Prior research has sought to understand the rise of election observers and their consequences for outcomes such as fraud, protest, and violence. These studies are important but they overlook a significant individual-level dynamic that observers themselves care about: the effect that election observers have on local attitudes about elections. We argue that the activities of election observers can enhance elections' local credibility, but only when locals perceive observers as being both capable of detecting fraud and unbiased in that pursuit. Not all observer groups are seen as equally capable and unbiased. Evidence from a large-scale, nationally representative experiment in Tunisia supports the argument. A key finding is that observers from the Arab League—an organization criticized internationally for low-quality election observation—enhanced credibility the most because they were perceived locally as both relatively capable and unbiased.

Militant groups, like all organizations, carefully consider the tactics and strategies that they employ. We assess why some militant organizations diversify into multiple tactics while others limit themselves to just one or a few. This is an important puzzle because militant organizations that employ multiple approaches to violence are more likely to stretch state defenses, achieve tactical success, and threaten state security. We theorize that militant organizations respond to external pressure by diversifying their tactics to ensure their survival and continued relevance, and that the primary sources of such pressure are government repression and interorganizational competition. We find consistent support for these propositions in tests of both the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior (MAROB) data sets. We bolster these findings with an additional specification that employs ethnic fractionalization in the first stage of a multi-process recursive model. These findings are relevant not only for academic research but for policy as well. While it is difficult for countries to anticipate the character of future tactical choices, they may be able to anticipate which groups will most readily diversify and thereby complicate counterterrorism efforts.

Migration is likely to be a key factor linking climate change and conflict. However, our understanding of the factors behind and consequences of migration is surprisingly limited. We take this shortcoming as a motivation for our research and study the relationship between environmental migration and conflict at the micro level. In particular, we focus on environmental migrants' conflict perceptions. We contend that variation in migrants' conflict perception can be explained by the type of environmental event people experienced in their former home, whether gradual, and long-term or sudden-onset, short-term environmental changes. We develop this argument before quantitatively analyzing newly collected micro-level data on intra-state migration from five developing countries. The results emphasize that migrants who experienced gradual, long-term environmental events in their former homes are more likely to perceive conflict in their new location than those having experienced sudden, short-term environmental events. These findings are in line with our theoretical argument that environmental migrants who suffer from environmentally induced grievances are ultimately more likely to perceive conflict and challenges in their new locations.

The most important international human rights norms are legalized or codified in international treaty law. Yet pernicious practices at odds with these norms endure and sometimes even increase after legalization. According to conventional wisdom, this is because agents commit to but do not comply with international law and the underlying norms. I develop a theory of evasion to explain why norm violations persist even when states technically comply with the law. Because legalization transposes social norms into international law imperfectly, it creates gaps between laws and underlying norms. Because of these norm-law gaps, legality and normative appropriateness will diverge. States caught between opposing pressures from pro-violation and pro-compliance groups exploit this gap through what I call evasion—the intentional minimization of normative obligations that technically complies with international law but violates underlying norms. I demonstrate the theory's empirical purchase in the cases of the French expulsion of Roma immigrants and the Czech school segregation of Roma children. Under the cover of technical compliance with the law, these states violated the norm of racial equality. The argument cautions that the good news about law compliance is not necessarily good news about norm compliance, broadens our understanding of norm violators' agency, and has practical implications for human rights advocacy.

In this paper I examine what constructivist approaches to IR tell us about how states should act when confronted by atrocity crimes in the context of a politically pluralist international society. Building on the work of theorists who responded to Richard Price and Christian Reus-Smit's call to substantiate the constructivist's claim to explain “moral progress,” and to better inform normative assessments, I claim that the constructivist emphasis on historical and social contingency does not rule out ethical standpoints, suggesting instead a “pragmatic” ethic. Norms are hypotheses rather than absolute values. The task of the pragmatic constructivist is not to establish beyond doubt the normativity of a norm—the task is to test the norm for how well its “meaning-in-use” supports action that ameliorates lived social problems. Pragmatic constructivists can commit to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) as an idea that might reconcile various communities of normative practice and ameliorate vulnerability without upsetting international order. To the extent particular practices (e.g., prevention) have proven (and continue to prove) useful in doing this, pragmatic constructivists can equate the institutionalization of those practices with normative progress. However, R2P is a “complex” norm. It recognizes that knowledge of how to respond to ongoing atrocity is context specific and cannot therefore be fixed. The task of the pragmatic constructivist here is to assess the practical judgment of those that claim to speak for the norm by weighing the consequences of acting out their prescription in the specific context of a particular crisis. I test the meanings of R2P in use during the Syria crisis from 2011 to 2012. R2P was problematic to the extent certain meanings reinforced policy ends (e.g., protection through political/criminal accountability) that were impractical and pursued at the expense of non-ideal but realizable goals (e.g., protection through peace/aid).

Existing scholarship attributes various political and economic advantages to democratic governance. These advantages may make more democratic countries prone to financial crises. Democracy is characterized by constraints on executive authority, accountability through free and fair elections, protections for civil liberties, and large winning coalitions. These characteristics bring important benefits, but they can also have unintended consequences that increase the likelihood of financial instability and crises. Using data covering the past two centuries, I demonstrate a strong relationship between democracy and financial crisis onset: on average, democracies are about twice as likely to experience a crisis as autocracies. This is an empirical regularity that is robust across a wide range of model specifications and time periods.

Politicians frequently turn to reputational arguments to bolster support for their proposed foreign policies. Yet despite the prevailing belief that domestic audiences care about reputation, there is very little direct evidence that publics care about reputation costs, and very little understanding of how. We propose a dispositional theory of reputation costs in which citizens facing ill-defined strategic situations turn to their core predispositions about foreign affairs in order to weigh competing reputational dimensions. Employing a diverse array of methodological tools—from vignette-based survey experiments to automated text analysis—we show that the mass public has a “taste” for reputation, but understands it in fundamentally different ways, with hawks concerned about the negative reputational consequences of inconsistency, and doves equally concerned with the negative reputational consequences of belligerence and interventionism. In illustrating how reputation costs are in our heads, our findings offer both good and bad news for theories of reputation in IR.

Do legal amnesties for combatants help end civil wars? International policy experts often take it for granted that amnesties promote negotiated settlements with rebels. However, a large number of amnesties are followed by continued fighting or a return to the battlefield. What, then, are the factors that make amnesties effective or ineffective? In this article I use a disaggregated data set of all amnesties enacted in the context of internal war since 1946 to evaluate a bargaining theory of amnesties and peace. Testing hypotheses about conflict patterns using models that account for selection, I find that (1) only amnesties passed following conflict termination help resolve civil wars, (2) amnesties are more effective when they are embedded in peace agreements, and (3) amnesties that grant immunity for serious rights violations have no observable pacifying effects. These policy-relevant findings represent a new breakthrough in an ossified “peace versus justice” debate pitting security specialists against global human rights advocates.

Why do some rebel groups provide governance inclusively while most others do not? Some insurgencies divert critical financial and personnel resources to provide benefits to anyone, including nonsupporters (Karen National Union, Eritrean People's Liberation Front). Other groups offer no services or limit their service provision to only those people who support, or are likely to support, the insurgency. The existing literature examines how insurgencies incentivize recruitment by offering selective social services, yet no research addresses why insurgencies provide goods inclusively. I argue that inclusive provision of services legitimates insurgents’ claim of sovereignty to domestic and international audiences, and thus is a strategic tool secessionist rebels use to achieve their long-term goal of independence. With new and original data, I use a large-N analysis to test this hypothesis. The results of the analysis support the hypothesis, underscoring the importance insurgent nonviolent behavior and addressing key issues such as sovereignty and governance.

When popular referendums fail to ratify new international agreements or succeed in reversing existing ones, it not only affects domestic voters but also creates negative spillovers for the other parties to such agreements. We explore how voters respond to this strategic environment. We use original survey data from a poll fielded just one day before the 2015 Greek bailout referendum—a referendum in which the stakes for other countries were particularly high—to investigate how expectations about the likely foreign response to a noncooperative referendum outcome influence voting behavior and to what extent foreign policymakers can influence those expectations. Our analysis of the Greek referendum shows that such expectations had a powerful effect on voting behavior: voters expecting that a noncooperative referendum outcome would force Greece to leave the eurozone were substantially more likely to vote cooperatively than those believing that it would result in renewed negotiations with the country's creditors. Leveraging the bank closure that took place right before the vote, we also show that costly signals by foreign actors made voters more pessimistic about the consequences of a noncooperative vote and substantially increased the share of cooperative votes.

Power sharing, in which elites from rival societal groups agree to share control of the central government, is a key source of domestic peace, enabling states to escape devastating cycles of exclusion and civil war. Yet the conditions giving rise to inclusive governance are not well understood. In contrast to existing scholarship that emphasizes the importance of external third-party mediation or strong formal institutions, we point to the structural roots of power sharing in which political inclusion stems from the distribution of societal power and the balance of threat capabilities it produces. Only when both the ruling group and a given rival group possess strong mobilizational capabilities, such that each could credibly threaten to recapture state power if excluded from the central government, does self-enforcing power sharing emerge. A strong rival induces the ruler to commit to power sharing and to reluctantly accept coup risk over civil war risk. The ruling group's own threat capabilities, in turn, constrain rivals from trying to convert their share of power into absolute power. Supported by extensive quantitative and qualitative evidence with particular reference to weak states in sub-Saharan Africa, we shed light on the conditions under which the distribution of violence within a state underwrites a peaceful and productive equilibrium. In doing so, we rethink how scholars approach the study of civil war. Rather than conceiving of it in terms of effective resistance, we model civil war as a contest for state power shaped by groups’ capabilities to project force in the capital.

Recent works on the role of argumentation in international politics have enriched our understanding of the discursive construction of international legitimacy. Many scholars have recognized the pervasiveness and privileged status of legal claims. Building on these insights, I advance the proposition that the international legitimacy of the use of force has legalized. Legalization implies that successful (de-)legitimation depends on the strategic use of international law, and that alternative legitimacy discourses (such as morality) have been marginalized and play a negligible role in the construction of legitimacy. Thus, the use of force is legitimate to the extent that it conforms to international law. I test this “legalization thesis” against the “hard” case of NATO's intervention in Kosovo in 1999. By revisiting the arguments used by state representatives, I show that, as expected in a legalized legitimacy system and contrary to what has become common knowledge about this case, legitimacy was gained through, not despite, international law. I analyze NATO's strategy of legitimation in detail and reconstruct it as a set of seven strategic moves, all of them appealing exclusively to the international legal discourse.

The “democratic peace”—the regularity that democracies rarely (if ever) fight with other democracies but do fight with nondemocracies—is one of the most famous findings in international relations scholarship. There is little agreement, however, about the mechanism that underpins the democratic peace. Recently, scholars have shown that mass publics in liberal democracies are less supportive of using military force against other democracies. This finding has been taken to support the idea that the content of public opinion may provide one mechanism that underpins the democratic peace. Using a large-scale survey experiment, we show that mass publics in an authoritarian regime—China—show the same reluctance to use force against democracies as is found in western democracies. Our findings expand the empirical scope of the claim that mass publics are reluctant to use force against democracies, but force us to rethink how public opinion operates as a causal mechanism underpinning the democratic peace.

From 1960 to 2000, manufacturing supply chains became global. To what extent has this growth in offshore outsourcing and foreign direct investment affected industrial attitudes toward trade liberalization? Using data on public positions of US firms and trade associations on all free trade agreements since 1990, I show that foreign direct investment (FDI) and input sourcing are the primary drivers of support for trade liberalization. Direct import competition and export opportunities play a secondary role in shaping support for free trade agreements. This work therefore adds to the literature on the politics of globalization by providing systematic evidence of a link between global supply chains and industrial preferences, and by developing a new model of the determinants of industrial attitudes toward trade.

The links between protests and state responses have taken on increased visibility in light of the Arab Spring movements. But we still have unanswered questions about the relationship between protest behaviors and responses by the state. We frame this in terms of concession and disruption costs. Costs are typically defined as government behaviors that impede dissidents’ capacity for collective action. We change this causal arrow and hypothesize how dissidents can generate costs that structure the government's response to a protest. By disaggregating costs along dimensions of concession and disruption we extend our understanding of protest behaviors and the conditions under which they are more (or less) effective. Utilizing a new cross-national protest-event data set, we test our theoretical expectations against protests from 1990 to 2014 and find that when protesters generate high concession costs, the state responds in a coercive manner. Conversely, high disruption costs encourage the state to accommodate demands. Our research provides substantial insights and inferences about the dynamics of government response to protest.