We develop a formal model of bargaining between two states where one can invest in a program to develop nuclear weapons and the other imperfectly observes its efforts and progress over time. In the absence of a nonproliferation deal, the observing state watches the former's program, waiting until proliferation seems imminent to attack. Chance elements—when the program will make progress and when the other state will discover this—determine outcomes. Surprise proliferation, crises over the suspected progress of a nuclear program, and possibly “mistaken” preventive wars arise endogenously from these chance elements. Consistent with the model's predictions and contrary to previous studies, the empirical evidence shows that the progress of a nuclear program and intelligence estimates of it explain the character and outcomes of most interactions between a proliferant and a potential preventive attacker. Counterintuitively, policies intended to reduce proliferation by delaying nuclear programs or improving monitoring capabilities may instead encourage it.

Recent articles conclude that foreign aid, like other nontax resources, inhibits political change in authoritarian regimes. This article challenges both the negative political effects of aid and the similarity of aid to other resources. It develops a model incorporating changing donor preferences and the heterogeneity of foreign aid. Consistent with the model's predictions, an empirical test for the period 1973–2010 shows that, on average, the negative relationship between aid and the likelihood of democratic change is confined to the Cold War period. However, in the post–Cold War period, nondemocratic recipients of particular strategic importance can still use aid to thwart change. The relationship between oil revenue and democratic change does not follow the same pattern over time or across recipients. This supports the conclusion that aid has different properties than other, fungible, resources.

Whether and how violence can be controlled to spare innocent lives is a central issue in international relations. The most ambitious effort to date has been the International Criminal Court (ICC), designed to enhance security and safety by preventing egregious human rights abuses and deterring international crimes. We offer the first systematic assessment of the ICC's deterrent effects for both state and nonstate actors. Although no institution can deter all actors, the ICC can deter some governments and those rebel groups that seek legitimacy. We find support for this conditional impact of the ICC cross-nationally. Our work has implications for the study of international relations and institutions, and supports the violence-reducing role of pursuing justice in international affairs.

This article examines why rebel groups make large demands of governments that are inconsistent with their fighting capacity, especially when such demands are almost always rejected. We show that making large demands, even if ultimately rejected by the government, makes sense for rebels who face a credibility dilemma. Such a dilemma is most likely to arise when militarily weak rebel groups face governments of uncertain strength and can commit to fight credibly only when they believe the government is also weak. This results in a counterintuitive set of strategic incentives for weak rebels, who choose their demands to ensure that they are rejected even when the government is weak. Thus, to make their threat to fight credible, weak rebels make large demands that, when rejected, result in inefficient fighting. Since most civil wars are characterized by weak rebels bargaining with much stronger governments, it is important to understand how this particular feature of civil war shapes intrawar negotiations between the rebels and the government. We develop a model of bargaining between a government and rebel group and evaluate its implications using historical data on civil conflict in Africa from 1989 to 2010. The results suggest that the tendency for the government to be significantly stronger than rebels induces rebel groups to make unrealistically large demands.

The institutions of global governance have changed dramatically in recent years. New organizational forms—including informal institutions, transgovernmental networks, and private transnational regulatory organizations (PTROs)—have expanded rapidly, while the growth of formal intergovernmental organizations has slowed. Organizational ecology provides an insightful framework for understanding these changing patterns of growth. Organizational ecology is primarily a structural theory, emphasizing the influence of institutional environments, especially their organizational density and resource availability, on organizational behavior and viability. To demonstrate the explanatory value of organizational ecology, we analyze the proliferation of PTROs compared with the relative stasis of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). Continued growth of IGOs is constrained by crowding in their dense institutional environment, but PTROs benefit from organizational flexibility and low entry costs, which allow them to enter “niches” with limited resource competition. We probe the plausibility of our analysis by examining contemporary climate governance.

Although there is a deep and wide consensus that international conflict over territory is especially common and destructive, there is less agreement over what it is about territory that leads to these outcomes. Understanding the role of territory in international conflict requires complementing realist and materialist understandings of the value of territory with one grounded in the constructivist theories that dominate studies of nationalism and geography. Doing so recognizes that homeland territoriality, because it raises the value of a specific territory and provides an imperative to establish sovereignty over it, plays a distinctive role in driving international conflict. This article presents a systematic, replicable operationalization of the homeland status of territory that, because it is consistent with constructivist theories of nationalism, can be used to integrate constructivist understandings of the role of territory into quantitative studies of territorial conflict. This measure is then used to test the implication that the loss of subjectively defined homeland territory increases the likelihood of international conflict relative to the loss of nonhomeland territory. The findings that dividing homelands is especially likely to lead to conflict are corroborated by a second novel measure of the homeland status of territory that is based on the identification of co-ethnics in a territory before the border was drawn.

Scholars, observing clustering in transitions to democracy, argue that democratization diffuses across borders as citizens in autocracies demand the same reforms they witness in neighboring states. We disagree. This article demonstrates that diffusion plays only a highly conditional role in democratization. We advance and test an alternative two-step theory of clustered democratization: (1) economic and international political shocks, which are clustered spatially and temporally, induce the breakdown of authoritarian regimes; then (2) democratic diffusion, in turn, influences whether a fallen dictatorship will be replaced by a democracy or a new autocracy. Diffusion, despite playing an important role, is insufficient to explain the clustering of transitions. Using data on 125 autocracies from 1875 to 2004, we show that economic crises trigger authoritarian breakdowns, while diffusion influences whether the new regime is democratic or authoritarian.

In response to corruption and inefficient state institutions in recipient countries, some foreign aid donors outsource the delivery of aid to nonstate development actors. Other donor governments continue to support state management of aid, seeking to strengthen recipient states. These cross-donor differences can be attributed in large measure to different national orientations about the appropriate role of the state in public service delivery. Countries that place a high premium on market efficiency (for example, the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden) will outsource aid delivery in poorly governed recipient countries to improve the likelihood that aid reaches the intended beneficiaries of services. In contrast, states whose political economies emphasize a strong state in service provision (for example, France, Germany, Japan) continue to support state provision. This argument is borne out by a variety of tests, including statistical analysis of dyadic time-series cross-section aid allocation data and individual-level survey data on a cross-national sample of senior foreign aid officials. To understand different aid policies, one needs to understand the political economies of donors.

Despite widespread agreement that status matters, there is relatively little in the way of focused research on how and when it matters. Relying on the assumption that it “matters” has provided few extant theories of variation in states’ concern for status and little understanding of its specific implications for international conflict. I introduce a theory of status dissatisfaction (SD) that clarifies who forms the basis for status comparisons in world politics, when status concerns should be paramount, and how they are linked to international conflict. I demonstrate the viability of conflict as a strategy for status enhancement: both initiation and victory bring substantial status benefits over both five- and ten-year periods. Using a new, network-based measure of international status, I demonstrate that status deficits are significantly associated with an increased probability of war and militarized interstate dispute (MID) initiation. Even internationally, status is local: I use “community detection” algorithms to recover status communities and show that deficits within those communities are particularly salient for states and leaders.

A broad literature on how oil wealth affects civil war onset argues that oil production engenders violent contests to capture a valuable prize from vulnerable governments. By contrast, research linking oil wealth to durable authoritarian regimes argues that oil-rich governments deter societal challenges by strategically allocating enormous revenues to enhance military capacity and to provide patronage. This article presents a unified formal model that evaluates how these competing mechanisms affect overall incentives for center-seeking civil wars. The model yields two key implications. First, large oil-generated revenues strengthen the government and exert an overall effect that decreases center-seeking civil war propensity. Second, oil revenues are less effective at preventing center-seeking civil war relative to other revenue sources, which distinguishes overall and relative effects. Revised statistical results test overall rather than relative effects by omitting the conventional but posttreatment covariate of income per capita, and demonstrate a consistent negative association between oil wealth and center-seeking civil war onset.

By the end of the twentieth century, a scholarly consensus emerged around the idea that oil fuels authoritarianism and slow growth. The natural abundance once thought to be a blessing was unconditionally, and then later only conditionally, a curse for political and economic development. We re-examine the relationship between oil wealth and political regimes, challenging the conventional wisdom that such natural resource rents lead to authoritarian outcomes. We contend that most efforts to examine the causal linkages between natural resource abundance and political regime have been complicated by the likelihood that both democracy and oil revenue are endogenous to the industrialization processes itself, particularly in its developmentalist form. Our quantitative results, based on an analysis of global data from 1970 to 2006, show that both resource endogeneity and several mechanisms of intraregional regime diffusion are powerful determinants of democratic outcomes. Qualitative evidence from the history of industrialization in Latin America yields support for our proposed causal claim. Oil wealth is not necessarily a curse and may even be a blessing with respect to democratic development.

Holy Land Crusades were among the most significant forms of military mobilization to occur during the medieval period. Crusader mobilization had important implications for European state formation. We find that areas with large numbers of Holy Land crusaders witnessed increased political stability and institutional development as well as greater urbanization associated with rising trade and capital accumulation, even after taking into account underlying levels of religiosity and economic development. Our findings contribute to a scholarly debate regarding when the essential elements of the modern state first began to appear. Although our causal mechanisms—which focus on the importance of war preparation and urban capital accumulation—resemble those emphasized by previous research, we date the point of critical transition to statehood centuries earlier, in line with scholars who emphasize the medieval origins of the modern state. We also point to one avenue by which the rise of Muslim military and political power may have affected European institutional development.

What drives autocrats to default on their sovereign debt? This article develops the first theory of sovereign debt default in autocracies that explicitly investigates survival incentives of political actors in nondemocracies. Self-interested elites, fearful of threats to their tenure because of urban unrest, may be willing to endure the long-term borrowing costs that defaulting creates rather than risk the short-term survival costs of removing cheap food policies for urban consumers. I test my main claims that both urbanization and food imports should be associated with greater likelihood of autocratic default using panel data covering forty-three countries over fifty years, finding that autocracies that are more reliant on imported food and that are more urbanized are significantly more likely to be in default on their external sovereign debt. I emphasize the regime-contingent nature of these effects by demonstrating that they are reversed when considering democratic sovereign default. I also substantiate the mechanisms put forward in my theory through illustrative historical cases of sovereign debt default in Zambia and Peru, in which I demonstrate that fear of urban unrest in the face of rapidly increasing food prices did indeed drive autocratic elites to default on international debt obligations. In addition to providing the first political theory of debt default in autocracies, the article introduces two robust predictors of autocratic default that have been overlooked in previous work, and highlights the importance of urban-rural dynamics in nondemocratic regimes.

States pursue their cooperative and competitive goals using both public and private policy tools. Yet there is a profound mismatch between the depth, variety, and importance of covert activity and what scholars of International Relations (IR) know about it. This article addresses this gap by analyzing how adversaries struggle for influence within the covert sphere, why they often retreat to it, and when they abandon it. It focuses on secrecy among adversaries intervening in local conflicts and develops a theory about secrecy's utility as a device for creating sustainable limits in war. Drawing on insights about secrecy and face-work from the sociologist Erving Goffman, I show that major powers individually and collectively conceal evidence of foreign involvement when the danger of unintended conflict escalation is acute. Doing so creates a kind of “backstage” in which adversaries can exceed limits on war without stimulating hard-to-resist pressure to escalate further. An important payoff of the theory is making sense of puzzling cases of forbearance: even though adversaries often know about their opponent's covert activity, they often abstain from publicizing it. Such “tacit collusion” arises when both sides seek to manage escalation risks even as they compete for power and refuse to capitulate. The article evaluates the theory via several nested cases of external intervention in the Korean War. Drawing on newly available materials documenting the covert air war between secretly deployed Soviet pilots and Western forces, the cases show how adversaries can successfully limit war by concealing activity from outside audiences. Beyond highlighting the promise in studying the covert realm in world politics, the article has important implications for scholarship on coercive bargaining, reputation, state uses of secrecy, and how regime type influences conflict behavior.

Financial regulatory networks are a pervasive new type of global governance heralded by some as a flexible answer to globalization dilemmas and dismissed by others as ineffective because of weak enforcement mechanisms. Whether regulatory network agreements provide global public goods or private goods for certain states’ firms is a second debated issue. This article adjudicates among competing perspectives by examining whether Basel III, an international agreement about bank capital minimums negotiated by the bank regulatory network in 2009 and 2010, was viewed as credible and affecting regulated US firms. I use stock returns to measure investors’ perceptions, and an event study methodology to test whether regulated banks’ observed stock returns significantly differ from expected stock returns on days when new information about Basel III becomes available. If the agreement is viewed as credible and affecting firm value, banks’ stock returns will deviate from expectations. The direction of any deviation indicates whether regulations benefit or hurt banks. Although the direction of effects is not uniform across events, I find that the initial stock return reaction and the net effect across all five events are negative, and of a similar magnitude as regulated foreign banks, indicating that US banks were harmed, and did not benefit from, the new international regulations. US banks experienced stock returns that differed from expectations, providing evidence that international regulatory network agreements are viewed as credible and tangibly affect firms independent of domestic implementation.