We examine how relative exposure to negative economic shocks across racial groups impacts racial animus and voting patterns. Guided by group position theory, we argue that when dominant groups experience greater economic harm than nondominant groups within the same labor markets, racial animus intensifies. In the US context, the historically central boundary between white and Black Americans provides the most meaningful test of this mechanism. Using data from US commuting zones (2000 to 2020), we focus on the impact of the China shock on anti-Black racial animus. We measure relative exposure as the gap in import exposure between white and Black workers. Our findings show that negative economic shocks disproportionately affecting white workers, compared to Black workers, lead to increased anti-Black animus and increased Republican presidential vote share, even when controlling for overall import exposure. Taken together, these findings suggest that it is economic decline relative to another group that generates racial animus and outwardly racist behavior, as well as influences political behavior.

This research note investigates the long-term impact of individuals' exposure to violent and nonviolent political conflict on their subsequent support for democracy. Drawing on insights from research on political socialization, we theorize how large-scale political conflicts shape the formation of individuals' political attitudes, leaving a lasting attitudinal imprint beyond the immediate participants and victims of conflict. We combine information on historical conflict episodes with global survey data covering over 600,000 respondents from 91 countries to study the individual-level consequences of both violent and nonviolent conflict comparatively. The results reveal that citizens' conflict experiences matter greatly for their attitudes to democracy, yet the effects differ significantly between the two types of conflict. Whereas violent conflict exposure increases their appetite for democracy, surprisingly this desire is dampened after experiences of large-scale nonviolent conflict. Given the importance of citizen support for the functioning of democracy, our findings provide insights into the prospects for democracy in a time of persistent intrastate conflict.

Contemporary armed conflicts often involve a wide array of actors—government forces, rebel groups, militias, informal armed groups, and civilians—interacting in complex and shifting patterns. To help capture this complexity, a growing number of studies draw on network analysis methods. As a complement to these approaches, this research note introduces a novel web-based tool that applies a visual analytics perspective to conflict dynamics. The tool visualizes conflict as a dynamic network, showing “who fights whom” through interactive network graphs. Drawing on the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED), the tool automatically generates conflict actor networks alongside maps of violent events. Users can drag and reposition nodes, filter the network by time period, and use a highlighting function to trace specific actors. We demonstrate the tool's value through case studies on the Central African Republic, Syria, and Sudan. By enabling researchers and practitioners to generate conflict networks without technical expertise, the tool offers a practical complement to traditional conflict visualization methods, which typically emphasize dyadic relationships—such as state versus rebel—and display violence on maps.

As democracies grow more diverse through immigration, a key question arises: when should immigrants participate in political decision-making? We examine citizens’ beliefs about when immigrants should vote in national elections (before citizenship, with citizenship, or never) and whether these views depend on immigrants’ integration markers. We assess how exclusionary worldviews and psychological predispositions—authoritarianism, social dominance orientation (SDO), and ethnocentrism—shape views of democratic membership and how malleable those views are. Using 2021 survey data from Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we find that integration criteria matter most to those who view citizenship as the primary gateway to political inclusion. High levels of SDO and ethnocentrism are associated with exclusionary preferences, though integration efforts reduce resistance among individuals high in SDO. Authoritarian-leaning individuals are simultaneously more willing to include immigrants pre-naturalization and more likely to support permanent exclusion. These findings highlight the conditional nature of political inclusion in diverse democracies.

As Western democracies become increasingly diverse, political influence often depends on effective alliances and solidarity that cut across group boundaries. While the intergroup solidarity literature points to shared grievances as a central driver, it remains unclear exactly what kind of grievance information promotes political solidarity between which groups. To test this, we conducted a survey experiment in the United Kingdom among respondents from three distinct groups: migrants from Eastern Europe, migrants from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and natives. The treatments vary based on which immigrant group is described as experiencing discrimination, making potentially shared group grievances salient. We find that discrimination information increases support for prospective MENA immigrants among migrants from Eastern Europe, but not vice versa, and we find no effects among UK natives. Moreover, discrimination information is more effective among migrants without British citizenship. Importantly, discrimination information may not uniformly foster political solidarity or interest alignment across all population groups.

Abstracts Indirect violence involving methods such as artillery shelling and aerial bombardment remains an underexplored aspect of conflict, largely due to the rarity of disaggregated data. This article estimates the impact of such violence on civilians by analyzing how territorial contestation influenced civilian casualties from Russian shelling near the frontlines in Ukraine. Drawing on granular conflict data, we find that civilian casualties from indirect violence were significantly higher during local Russian offensives, consistent with a doctrine of clearing the way through intensive bombardment. In contrast, this effect was not observed during Russian retreats, nor during local stalemates, which were marked by greater military casualties only. These relationships hold when proxies for civilian evacuation are included. We conclude that the study of indirect violence should consider how changing battlefield dynamics expose civilians to harm, especially the relationship between casualties and territorial contestation.

Globalization has intensified the cross-border transmission of financial risk, placing the Global Financial Safety Net (GFSN) at the core of international economic stability. Since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, bilateral swap agreements (BSAs) have expanded rapidly, now exceeding International Monetary Fund (IMF) resources and fundamentally reshaping the architecture of global financial co-operation. While observers frequently warn that BSAs may induce moral hazard, systematic theoretical and empirical assessments remain scarce. We develop a network-based argument of moral hazard, arguing that states’ incentives to safeguard depend on their positions within the BSA network. We test theoretical expectations with an original dataset of global BSAs and causal inference techniques. The findings uncover a dual dynamic: central creditor states adopt more prudent positions, expanding their liquidity provision capacity by nearly 20 percentage points to reinforce network stability, whereas peripheral debtor states exhibit significant moral hazard, reducing their self-insurance by roughly 8 percentage points. This study shows that BSAs both diffuse the burden of liquidity provision and reallocate financial risk. In doing so, they generate new systemic vulnerabilities, shift the key currency system away from unilateral reliance on the United States toward burden-sharing among core central banks, and raise emerging challenges for domestic accountability in global financial governance.

Relational thinking in International Relations Theory (IRT) and International Political Sociology (IPS) critiques Cartesian binaries by advancing relational ontologies of politics. Central to this critique is Bruno Latour’s theory of modernity, which challenges Cartesianism and calls for an emancipatory break from it. I engage Latour through a dialogue with Hannah Arendt’s account of the shift from Being to Process, which she links to cybernetics and the dominance of labor in the vita activa. I reinterpret this shift as a move from Cartesian mechanism (Arendt’s Being) to what I call organic cosmology (Arendt’s Process), reflecting digitalised reality. I argue that IRT and IPS have under-theorized this cosmological shift, with consequences for the politics of relations. Cybernetics inaugurated organic cosmology by positing that information constitutes relations. Yet information is treated as separate from matter, producing a post-Cartesian dualism left largely unaddressed by Latour and contemporary IRT and IPS. This binary underpins computational capitalism by enabling data extractivism as an ordering logic. Drawing on debates on earth-system governance and algorithmic ontology, I argue that neglecting cybernetics as a cosmological formation leaves relational IRT and IPS ill-equipped to grasp how cybernetic imaginaries structure politics of relations and reproduce new dualisms, weakening their critical purchase.

We find that corporate access to the executive in the United Kingdom fails to deliver financial benefits to firms. We use two measures of access for the United Kingdom’s largest 2049 firms between 2013 and 2019: (1) all meetings between corporate representatives and ministers and (2) all state non-executive directorships held by the employees of those firms. Both meetings and non-executive directors (NEDs) skew dramatically towards a group of large firms that have regular access to government, overwhelmingly the Department of Business and the Treasury. Once we correct for endogeneity, we show that various versions of the NED and meeting measures are not consistently associated with seven financial outcomes. By contrast, using a matching exercise, we observe that elite firms with giant market values and weekly interactions with the government gain relative to peers. Since so few corporate executives get regular access to government, their occasional meetings may serve to aid policymaking without distorting it or distracting noticeably from a business leader’s principal duties.

The shifting dynamics of power between the United States and China are reshaping the international system, giving rise to an emerging bipolar structure. This evolving strategic landscape prompts important questions regarding the mechanisms of balancing within international relations and the relevance of balance of power theory in understanding contemporary great-power competition. By synthesising two existing frameworks – internal versus external balancing and soft versus hard balancing – this article introduces a new conceptual model that distinguishes between incremental and prompt balancing. The article contends that, since the 2010s, China has shifted from an incremental balancing strategy to a highly-intensive prompt balancing approach, employing a mix of economic, military, and diplomatic tactics to counter US dominance. This escalated balancing effort has been driven by a narrowing power gap and a profound change in the nature of the bilateral relationship, as China increasingly asserts its great-power status on the global stage.