Research on migration diplomacy has shown that control over cross-border mobility can function as a power resource, enabling transit states to extract concessions from destination countries. However, transit states do not systematically activate this potential leverage, nor do they uniformly engage in rent-seeking behaviour. This article asks why transit countries occupying similarly advantageous geopolitical positions adopt divergent approaches to the use of migration power. Focusing on Mexico–United States relations during Donald Trump’s first presidency, it shows that Mexico initially refrained from instrumentalising migration control and later relied on defensive rather than extractive uses of its leverage. To explain this variation, the article develops an analytical framework that conceptualises transit states’ choices regarding the activation of migration power as strategic decision-making grounded in cost–benefit calculations under specific structural constraints. It shows that these evaluations are context-dependent and shaped by how actors perceive their scope of action. The framework examines how political, reputational, and implementation costs shape states’ willingness to deploy migration leverage and how different aims – punitive, extractive, defensive, and deterrent – structure its use in practice. By shifting attention from rent-seeking behaviour to strategic restraint and defensive action, the article broadens the explanatory scope of the migration diplomacy literature.

What explains how the public views government responses to hostage crises? Existing research has explored how incident-level factors shape public opinion of hostage recovery, but we know less about which Americans support recovery – and why. In this article, we explore how individual-level factors shape public support for bringing captives home. We argue that support for hostage recovery reflects partisan, ideological, and emotional factors. Drawing on two large, national surveys of the American public, we show how Americans’ partisanship, broader foreign policy attitudes, and other personal traits predict willingness to support a range of hostage recovery activities, including negotiations, ransom payment, prisoner exchanges, and military rescue missions. We find that foreign policy internationalists are much more likely to support recovery compared to isolationists, though ‘militant’ and ‘cooperative’ internationalists prefer different recovery options. While broad, bipartisan majorities support recovery efforts, Republicans are significantly less supportive of making concessions to bring captive Americans home – partisan differences that are exacerbated when recovery is proposed by an out-party president. Finally, we show that respondents with children are more supportive of recovery than non-parents, a result we attribute to the emotional pleas made by captives’ parents. This paper explores the domestic politics of international threat, revealing the individual determinants of support for recovery.

Scholarship has increasingly acknowledged the importance of public attitudes for shaping the European Union's Common Foreign and Security Policy. Economic sanctions emerged as one of CFSP's central tools. Yet despite the emergence of sanctions as a popular instrument in the EU foreign policy toolbox, public attitudes towards sanctions are yet to be studied in depth. This article explains public support for EU sanctions, using the empirical example of sanctions against Russia. It looks at geopolitical attitudes, economic motivations and ideational factors to explain the variation in public support for sanctions. The conclusion suggests that geopolitical factors are the most important, and that economic factors matter very little. Euroscepticism and anti‐Americanism play an important role in explaining the support for sanctions at the individual level.

Do voters’ assessments of the government's foreign policy performance influence their vote intentions? Does the ‘clarity of responsibility’ in government moderate this relationship? Existing research on the United States demonstrates that the electorate's foreign policy evaluations influence voting behaviour. Whether a similar relationship exists across the advanced democracies in Europe remains understudied, as does the role of domestic political institutions that might generate responsibility diffusion and dampen the effect of foreign policy evaluations on vote choice. Using the attitudinal measures of performance from the 2011 Transatlantic Trends survey collected across 13 European countries, these questions are answered in this study through testing on incumbent vote the diffusion-inducing effects of five key domestic factors frequently used in the foreign policy analysis literature. Multilevel regression analyses conclude that the electorate's ability to assign punishment decreases at higher levels of responsibility diffusion, allowing policy makers to circumvent the electoral costs of unpopular foreign policy. Specifically, coalition governments, semi-presidential systems, ideological dispersion among the governing parties and the diverse allocation of the prime ministerial and foreign policy portfolios generate diffusion, dampening the negative effects of foreign policy disapproval on vote choice. This article contributes not only to the debate on the role of foreign policy in electoral politics, but also illustrates the consequential effects of domestic institutions on this relationship.

While public opinion about foreign policy has been studied extensively in the United States, there is less systematic research of foreign policy opinions in other countries. Given that public opinion about international affairs affects who gets elected in democracies and then constrains the foreign policies available to leaders once elected, both comparative politics and international relations scholarship benefit from more systematic investigation of foreign policy attitudes outside the United States. Using new data, this article presents a common set of core constructs structuring both American and European attitudes about foreign policy. Surveys conducted in four countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany) provide an expanded set of foreign policy‐related survey items that are analysed using exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM). Measurement equivalence is specifically tested and a common four‐factor structure that fits the data in all four countries is found. Consequently, valid, direct comparisons of the foreign policy preferences of four world powers are made. In the process, the four‐factor model confirms and expands previous work on the structure of foreign policy attitudes. The article also demonstrates the capability of ESEM in testing the dimensionality and cross‐national equivalence of social science concepts.

Scholars have recently begun to examine how authoritarian rulers cooperate with each other in order to fend off popular challenges to their power. During the Arab Spring the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) supported fellow authoritarian regimes in some cases while backing opposition movements in others. Existing theoretical approaches fail to explain this variation. Advancing the study on authoritarian cooperation, this article develops a theoretical approach that sets out to explain how authoritarian regimes reach their decisions. Drawing on poliheuristic foreign policy analysis, it argues that perceptions of similarity serve as a filter for estimating threats to regime survival at home. If regimes perceive the situation in other countries as similar to their own, supporting other authoritarian regimes becomes the only acceptable strategy. In contrast, if perceptions of similarity are low, regimes also consider other options and evaluate their implications beyond the domestic political arena. Applying this framework to the example of the GCC states during the Arab Spring, the analysis reveals covariation between perceptions of similarity and threat among GCC regimes, on the one hand, and their strategies, on the other.

This article reviews the general characteristics of the ‘crisis’ faced by the EU when confronted by the George W. Bush administration in the US, and considers it in relation to the EU's capacity for collective international action. On the basis of a range of examples, it appears that the EU's foreign policy ‘crisis’ was limited to one end of an extensive spectrum, and that in other areas there is considerable evidence of success in maintaining solidarity and proposing alternative policies. The article concludes by proposing an approach to EU collective international action that can account for and accommodate this unevenness, and which might be applied to EU–US relations more generally.

This article investigates the combined effect of experiential and reflective learning on student learning in international politics. It proceeds from the premise that students need a more realistic view of decision-makers so as to understand the logic and context of foreign policy-making better. A board game was used to model the foreign policy decision-making environment, and written and oral reflections were utilised to link students’ personal experience to abstract concepts of foreign policy analysis. Using a quasi-experimental design, both qualitative and quantitative data were used to test the hypotheses about students’ altered views of decision-making and their interest in and learning about foreign policy analysis. Results show that, in comparison with the impact of traditional lecturing combined with discussions, the benefits of experiential and reflective learning are very small. The little support for the existence of such benefits that was uncovered comes from qualitative data and a few statistical measures based on student self-evaluation. Quantitative analyses based on objective measures provided little evidence for a difference between the two teaching approaches. The article concludes with a call for improving the effectiveness and evaluation of reflective learning methods and putting the theories of reflective learning into practice more profitably in international relations.

Nicolas Sarkozy's reintegration of NATO's military command in 2009 has been presented as radical, given the traditional Gaullist stance of an arm's length relationship with NATO and the US. This article argues first, the difficulty for any French political leader to alter radically the course of French foreign and defence policy; second, that Sarkozy’ policy is merely conforming to a longer-term trend of negotiating between European and Atlantic positions dating from the beginning of the twentieth century.

This study explores the relationship between state–citizen relations and changing notions of volunteering in Japan. I map Japan’s state–citizen relations through an analysis of the transformations of volunteering in Japan from “hōshi” (mutual obligation) to “borantia” (borrowed from the English “volunteer”). The article broadly considers these paradigm shifts in terms of the context of the role International Non Profit Organisations (INPOs) play in Japanese foreign policy.

This article, as an introduction to the Symposium, discusses the determinants and evolution of attention to defence and foreign policy issues in France. It thereby contributes to existing debates on the relative power of presidents in this area. It then provides a short overview of the different contributions to the symposium. It argues that there is some measure of agreement in the analyses of current relations between France and the US, especially concerning the weight of history. Yet, at the same time, the articles provide a variety of views and approaches to the current state of these relations.

The relationship between France and the US is complex and characterised by frictions, which derive from the interests (and not the susceptibilities), of the two partners (Iraq, NATO, Afghanistan, the Middle-East). In order to avoid a return to past suspicions, the two allies need to establish a more structured dialogue, and cope with the new international agenda through more permanent structures. This requires a new culture of cooperation on both sides.