Torture critics have offered two types of arguments in the hope of swaying public opinion against torture: A pragmatic (consequentialist) argument that “torture doesn’t work” and a moral (deontological) argument about the immorality and cruelty of torture. I present findings from two survey experiments about public support for torture among U.S. adults. The great majority of the respondents in these surveys did not endorse pragmatic arguments. They believed that torture was a quick and effective means of extracting information from detainees who had information about terror attacks. Respondents were unpersuaded by the suggestion that evidence extracted by means of torture might be fragmentary, outdated, or merely corroborative. However, when respondents were informed about the protracted nature of torture, which often requires weeks or months of interrogation before yielding results, their support for torture was lower by 14% in one survey and by 30% in a second survey. Survey participants refused to endorse prolonged torture not because they perceived torture to be ineffective, but because they felt that prolonged torture was cruel. Torture critics would be well advised to steer away from less persuasive arguments about torture inefficacy and instead confront audiences with sobering truths about the cruelty of torture.

Though psychic trauma may be an essential part of the human condition, in recent decades its interpretation as PTSD has had important political consequences. I examine both the political roots of the PTSD diagnosis and the disorder’s subsequent impacts on American foreign policy discourse. I draw on a mixed-methods approach, including historical analysis of PTSD’s development and quantitative and qualitative analysis of presidential papers, presidential debates, and the Congressional Record from the last fifty years. My chief findings are twofold. First, even though PTSD was added to the DSM in 1980, American leaders only began commonly referencing the disorder around the 2008 presidential cycle, more than half a decade into the War on Terror. Second, critical discourse analysis reveals that increased attention to PTSD has contributed to a blurring of important spatiotemporal lines around the concept of war, extending its consequences into an unknown future and outside the war zone. This erosion has profound normative consequences, considering how it similarly blurs the pivotal ethical distinction between victim and perpetrator. These findings not only elucidate an evolution that has taken place in American foreign policy, but also speak to the more general conceptual challenges posed by war trauma.

What is the relationship between insularity—a state’s separation from other states via large bodies of water—and expansion? The received wisdom, prominent in (though not exclusive to) realist theories, holds that insularity constrains expansion by making conquest difficult. We contend, by contrast, that this received wisdom faces important limits. Focusing on U.S. expansion via means short of conquest, we interrogate the underlying theoretical logics to demonstrate that insular powers enjoy two distinct advantages when it comes to expansion. First, insularity translates into a “freedom to roam”: because insular powers are less threatened at home, they can project more power and influence abroad. Second, insularity “sterilizes” power, which explains why insular powers are seen as attractive security providers and why we do not see more counterbalancing against them. On net, existing scholarship is correct to argue that insularity impedes conquest between great powers. Still, it has missed the ways that insularity abets expansion via spheres of influence abroad. One consequence is an under-appreciation for the role of geography writ large and insularity in particular in shaping contemporary great power behavior.

Recent scholarship has warned that the American public is turning away from democracy, with many focusing on the role of polarization in driving these trends. While these studies devote a great deal of attention to conceptualizing and measuring polarization, however, there is much less attention to the concept of democracy itself. As a result, they encounter several problems: First, lack of attention to the categorical and contextual differences between various democratic transgressions can lead to misleading findings. Second, slippage between macro and micro level analysis of backsliding can make it difficult to draw solid inferences about attitudes. Finally, lack of attention to contestation within the concept of democracy obscures a different kind of regime contention reflected in public attitudes. These problems confound efforts to understand whether the American public is truly turning away from democracy and point to the need for greater collaboration among scholars from different intellectual traditions and methodological orientations.

We propose a new conception of monetary sovereignty that acknowledges the reality of today’s global credit money system. Today, the concept is predominantly used to denote states that issue and regulate their own currency. We reject that Westphalian understanding of monetary sovereignty. Instead, we propose a conception of effective monetary sovereignty that focuses on what states are actually able to do in the era of financial globalization. The conception fits the hybridity of the modern credit money system by acknowledging the crucial role not only of central bank money but also of money issued by regulated banks and unregulated shadow banks. These institutions often operate “offshore”, outside of a state’s legal jurisdiction, which makes monetary governance more difficult. Monetary sovereignty consists in the ability of states to effectively govern these different segments of the monetary system and thereby achieve their economic policy objectives.

The very idea that authoritarian regimes (“autocracies”) may enjoy popular support is hard to fathom for democrats. Models of authoritarian regimes often entail tacit ideological assumptions, and many are driven by methodological fashions. They ignore the efforts of rulers to provide what people value. The psychology they assume is inadequate to predict actions. They are often too abstract to generate testable predictions. “Support” for any regime is difficult to assess.

While it is widely accepted that negotiated settlements are prone to breakdown, our understanding of the processes through which signatories defect lacks precision. A growing qualitative literature recognizes the potential for rebel group fluidity, yet the conflict field’s converging reliance on dyadic data obscures pathways of defection that result in splintering or merger in quantitative studies. An in-depth case study of a failed peace process in Uganda—which is misclassified in the extant data—helps to illustrate the ways in which excluded groups can lower the opportunity cost of defection for splintering factions, resulting in a strategic alliance. I test the generalizability of this argument against the full sample of rebel parties to settlements in Sub-Saharan Africa (1975–2015) using a large-N qualitative analysis of causal process observations (CPOs). The aggregated results provide strong evidence that the defection-by-alliance pathway is much more prevalent than previously recognized, accounting for more than one-third of all defections in the sample. Where settlements create shared incentives for stakeholders inside and outside the peace process to spoil, rebel elites appear more willing to bear the costs of an alliance with a rival, rather than surrendering under adverse conditions.

Pre-analysis plans (PAPs) have been championed as a solution to the problem of research credibility, but without any evidence that PAPs actually bolster the credibility of research. We analyze a representative sample of 195 PAPs registered on the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) and American Economic Association (AEA) registration platforms to assess whether PAPs registered in the early days of pre-registration (2011–2016) were sufficiently clear, precise, and comprehensive to achieve their objective of preventing “fishing” and reducing the scope for post-hoc adjustment of research hypotheses. We also analyze a subset of ninety-three PAPs from projects that resulted in publicly available papers to ascertain how faithfully they adhere to their pre-registered specifications and hypotheses. We find significant variation in the extent to which PAPs registered during this period accomplished the goals they were designed to achieve. We discuss these findings in light of both the costs and benefits of pre-registration, showing how our results speak to the various arguments that have been made in support of and against PAPs. We also highlight the norms and institutions that will need to be strengthened to augment the power of PAPs to improve research credibility and to create incentives for researchers to invest in both producing and policing them.

Congress hears more and more from everyday citizens. How do modern Congressional offices use this information to represent their constituents? Drawing on original interviews and a survey of Congressional staff, we explore how representation works in practice when new data and tools, such as databases and downscaled public opinion polls, are available. In contrast with established theories that focus on responsiveness, we show that representation is a two-way street. Congressional offices both respond to incoming constituent opinion and reach out to elicit opinions from stakeholders. Offices record correspondence into databases, identifying the most salient issues and the balance of opinion among correspondents. They tend not to use polls on policy. To understand the opinions of electorally influential constituencies, staffers also proactively reach out to stakeholders and experts in a practice we call provoked petitioning. If the Washington pressure system is a chorus, Congressional staff often serve as conductors, allowing well-resourced and organized constituents, including interest groups, to sing with the loudest voices. While Congress has some new tools and strategies for representation, its modern practices still reinforce existing biases.

An influential model of democratic civil-military relations insists that civilian politicians and officials, accountable to the public, have “the right to be wrong” about the use of force: they, not senior military officers, decide when force will be used and set military strategy. While polls have routinely asked about Americans’ trust in the military, they have rarely probed deeply into Americans’ views of civil-military relations. We report and analyze the results of a June 2019 survey that yields two important, and troubling, findings. First, Americans do not accept the basic premises of democratic civil-military relations. They are extraordinarily deferential to the military’s judgment regarding when to use military force, and they are comfortable with high-ranking officers intervening in public debates over policy. Second, in this polarized age, Americans’ views of civil-military relations are not immune to partisanship. Consequently, with their man in the Oval Office in June 2019, Republicans—who, as political conservatives, might be expected to be more deferential to the military—were actually less so. And Democrats, similarly putting ideology aside, wanted the military to act as a check on a president they abhorred. The stakes are high: democracy is weakened when civilians relinquish their “right to be wrong.”

Social media is frequently an arena of intense competition among major political actors across the world. We argue that a fruitful way of understanding this competition is as coalitions among key actors and their networks of followers. These coalitions can both advance a shared political message and target mutual rivals. Importantly, coalitions can be tacit or explicit, and they do not necessarily depend on direct state manipulation or repression, although they often do. This makes a coalitional framework particularly valuable for studying complex political environments in which online actors blend cooperation and competition. Empirically, we show the value of this approach with novel data collection and analysis of Twitter and Facebook content from 2018–19 in Pakistan, with a focus on the dynamics leading up to and following the controversial 2018 general election. We map out networks of narrative alignment and conflict on Pakistani social media, providing important insights into the relationships among the major political parties, military, media, and dissidents. Future research can fruitfully explore the causes and effects of powerful social media coalitions.

Big technology companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon amass global power through classification algorithms. These algorithms use unsupervised and semi-supervised machine learning on massive databases to detect objects, such as faces, and to process texts, such as speech, to model predictions for commercial and political purposes. Such governance by algorithms—or “algorithmic governance”—has received critical scrutiny from a vast interdisciplinary scholarship that points to algorithmic harms related to mass surveillance, information pollution, behavioral herding, bias, and discrimination. Big Tech’s algorithmic governance implicates core IR research in two ways: (1) it creates new private authorities as corporations control critical bottlenecks of knowledge, connection, and desire; and (2) it mediates the scope of state–corporate relations as states become dependent on Big Tech, Big Tech circumvents state overreach, and states curtail Big Tech. As such, IR scholars should become more involved in the global research on algorithmic governance.

The notion that states pursue a monopoly over the use of force rings increasingly hollow. From vigilantes that patrol the United States’ southern border, to thugs for hire in China, states are characterized by non-state violent actors. These trends are more pronounced in comparatively lower-capacity states. Employing the concept of “security assemblages,” I propose that it is crucial to consider historically embedded relations among violent actors and institutions in order to understand their socio-political role and implications for state authority. This approach offers three insights: first, in low-capacity states, violence is not zero-sum. Rather, it is assembled among diverse actors, which each have historically embedded comparative advantages. Second, therefore, state efforts to monopolize violence should be taken as an empirical question rather than an assumption grounding analysis. Third, relationships between violent actors occur in thick institutional environments, meaning that violent actors, including state actors and institutions, often must act under significant constraints. To illustrate these points, I conduct a mixed-methods nested study of vigilantes in Uganda, finding that vigilantes are more common where other authorities are present, and are more helpful when other authorities are also more helpful. Focusing on dynamics between vigilantes and police, I pinpoint their historically distinct roles: the police were established as a colonial-era institution to suppress political dissent, while vigilantes have long been socially embedded actors tasked with everyday security provision. Thus, in this case, police and vigilantes are not substitutes; instead they play distinct and complementary roles.

High levels of self-reported trust in government found in China has invited skepticism about the authenticity of survey results. To address this question, we examine implicit political trust, an automatic, intuitive orientation toward government. Using the Single-Target Implicit Association Test, we found that the Chinese public holds an implicit trust in government that is unrelated to self-reported, explicit trust. Whereas early political socialization processes, represented by education and urban residency, increase implicit trust they also decrease explicit trust suggesting that agents of socialization have differential effects. Furthermore, performance evaluations, income, and social desirability affect explicit trust but have no effect on implicit trust. Controlling for explicit trust, we found that implicit trust matters for understanding various types of regime support including system justification, the social credit system, and government’s ability to handle crises. Our results have important implications for understanding regime support in the world’s largest authoritarian country.

We know much about “how democracies die”: elites and masses become polarized, and norms of mutual toleration, forbearance, and institutional restraint erode. But why do elites feel free to undermine these guardrails of democracy? What are the sources of backsliding? Answers to these questions have focused on the impact of economic and cultural change, and on autocratic meddling. I consider another potential source of backsliding around the world: the impact of the reconfiguration of global politics after the Cold War and 9/11 on politics in the main prodemocratic actors that Samuel Huntington highlighted in his book The Third Wave: the United States, the European Union, and the Vatican. Today, the international context gives leaders in these global powers relatively weaker incentives to stand up for democracy, even in the face of aggressive meddling from Russia and China. Changes in international politics has left democracy with weaker ideational support in the global arena, potentially facilitating backsliding.

We vindicate the widespread intuition that there is something morally problematic with for-profit corporations providing care to young children and elders. But instead of putting forward an empirical argument showing that for-profit corporations score worse than not-for-profits when it comes to meeting the basic needs of these vulnerable groups, we develop a philosophical argument about the nature of the relationship between a care organisation, its role-occupants, and care recipients. We argue that the correlation between profit and lower-quality care is a result of intrinsic features of a for-profit model, combined with conceptual features of meaningful caring relationships, such that non-profits are the most reliable institutional providers of adequate care. Our claim is that care requires a kind of commitment that for-profit institutions are constituted to avoid, and that non-profit institutions are constituted to embrace.

One of my pet peeves when watching televised sports is when the commentators declare that one or another player or team “has momentum” or that “the momentum has shifted.” Typically, this statement is made shortly after a team or player does something that puts them in a better position to win the game, and the implication seems to be that this change in momentum will carry someone to victory. But there are at least two problems with this all-too-typical sportscaster pronouncement. One is that “momentum” is a mathematically well-defined notion in physics, where it means the mass of an object multiplied by its velocity; linear momentum is also a vector quantity, and has both a magnitude and a direction. It is this complexity that allows momentum and changes in momentum—in conjunction with an account of the various forces at work on the object—to explain the object’s trajectory. A well-kicked football has momentum in the physics sense, but it is quite unclear how the “momentum” of a player or a team might be calculated, to say nothing of the various forces at work on the player or team’s movement through the playing of a game. Hence both the determination of a player or team’s “momentum,” and the use of that “momentum” in explaining or predicting the outcome of a game, necessarily remain at the level of metaphor.

We reexamine the concept of individualism and its political implications. While both political scientists and social psychologists agree that individualism is a core value for many Americans, political science has primarily associated the concept with views about economic mobility. Building upon insights from political theory, we argue that a narrow focus on economics overlooks key elements of individualism and its relation to political life. With the help of five distinct datasets collected between 2018 and 2022 (combined N = 12,169), we develop a new index that emphasizes autonomy from authority, which we label moral individualism. We show how it and other dimensions of individualism explain interactions with the political world, including responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Across multiple indicators, moral individualists were far less likely to engage in collective action or pursue other behaviors meant to assist the community. For example, even after controlling for the effects of ideology and partisanship, moral individualism reduced the probability of wearing a mask during the first year of the pandemic by approximately 30 percentage points.

The growth of inequality over the past half century is closely connected to the rise of neoliberal policies and institutions, the latter of which shield capital from state actions that might limit wealth accumulation. Economic nationalism since the global financial crisis has slowed or even reversed this, yet this same era has seen the emergence of a new form of instrument in the neoliberal mold, in a stronghold of state sovereignty: taxation. Under mandatory binding tax arbitration, states cede sovereignty over the interpretation of international tax agreements to panels of transnational tax adjudicators. Focusing on the pivotal role of the United States, we use historical documents, including from the congressional archive and interviews with key actors to ask why tax arbitration emerged late in the neoliberal era, and at a counterintuitive time. We demonstrate that this outcome is the result of instrumental business power driving a process of incremental change through layering, to overcome states’ preference to retain sovereignty. This experience sheds light on the historically structured ways that business power constrains sovereignty in an era of high inequality.

Great socioeconomic transitions bring about the demise of certain industries and the rise of others. The losers of the transition tend to deploy a variety of tactics to obstruct change. We develop a political-economy model of interest group competition and garner evidence of tactics deployed in the global climate movement. From this we deduce a set of strategies for how the climate movement competes against entrenched hydrocarbon interests. Five strategies for overcoming obstructionism emerge: (1) appeasement, which involves compensating the losers; (2) co-optation, which seeks to instigate change by working with incumbents; (3) institutionalism, which involves changes to public institutions to support decarbonization; (4) antagonism, which creates reputational or litigation costs to inaction; and (5) countervailance, which makes low-carbon alternatives more competitive. We argue that each strategy addresses the problem of obstructionism through a different lens, reflecting a diversity of actors and theories of change within the climate movement. The choice of which strategy to pursue depends on the institutional context.