Theory and extensive evidence connect poverty and underdevelopment to civil conflict yet evidence on the impact of development programs on violence is surprisingly mixed. To break this impasse, we exploit a within-country policy experiment to examine the conditions under which antipoverty programs reduce violence. The roll-out of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme caused a large long-run reduction in Maoist conflict violence, as measured with an original data set based on local-language press sources. These pacifying effects were not uniform, however, but overwhelmingly concentrated in districts with sufficient pre-existing local state capacity to implement the program effectively. The results demonstrate the potential for anti-poverty programs to mitigate violent civil conflict by improving livelihoods, but also highlight the crucial role of state capacity in shaping these effects.

The modern international order faces profound challenges. Power is shifting to non-Western states and diffusing to non-state actors, including transnational insurgents. This is more than a power transition: it also about culture. Western states now share the stage with powers such as China who bring their own cultural values, practices, and histories, and new forms of transnational violence are justified in the name of religious identity and belief. Some see this as a fundamental threat to modern international order, an order created by and for the West. Others see the “liberal” order as uniquely able to accommodate states and peoples of diverse cultures. How well equipped is IR to contribute to these debates? I review four recent works on the future of the modern international order, asking what conceptual, theoretical, and empirical resources they offer for understanding the relationship between cultural diversity and international order. This literature suffers from four limitations: culture is essentialized or bracketed; institutions are seen as either simple expressions of cultural values or structures that neutralize culture, with their recognition function ignored; the structural power of international orders—how they produce political and cultural subjectivities—is underappreciated; and international orders are conceived too narrowly as orders of sovereign states. To overcome these limitations, I advance a new perspective on cultural diversity and international order. International orders evolve in heterogeneous cultural contexts, and the governance of diversity is a key imperative of order building. In response, international orders develop diversity regimes: institutional norms and practices that define legitimate units of political authority, authorize certain forms of cultural difference, and relate the two. These regimes are essential to the legitimacy of international orders, but face two interrelated pressures for change: shifts in underlying material capabilities, and new claims for cultural recognition, often rooted in grievances against past or prevailing forms of recognition.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), more popularly known as “drones,” have become emblematic of twenty-first century military technologies but scholars have yet to convincingly explain the drivers of UAV proliferation. Using the first systematic data set of UAV proliferation, this research note examines the spread of UAVs in the context of scholarly debates about interests versus capacity in explaining policy adoption. The results yield important insights for both IR scholarship and the policy-making community. While countries that experience security threats—including territorial disputes and terrorism—are more likely to seek UAVs, drone proliferation is not simply a function of the threat environment. We find evidence that democracies and autocracies are more likely than mixed regimes to develop armed UAV programs, and suggest that autocracies and democracies have their own unique incentives to acquire this technology. Moreover, supply-side factors play a role in the UAV proliferation process: a state's technological capacity is a strong predictor of whether it will obtain the most sophisticated UAVs. The theories and evidence we present challenge emerging views about UAV proliferation and shed useful light on how and why drones spread.

While emotions are widely regarded as integral to the “behavioral approach” to International Relations (IR), a host of fundamental problems have delayed the integration of affective influences into traditional models of IR. We aim to integrate affect by focusing on commitment problems, a body of work that contains strong theoretical predictions about how individual decision makers will and should act. Across two lab experiments, we use a novel experimental protocol that includes a psychophysiological measure of emotional arousal (skin conductance reactivity) to study how individuals react to changes in bargaining power. While we find support for one key pillar of IR theory—individuals do reject offers when they expect the opponent's power to increase—we also find that physiological arousal tampers with individuals’ ability to think strategically in the manner predicted by canonical models. Our follow-up experiment mimics the elements of institutional solutions to commitment problems and finds support for their efficacy on the individual level. Our novel findings suggest that when individuals face large power shifts, emotional arousal short-circuits their ability to “think forward and induct backwards,” suggesting that emotionally aroused individuals are less prone to commitment problems.

Despite advances in the study of individuals in international relations, we still know little about how the traits and biases of individuals aggregate. Most foreign policy decisions are made in groups, usually by elites with varying degrees of experience, which can have both positive and negative psychological effects. This paper addresses the aggregation problem by exploring how the balance of foreign policy experience among leaders and advisers affects decision making in war, using a principal-agent framework that allows the relative experience of leaders and advisers to vary. A leader's experience affects decision making and, ultimately, the risks associated with conflict, through three mechanisms. First, experience influences a leader's ability to monitor advisers. Second, a leader's experience affects the credibility of delegation to experienced advisers and, in turn, the nature and extent of information gathering. Third, experience affects whether leaders are able to diversify advice, as well as their preference for policies that appear certain. I illustrate the argument using two cases that hold an unusual number of factors constant: the 1991 and 2003 Iraq Wars. George W. Bush's inexperience exacerbated the biases of his advisers, whereas his father's experience cast a long shadow over many of the same officials. Understanding the experience and biases of any one individual is insufficient—the balance of experience within a group is also important. Experience is therefore not fungible: a seasoned team cannot substitute for an experienced leader.

Almost forty years ago, a small group of scholars drew on cognitive psychology to explain anomalous patterns of behavior by leaders on issues of international security. Although it made significant contributions to theory and research, that scholarship did not diffuse broadly into the field. Drawing on concepts in psychology and behavioral economics, research that uses new methods is now producing a wave of scholarship in international relations exemplified by the work in this special issue. Analysis of the use of prospect theory over the last three decades identifies the scope conditions that enable the predictions of rational choice and psychological theories. These scope conditions motivate the focus on the heterogeneity of decision makers that is at the core of current contributions. Future research will move beyond the now-sterile debate between rational choice and psychology.

Behavioral IR faces a fundamental challenge. The actors in most IR models and theories are not individuals—they are aggregates like states, ministries, interest groups, political parties, and rebel factions. There are two broad approaches to attempting to integrate behavioral research about individuals. The first, a quasi-behavioral approach, makes nonstandard assumptions about the preferences, beliefs, or decision-making processes of aggregate actors. The second tries to build theories in which the key actors are individuals. Pursuing the former means that the assumptions about actors will be only weakly linked to the empirical findings propelling behavioral research. The second approach faces formidable obstacles that international relations theory has confronted for a long time and for the most part has not overcome.