastructure, often through selective alliances with firms and other governments. The outcome is an emergent form of AI governance in techno-blocs: coalitions that coordinate control over key inputs while excluding others. These arrangements challenge the liberal international order by replacing multilateral cooperation with strategic—and often illiberal—alignment within competing blocs.

Any theoretically informed predictions about the future of international order and global governance must reckon with the power and intentions of the United States. We argue that fundamental changes in the nature of domestic audience constraint within many democracies, and the United States in particular, undermine both the willingness and the capability of the United States to continue its role as the underwriter of international order and global governance. A US government unbound by domestic constraint will have difficulty building broad coalitions to solve national and international problems because it will have reduced incentives to invest in public goods, including national defense, science and technology, and future economic prosperity; reduced barriers to corruption that undermines the quality of and trust in US capabilities; and reduced state capacity, including the capacity to finance wars and other long-term international commitments. We argue that three trends were especially relevant in reshaping domestic audience constraint: information fragmentation, extreme polarization, and a global threat environment that facilitated executive power concentration. Together they reduce the costs and risks for leaders to escape domestic audience constraints, weakening the institutional and accountability mechanisms that give democracies advantages in the international system. Though these trends affect many democracies, the undermining of US domestic constraint is particularly consequential because the United States shaped and buttressed the current system. An unconstrained United States likely means a less cooperative and less predictable global order, irrevocably altering the post-1945 system.

The liberal international trading system has underpinned decades of unprecedented globalization. Yet the imposition of across-the-board and country- and sector-specific tariffs by the second Trump administration in early 2025 has reignited debates over the system’s survival. We challenge the notion that the regime is on the brink of collapse. Drawing on historical patterns of United States trade policy, we argue that US engagement with global commerce has mostly been eclectic, characterized by the coexistence of protectionist and liberal impulses. We show that the system has demonstrated resilience and an ability to adapt to challenges resulting from this eclecticism. While current US trade actions are unprecedented since World War II, we present three reasons to expect a return to the traditional US approach to trade policy. We therefore argue that, despite the protectionist turn and the disruptions created by current US trade policy, predictions about the death of the system underestimate its adaptive flexibility and are thus premature.

With the Liberal International Order (LIO) in decline, scholars have focused increasingly on the possible return to a Westphalian great power system marked by sovereigntist claims and balancing among states. The actions of the Trump administration, however, raise a number of significant puzzles for such accounts—the US seems willing to sign deals with traditional adversaries including Russia and China, while targeting long-standing allies like Canada and Denmark. At the same time, transactional politics often serve narrow personalist interests rather than national objectives. In short, a Westphalian lens focused on states and sovereignty may generate intellectual blinders that misreads the emerging international order. To overcome these limitations, we propose an alternative account, which we label neo-royalism. The neo-royalist order centers on an international system structured by a small group of hyper elites, which we term cliques. Such cliques seek to legitimize their authority through appeals to their exceptionalism in order to generate durable material and status hierarchies based on the extraction of financial and cultural tributes. This short paper lays out the key elements of the neo-royalist order, differentiating it from the Westphalian and Liberal International Orders, and applies its insights to better grapple with the emerging system being promoted by the United States under Donald J. Trump. For policymakers and scholars, the neo-royalist approach clarifies recent events in US foreign policy. Theoretically, the field should take contending ideas of international order seriously, and establish a research agenda beyond a backward looking view to the Westphalian moment.

This essay argues that the United States’ expansive use of financial sanctions—leveraging dollar-clearing chokepoints and global networks—has paradoxically accelerated pressures toward the erosion of the liberal economic order. As sanctions proliferate, targets move from short-term evasion to building alternative infrastructures, such as China’s RMB settlement system (CIPS), BRICS financial mechanisms, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and barter-based trade, thereby fostering governance decoupling from US-led systems. Drawing on structural power and institutionalist insights, I show how sanctions catalyze parallel economic ecosystems that fragment the financial architecture and, over time, erode US leverage and dollar centrality—even as the dollar remains dominant. I emphasize heterogeneous switching costs, with near-term change concentrated in the “plumbing” (messaging, clearing, legal venue) rather than in core reserve functions, and sketch two possible futures-bifurcated rival blocs versus pluralistic coexistence—calling on scholars and policymakers to rethink coercive statecraft in light of sanctions’ long-term institutional legacies.

United Nations peacekeeping is drifting from its post–Cold War liberal model toward a more sovereignty-focused approach. This essay posits that the change is not formal or doctrinal, but instead emerges through institutional drift and norm reinterpretation, driven by accelerated US retrenchment, China and Russia’s growing influence, host-state assertiveness, and internal United Nations adaptation. Drawing on theories of norm dynamics, bureaucratic culture, and empirical studies of peacekeeping mission practice, the analysis shows how liberal principles, such as democratization and human rights, are increasingly sidelined in favor of conflict containment and host-state support. The essay concludes by outlining four potential futures for peacekeeping: gradual drift into stabilization, normative fragmentation and regionalization, niche reaffirmation of liberalism, and formal norm redefinition. Together, these scenarios suggest peacekeeping is entering a postliberal era, marked not by collapse, but by contested adaptation within a shifting world order.

A defining feature of the post-1945 international system is the American network of allies and partners that has underpinned its global power. Recent developments within the United States and in the international system have severely strained that alliance network. If it collapses, what is at stake? Existing scholarship in International Relations highlights losses in aggregated military capabilities, reduced diplomatic support, and lost trade. In this essay we review these benefits and another that has been overlooked: ally-enabled access. Access refers to permission from allies and partners to engage in military and intelligence missions within their borders on their territory, through their airspace, or in their territorial waters. Access via America’s allies and security partners has enabled Washington to use foreign sovereign spaces for military logistics, military operations, and foreign surveillance to overcome the tyranny of distance. Examples include permission from allies and partners in the Middle East to allow the US Air Force to fly from their bases to strike targets in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, and US intelligence installations built and operated by permission from Pakistani, Turkish, and Japanese territory during the Cold War. We describe the broad functions of alliances and show how access has been key to projection of American military and intelligence power at a global scale. Perhaps limiting or ending America’s global hegemonic role is desirable; perhaps it is dangerous. We argue that accounting for the contributions of access made by allies and security partners is critical if scholars, policymakers, and publics are to properly assess what is at stake in an American turn away from alliances.

Information is a key variable in International Relations, underpinning theories of foreign policy, inter-state cooperation, and civil and international conflict. Yet IR scholars have only begun to grapple with the consequences of recent shifts in the global information environment. We argue that information disorder—a media environment with low barriers to content creation, rapid spread of false or misleading material, and algorithmic amplification of sensational and fragmented narratives—will reshape the practice and study of International Relations. We identify three major implications of information disorder on international politics. First, information disorder distorts how citizens access and evaluate political information, creating effects that are particularly destabilizing for democracies. Second, it damages international cooperation by eroding shared focal points and increasing incentives for noncompliance. Finally, information disorder shifts patterns of conflict by intensifying societal cleavages, enabling foreign influence, and eroding democratic advantages in crisis bargaining. We conclude by outlining an agenda for future research.

In the 1990s and 2000s, scholars emphasized the transformative power of international human rights and the durability of liberal global governance. Today, that optimism has faded. Human rights norms face sharper constraints, weakened institutions, and their authority challenged. We argue that rising authoritarian power—driven by more countries autocratizing, major powers gaining strength, and coordination in an emboldened bloc—poses a major challenge to the global human rights system, and that the United States’ retreat from human rights leadership is accelerating this threat. Authoritarian regimes are no longer merely resisting pressure; they are reshaping the system itself. Four strategies are driving this transformation: repression of domestic and transnational activism; refuting information and discrediting of critics; re-engineering procedures and coalitions within international organizations; and replacement of existing norms with alternative narratives that redefine human rights in illiberal terms. US disengagement amplifies each strategy by removing funding, normative leadership, and institutional backing that once raised the cost of violations and constrained authoritarian advance. Together, these developments mark a turning point. Where autocracies once played defense, liberal democracies and human rights actors are now on the defensive. If powerful authoritarian states consolidate these gains, they may emerge as models for others, attract new followers, and gravely damage liberal human rights as a global project. Yet the future is not preordained. Resilience may require liberal democracies confronting illiberal backsliding at home, and for European and other consolidated democracies to assume greater external leadership to strengthen the foundations of international human rights.

Scholars and policymakers have expressed concern that the decline of territorial conquest, a central pillar of the postwar international order, is under strain. Do the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the rise of China, and retrenchment of the United States portend a return to earlier patterns of international politics when boundaries were more frequently redrawn by force? This essay evaluates the theories and evidence that speak to this question. It delineates several mechanisms through which recent developments could destabilize the territorial order: the growing power of revisionist states, the declining credibility of third-party guarantees, and the erosion of the normative prohibition against conquest. At the same time, institutionalized equilibria at the dyadic and regional levels are sources of stability that can cushion the effect of these threats. Although escalation of conflicts in already disputed areas is possible, the most destabilizing outcome—widespread contestation of settled borders—is also the least likely.

Population displacement is a prominent state-building strategy. Using either force or positive inducements, states sponsor the resettlement of racial, ethnic, or linguistic groups to consolidate territorial control. We evaluate the long-run consequences of large-scale displacement by analyzing a historical episode in Afghanistan: the relocation of Pashtun communities during the rule of Emir Abd al-Rahman. Using historical records, we reconstruct the map of relocated tribes to identify contemporary settlements that are connected to the original displaced settlements. We analyze novel, microlevel survey data on more than 80,000 subjects to study how contemporary attitudes about the central government and the Taliban as well as individuals’ identity salience differ across coethnic communities separated by the emir’s state-building effort. We argue that under conditions common to many historical cases, settlers develop regional political identities that are neither ethnocentric, nor pro-central-state, nor focused on national identity. We show that the long-term consequences of the state-led resettlement of Pashtuns to northern Afghanistan are stronger attachments to regional government and local institutions, along with greater hostility to the central government and the Taliban relative to Pashtuns in the south and east.

As authoritarianism has spread globally, government efforts to stifle civic space have increased dramatically. Among the most alarming tactics has been the spread of restrictive laws targeting NGOs. While such laws threaten the core objectives of many foreign donors, they have become especially common in aid-dependent nations. How do foreign donors react to this assault on their local and international implementing partners? On the one hand, democracy-promoting donors might push back, ramping up support for advocacy in defiance of draconian measures. Alternatively, when aspiring autocrats make it difficult to work with local partners, donors might back down, decreasing support for democracy promotion. Testing these arguments using dyadic data on aid flows, an original data set of NGO laws, and a variety of research designs, we find that the donors most committed to democracy promotion back down in the face of restrictive NGO laws, reducing democracy aid by 70 percent in the years after laws are enacted. Our findings suggest that donor behavior creates strong incentives for backsliding governments in aid-receiving countries to use legislation to crack down on civil society.

Key to the success of international peace-building efforts is the cooperation and support of civilian populations. Studies show that economic considerations shape combatants’ willingness to lay down their arms. We study a related but under-studied question: does economic hardship impact civilian support for conflict cessation? If reintegration of former combatants into productive economic sectors threatens civilians’ own incomes, then support for peace-building may diminish. We investigate localized effects of the 2015 Hindu Kush earthquake using individual-level survey data on support for Taliban reintegration. The earthquake reduced support for reintegration into disproportionately impacted economic sectors. We observe no effect for less impacted sectors. Results are robust to a battery of tests, including a novel spatial randomization leveraging geocoded fault lines corresponding to the universe of counterfactual earthquakes. Our findings provide new insight into the resolution of violent conflict: economic hardship may undermine civilian support for rebel reintegration.