The development of nuclear weapons added a new dimension to conventional conflict: the possibility that it could inadvertently escalate into a nuclear exchange. How does this relationship between conventional war and nuclear escalation shape deterrence? I present a formal model of deterrence and arming. The novelty here is that investing in conventional capabilities has a direct effect on the balance of power but also an indirect effect on conflict duration and the likelihood of an accidental nuclear exchange. I find that accounting for the risk of nuclear escalation may require greater conventional force postures for deterrence, thus lowering welfare in the absence of nuclear war. I also find the nuclear era will be more peaceful, but when conflicts occur, they may be more aggressive and decisive. These results (and others) offer insight into the difficulty of substituting nuclear weapons for conventional arms, and into the Soviet response to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

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.

How does power affect threat perception? Drawing on advances in psychological research on power, I find that the sense of state power inflates the perception of threats. The sense of power activates intuitive thinking in the decision-making process, including a reliance on gut feelings and cognitive shortcuts like heuristics and prior beliefs. In turn, as psychological IR research shows, these mechanisms tend to inflate threat perception. The powerful assess threats from the gut rather than the head. Experimental evidence from the US and China, a reanalysis of a survey of Russian elites, and a large-scale text analysis of Cold War US foreign policy elites lend support to this expectation. The findings help to psychologically reconcile enduring theoretical puzzles—from “underbalancing” to “overextension”—and generate entirely new ones, like the possibility that decision makers of rising, not declining, states feel more fear. Together, the paper offers a “first image reversed” challenge to bottom-up accounts of psychological IR. Decision-maker psychology is also a dependent variable shaped by the balance of power, with important implications for a world returning to great power competition.

In this article I argue that the climate crisis may emerge as a new arena for status competition among states, enabled through the grafting of decarbonization and green-energy policies onto the status order’s existing symbolic-materialist logic. Status is often thought of as a destabilizing force in world politics, as its pursuit so often pushes states toward violent and financially wasteful policies of social aggrandizement. But this belief elides two points: that the status order and its rules of membership and esteem are malleable and subject to change; and that the emergence of different and new status symbols can also push status-seeking toward more prosocial outcomes. Rather than see these changes as occurring through explicit normative transformation, however, I argue that the status order is most likely to change surreptitiously when entrepreneurs can graft new status symbols onto an order’s underlying tenets, thus concealing but also producing change. I apply this grafting theory to the climate crisis in arguing that (1) highly visible steps taken to effect the green-energy revolution can be legibly grafted onto the existing status order; (2) this grafting technique was already evident in the Biden administration’s increased framing of the climate as an arena of status competition against China; and (3) in an era of renewed great power rivalry, status competition may at least compel states to make the kinds of costly and needed investments in climate mitigation they eschewed earlier.

Under what conditions do insurgents challenge gender norms in the midst of conflict? And what do they gain by doing so? Using an original data set of 137 armed groups fighting between 1950 and 2019, I argue that armed groups challenge gender customs to reshape local power relations. With 40 percent of rebel groups regulating civilian gender customs during civil war, this strategy is remarkably widespread, comparable to taxation or the provision of basic security in its prevalence. I demonstrate that armed groups exploit pre-existing gender grievances, using strategies like punishing domestic violence (9 percent of groups), banning dowries (15 percent), and enforcing dress codes (11 percent) to empower targeted subsections of the population and undermine local elites. I combine cross-national analysis with qualitative case studies of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Katiba Macina, two Islamist groups in Mali. This allows me to demonstrate how the approach to local elites drives gender governance in two groups with a shared ideology, goals, and societal context.

Most of what we know about organized criminal violence comes from research on illicit narcotics markets. Yet criminal groups also fight to capture markets for licit commodities, as evidenced by Sicilian lemons and Mexican avocados. When do organized criminal groups violently expand into markets for licit goods? We argue that rapid increases in the share of a good’s export value create opportunities for immediate profit and future market manipulation. These opportunities lead to violence as groups expand their territorial holdings and economic portfolio. We provide subnational evidence of our mechanism using data on avocado exports from Mexico, and address reverse causality with Google Trends data on the popularity of web searches for “avocado toast.” We also provide cross-national evidence by combining data from the Atlas of Economic Complexity, V-Dem, and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). We find that increases in a country’s share of global export value for agricultural goods are associated with more homicides—but only where organized criminal groups are present.

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.

When is science politicized in the international climate change regime? Does greater scientific certainty protect it from becoming politically contentious? I study these questions in the context of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the organization responsible for communicating the global scientific consensus on climate change. Using newly digitized data from inter-state negotiations at the IPCC, I show that states attempt to influence the IPCC’s assessment of scientific consensus in line with their bargaining positions in climate change negotiations. Estimating an ideal-point model, I find that the predominant cleavage over climate science is distributional—between new and old industrializers with broader ideological disagreements, rather than between large polluters and vulnerable countries. Next, I show that this cleavage is mediated by scientific uncertainty. Large polluters are more likely to agree with each other on interpretations of relatively uncertain science, which allows them to jointly weaken the scientific basis for strong climate agreements. Conversely, these countries are less likely to agree on relatively certain science, which heightens conflict over the distribution of the burden of mitigation. Thus greater scientific certainty may change the nature of politicization rather than reducing it.

Climate treaties have progressed over time to pledge substantial reductions in global warming. This is surprising, given that theories of climate politics emphasize collective-action problems and domestic deadlock. I first describe the process of updating climate mitigation targets under the Paris Agreement. Then I develop a theoretical argument that explains target changes based on how countries are situated in economic and political networks. Trade flows create competitive economic pressures that may undermine climate action, but these pressures may ebb when partners also commit to act. I argue that political networks support conditional cooperation, especially when institutional design promotes gradual commitments. I use spatial regression models to study how countries’ climate targets are related to their partners’ prior targets. I find that countries pledged stronger updated mitigation targets in the Glasgow Climate Pact when their closest political partners submitted strong targets in the Paris Agreement. This suggests the Paris Agreement drove conditional cooperation on mitigation.

We introduce a dynamic game of outbidding where two groups use violence to compete in a tug-of-war fashion for evolving public support. We fit the model to the canonical outbidding rivalry between Hamas and Fatah using newly collected data on Palestinian public support for these groups. Competition has heterogeneous effects, and we demonstrate that intergroup competition can discourage violence. Competition from Hamas leads Fatah to use more terrorism than it would in a world where Hamas abstains from terrorism, but competition from Fatah can lead Hamas to attack less than it otherwise would. Likewise, making Hamas more capable or interested in competing increases overall violence, but making Fatah more capable or interested discourages violence on both sides. These discouragement effects of competition on violence emerge through an asymmetric contest, in which we find that Fatah uses terrorism more effectively to boost its support, although Hamas has lower attack costs. Expanding on these results, we demonstrate that outbidding theory is consistent with a positive, negative, or null relationship between measures of violence and incentives to compete.

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.

Why are some firms more successful than others in obtaining privileged treatment from their government? Trade policy, as an unusually targeted tool, offers a rich context to understand such questions of special-interest politics and corporate power. Studying decisions on anti-dumping petitions in the United States, we introduce a novel source of privileged treatment. We argue that firms with more linkages throughout the domestic economy enjoy a privileged political position. Benefits to these firms extend indirectly to a wider set of constituents, which allows firms to assemble broader coalitions and to portray protectionist policy as more than purely particularistic politics. We provide evidence for this argument by developing original measures of linkages between firms, derived from over 600,000 customer–supplier relationships among industries, matching them with data on anti-dumping petitions filed by US firms, written briefs filed by members of Congress on behalf of these firms, and the geographic distribution of industries. Our account identifies a new explanation of differences in the political influence of firms, underscores the relevance of domestic production networks in politics, and offers a novel perspective on cleavages and coalitions in trade politics. Our results also suggest that the expansion of global supply chains, long considered a hallmark of political power, has weakened the clout of some of the largest firms by limiting their domestic footprint.

We use a formal model to explore leaders’ incentives to set climate commitments and subsequently exert downstream mitigation effort. Since the Paris Agreement asks countries to make unilateral voluntary commitments, we investigate the domestic factors motivating climate pledges. We study a country with electoral competition between two parties, Green and Brown, who first make commitments to reduce emissions and then implement policies to meet their commitments. Voters anticipate the equilibrium policies each party will implement given the pledge. If downstream mitigation policies are insufficient relative to the commitment, the government is “shamed” by the international community. Several incentive channels arise when parties make commitments, as they have policy and electoral value. Parties can use commitments to tie the opposition’s hands to implement preferential policies in the future. If parties care only about winning elections, they will exploit commitments to serve electoral needs, which paradoxically leads anti-environmental parties to implement more ambitious commitments.

Alliance formation typically entails some risk of abandonment, wherein an ally may not honor its obligations in the future. When potential security partners’ preferences are misaligned, this risk looms large, discouraging mutually beneficial investment in an alliance. How can a prospective ally credibly reassure an uncertain patron that their preferences align, to mitigate abandonment risks and elicit a security commitment? We show formally that pre-alliance bargaining with third parties is one way to do so. When the patron holds abandonment concerns, the prospective ally can reassure the patron by making greater concessions to the patron’s existing allies, but more hard-line demands of its rivals. This finding implies that the prospect of an alliance can alternately promote conflict with a prospective patron’s enemies and forestall conflict with its friends. Indeed, we show that incentives for pre-alliance reassurance can result in war, even with perfect asset divisibility, no commitment problems, and complete information among the belligerents. The results are illustrated by China’s intervention in the Korean War and Australia’s post-World War II rapprochement with Japan, which were motivated largely to foster security cooperation with the Soviet Union and the United States, respectively.

Political myths, the sacred narratives that legitimize power, are at the core of all political communities and organizations. In the post–World War II era, clear myths emerged around the ordering of the world, placing democracy, order, and peace at the idealized heart of global governance. Today, the international order is markedly changed. Previously dominant myths are routinely questioned and the international order that was built on these myths is beginning to fragment. Myths traditionally change with institutions. At this unique inflection point in the 2020s, however, this is no longer the case—myths crumble while the institutions they once supported persist, creating a vacuum in which novel myths must emerge in what we refer to as the new age of myth. We argue that the global order is in a transitional moment in terms of its governing mythologies. The myths that are born out of this age will underline the institutions, ideas, and ideologies that will shape the trajectory of the international order in the coming decades. In this essay we therefore argue that the study of political myths should be central to future approaches to international relations. Such an emphasis not only provides insight into the pathways of international cooperation and politics that may emerge from the contemporary shattering of the global political order, but also highlights how these sacred narratives will shape its future trajectory.

Thomas Schelling argued that “The most spectacular event of the past half century is one that did not occur. We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger.” To this, he added a question: “Can we make it through another half dozen decades?” Contemporary technological innovation, weapons proliferation, increased modernization efforts, and nuclear saber-rattling have made Schelling's question an urgent one. Recently, there has been an explosion in scholarship attempting to test the resilience of nonuse. These scholars have focused primarily on methodological innovations, generating an impressive body of evidence about the future of nonuse. Yet we argue that this literature is theoretically problematic: it reduces mechanisms of nuclear nonuse to a “rationalist” versus “normative” dichotomy which obscures the distinct pathways to nuclear (non)use within each theoretical framework. With rationalist theories, the current literature commits the sin of conflation, treating what should be distinct mechanisms—cost and credibility—as a single causal story. With normative theories, scholars have committed a sin of omission, treating norms as structural and overlooking mechanisms of norm contestation. We show that teasing out these different causal pathways reveals radically different expectations about the future of nonuse, especially in a world of precision nuclear weapons.

Exchange rate manipulation—the active devaluation of a currency through intervention in the foreign exchange market—is a frequent trigger of international disputes. Yet it is not an obvious policy choice: as a blunt tool to boost export competitiveness, it is disliked by citizens and importers because of the loss of purchasing power it entails, and because it benefits those with investment abroad at the expense of those with savings at home. It is thus notable that a group of East Asian countries, from Japan and Korea to Thailand, undertake frequent and often large interventions to devalue their currencies. What explains their policy choice? We provide evidence that exchange rate depreciations are undertaken at the behest of export industries. Because lobbying activities in East Asian countries are not directly observable, we focus on Japan and Korea and construct a proxy measure of lobbying by exporters, drawing on news reports. We use machine learning to scale daily reports of industry demands in the two leading financial newspapers, the Japanese Nihon Keizai Shimbun and, in a robustness check, the Korean Hankyung, over twenty-five years. We find evidence that mounting public pressure by organized economic interest groups precedes intervention and induces currency depreciation.

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.

Can states improve their international image by apologizing for past wrongs, or do apologies hurt countries’ reputations? We argue that apologizing can boost a country’s international image by providing reassurance about future behavior and conveying appropriate values. Yet apologies could also signal weakness, and their international effects could depend on reactions in the sending and receiving countries. To test these arguments, we pair large-scale US-based survey experiments involving Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with the historical case of Germany’s 1951 Holocaust apology. In our experiments, respondents learned whether a foreign state apologized for past offenses, how the target of the apology responded, whether key domestic groups in the sender opposed the apology, and whether the sender was democratic or not. We found that apologies boosted foreign favorability and willingness to cooperate, and did not indicate weakness. These effects persisted even if the target rejected the apology or the apology provoked backlash inside the sender, and did not depend on whether the sender was described as democratic. The case of Germany’s 1951 Holocaust apology corroborates these patterns. Together, our findings suggest that apologies may be a powerful tool of public diplomacy.

Experts argue that resource transfers from developed to developing countries are central to international climate policy efforts. Yet as countries grapple with the political difficulties of provisioning and accepting climate funds, understanding why voters support or oppose international climate finance becomes critical. Focusing on domestic audiences in both donor and recipient countries, we investigate the determinants of public support for cross-border climate transfers. Theoretically, we focus on the effects of emphasizing the compensatory purposes of funding, favoring mitigation over adaptation activities, and prioritizing partnerships between donor and recipient agents—three factors that generate both normative and material benefits, and thus build support among broader coalitions of voters. Paired survey experiments in the United States and India corroborate the relevance of these transfer features for citizens in donor and recipient countries. Taken together, our findings shed light on the domestic political-economy attributes of transfer agreements that can unlock support for cross-border climate cooperation.