Right-wing populist leaders often seem to love soldiers (especially fallen ones) and the trappings of military life. But their love affair with the military rarely endures. This article explains this seeming paradox through the political logic of populism. Romanticizing and mythologizing the military solves a political problem for populists: how to mobilize people power without actually granting power to the people. Soldiers who willingly risk their lives for the nation serve as a model for an obedient public that should similarly march into the political battlefield on behalf of the populist leader. Dead soldiers cannot object when a populist leader exploits their memory. Populists understand that an independent, professional military is always at least a latent threat to their political ambitions. Once populists have bent other institutions to their will, they seek to control the military, erode its autonomy and professionalism, and transform it into a realm of loyalists. If the military resists, populists undermine public trust in it to facilitate taking it over. The article explores these dynamics in five case studies: Brazil under Bolsonaro; India under Modi; Poland under the Law and Justice Party; Turkey under ErdoÄan; and the United States under Trump.
Technology, Behavior, and Effectiveness in Naval Warfare: The Battles of Savo Island and Cape Saint George
What explains success and failure in naval warfare? Most political science research on military effectiveness focuses on land combat, often overlooking how behavior shapes outcomes at sea. This article uses a paired comparison of two World War II naval battlesâSavo Island and Cape Saint Georgeâto examine how material and nonmaterial factors interact in maritime conflict. In both battles, U.S. forces held significant material and technological advantages, yet they suffered a catastrophic defeat in the former and achieved a lopsided victory in the latter. The decisive difference, we argue, lay in commandersâ behavioral choices, organizational structure, and crew proficiency in using technology under stress. Using case study comparison and counterfactual analysis, we demonstrate how similar material conditions produced dramatically different outcomes as a result of variation in nonmaterial performance. These findings suggest that naval combat is more sensitive to human factors than prevailing materialist assessments acknowledge. As U.S.-China competition intensifies in the Western Pacific, our analysis calls for greater attention to training, leadership, and doctrine when evaluating the implications of China's growing material power. Naval warfare is a deeply social process, and understanding its outcomes requires integrating human behavior with technological and material analysis.
This article is the first to explore the limitations of artificial intelligence in strategic decision-making and in preventing strategic surprise. Using well-known cases, it examines repeated difficulties involved in the collection, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence. Given collection challenges, corrupted data, legal limitations, classification barriers, and spoofing by adversarial AI systems, the article shows that adequate data to avoid surprise are often unavailable. Nor will AI eliminate the dangers of misapprehending information or the politicization of intelligence. The article then considers the theoretical limitations on the ability of computers of any level of power to predict the future. The future is random; any system in a given state can produce multiple future states. Consequently, even in a closed laboratory system, the ability to predict is subject to error and degrades rapidly over time. Unavoidable observational error, imprecision, and incompleteness create further difficulty. In strategic decision-making, these difficulties are compounded. AI will enhance strategic planning and improve short-term political forecasting within a margin of error, but it cannot be relied on for judgment, and it will not eliminate strategic surprises.
A Matter of Principle: How Local Consent Affects U.S. Support for Military Interventions
U.S. policy elites regularly claim that local populations welcome U.S. military intervention on their territory, which implies a powerful moral justification for war. Does the consent of the âintervened populationâ affect U.S. public support for military intervention? A large literature shows that U.S. support for war follows cost-benefit calculations. In this view, ordinary Americans are prudent, not principled, about warâspecifically, they support low-cost interventions that are likely to succeed. Yet our conjoint survey experiment finds that American respondents do take a moral position regarding military intervention. In the experiment, we asked 3,360 U.S. citizens to evaluate ten hypothetical military intervention scenarios with attributes that we varied randomly. The results show that local consent significantly increases support for war on average, even when the intervention is predicted to be costless. This finding is consistent with the anti-paternalist position that using force for the benefit of others requires their consent as a matter of principle. Our study contributes to a recalibration of the roles of principled and prudential considerations in U.S. support for war. The importance of consent and the principled logic behind its effect on support for military intervention suggest that policy elites concerned with the democratic legitimacy of U.S. wars should identify the actual views of the population where the United States militarily intervenes.
Deception and Detection: Why Artificial Intelligence Empowers Cyber Defense over Offense
Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to automate key tasks in the life cycle of a cyber operation. Many have predicted that AI will revolutionize cyber conflict by enabling offense automation for faster, stealthier, and more damaging attacks. But the revolution has not happened, even though highly capable AI models have been available for several years. This article explains why: There is a gap between defense and offense when it comes to the limits on what AI can do. Cyber offense requires creative deception to burrow into systems and produce desired effects before being discovered. Cyber defense, by contrast, strives to detect such intrusions before they cause harm. AI models struggle with the creativity and deception necessary for offensive operations, but they excel at the pattern recognition that is key for defensive operations. I show that this relative advantage of defensive tasks increases as the stakes increase. I test this theory against experimental and in-the-wild evidence of AI automation in cyber conflict. States that invest in defense automation will likely enjoy a growing advantage over those that prioritize investing in offense automation. Rather than heralding a revolution, AI automation is likely to further tame cyber conflict. Highly skilled human operators, not AI, will be necessary to avoid being detected by AI-empowered defenders.
Review of International Organizations
Siloes of influence: The political economy of resourcing international organizations
Violent nonstate actors are increasingly seen as engaging in a diverse set of tactics, including nonviolent resistance. The use of nonviolent tactics by rebels complicates our understanding of rebels as primarily violent challengers to the state. What determines rebel groupsâ use of nonviolent tactics? Extant research explains this tactical choice with mobilization potential and incentives that external actors create. We propose an alternative, organization-centric approach. Shifting the focus to the role of organizational legacies in tactics decisions, we argue that a rebel groupâs tactical choice between violent and nonviolent contention is influenced by the type of parent organization from which it descends. Rebel groups inherit organizational capacities, behavioral norms, and personnel from parent organizations. These factors shape decisions on and norms with respect to the use of contentious tactics. We contend that groups with nonviolent parent organizations should be more likely to engage in nonviolent tactics, and should do so earlier in conflict, than those with other types of parent organizations, as they inherit organizational repertoires comprised of peaceful practices, norms against violence, and members socialized into nonviolent contentious politics. We test our argument using a quantitative research design with the newly updated SRDP dataset on the tactics of self-determination groups and the FORGE dataset on rebel group origins. We find that rebels with roots in organizations that used nonviolence are more likely to employ nonviolent tactics and use these tactics significantly earlier in wartime than rebels with other types of parent organizations.
Under what conditions does preventive mediation occur in self-determination disputes?
David E Cunningham, Leo Bauer, Sloan Lansdale, Megan Lloyd
Mediation is a crucial instrument employed by external actors to resolve armed conflicts and mitigate violence. A large academic literature examines mediation in civil war, with analyses of which civil wars see mediation and what the effect of this mediation is. Many organizations express a commitment to conflict prevention, and engage in mediation to prevent the outbreak of armed conflict. There is much less research on when mediation is used as a tool of conflict prevention. We have collected new data on all mediation efforts in a random sample of 51 self-determination (SD) disputes from 1991â2015, which includes disputes that never experience armed conflict, as well as years before and after armed conflicts in disputes that do. We use these data to examine the conditions under which preventive mediation occurs in SD disputes. We develop a theoretical argument for when mediators are likely to offer mediation, and governments and representatives of SD groups are likely to accept it. We test this argument using our new data in two samples of SD dispute-years that are not in armed conflict. We find that mediation is more likely in dispute-years outside of armed conflict where SD groups are engaged in low-level violence and in disputes in countries that border other countries that are experiencing armed conflict and less likely in disputes in states that are permanent members of the UN Security Council or former French colonies. This analysis shows that mediators do engage in preventive mediation in disputes that they perceive as having a higher likelihood of escalation to armed conflict, but that they are constrained in their ability to do so by geopolitics.
Commodity price shocks and ethnic riots: evidence from a new dataset on majority ethnic nationalist organizations
This study investigates the relationship between national economic growth and riots conducted by members of majority ethnic nationalist organizations. Studies on economic growth and ethnic violence focus primarily on minority ethnic populations and civil war violence, devoting insufficient attention to majority ethnic nationalist organizations and ethnic rioting. This article introduces a novel dataset capturing the yearly ethnic riot behavior of 769 majority ethnic nationalist organizations from 90 randomly selected countries between 1990 and 2017. Using export price shocks as the cause of exogenous changes in national economic growth, two-way fixed-effects linear regression analysis demonstrates a negative relationship between export booms and majority ethnic nationalist organization rioting among poor countries. Additional analyses show that the relationship is stronger among militant majority ethnic nationalist organizations and in countries with higher levels of political opportunityâcharacterized by more democratic institutions and lower levels of repression. Although national economic growth may mediate these relationships, other pathways are possible. More broadly, the evidence demonstrates how temporal, country, and organizational factors interact to associate with declining inter-ethnic relations.
Mapping the ROAD to democracy: a global dataset of overturning attempts and organizations in civil resistance transitions
Naela Elmore, Kashmiri Medhi, Giuseppe Peressotti, Jonathan Pinckney
Who attempts to overturn nonviolent revolutions? And when do they succeed? There is a strong correlation between transitions initiated through primarily nonviolent civil resistance and democratization. However, in several prominent cases, civil resistance transitions have been overturned, resulting in new authoritarian regimes. Little research has examined when and how overturning occurs, and which organizations perpetrate it, in part because no data exists that comprehensively examines overturning in civil resistance transitions. In this article we present the Resistance Overturning Attempts Dataset (ROAD), a dataset of overturning attempts and the organizations participating in and resisting them in every civil resistance transition from the beginning of the Third Wave of democratization to the present. We describe the variables and data collection process, and present descriptive statistics to illustrate the dataâs utility. These descriptives reveal several important areas for future research, perhaps most surprisingly that the most effective tactic for safeguarding civil resistance transitions appears to be armed violence.
Review of International Political Economy
Citizen responses to economic statecraft: evidence from Australia
Intrastate conflict is often identified to increase the risk of foreign asset expropriation due to heightened incentives for short-term economic gains. In this paper, we investigate this notion both theoretically and empirically, and refine the conventional wisdom by examining conditions under which intrastate conflict incentivizes a host government to expropriate foreign assets. We argue that intrastate conflict increases the risk of expropriation when the governmentâs capability to finance civil conflict is significantly constrained. The empirical results indicate that intrastate conflict has a positive effect on the expropriation risk only when the governmentâs war financing capabilities are substantially low due to a high level of external debt burdens. The findings show that host governments take a strategic approach in revenue generation and the capability to finance war is the key to understanding the relationship between conflict and expropriation.
Violence as a Condition: Structure, Composition, and the Use of Lethal Force
Since 2014, Russiaâs Wagner Group has gained prominence, expanding its role from driving Russian foreign policy across many African and Middle Eastern countries into an integral part of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In this paper, we first draw on the one-sided violence (OSV) literature to show how organizational incentives explain Wagnerâs violence against civilians pre-November 2021. Despite the static context of organizational incentives, Wagnerâs OSV lethality increased dramatically after the initial invasion. While prior research on this topic assumes organizations to be unitary and rational, we use personnel composition as an additional explanatory factor to explain OSV. Situated within research on combat psychology and health sciences, we introduce pre-combat experience (PCE) as key to understanding how training contributes to the use of OSV. By clarifying the role of PCE on OSV, we provide novel theoretical logic and empirical evidence explaining how individual-level experience aggregates to unit-level violence.
Do Humanitarian Military Interventions Foster Economic Growth?
Humanitarian military interventions (HMIs) are undertaken to end violent conflicts and establish political and economic stability in targeted countries. Their frequency has risen since the end of the Cold War and the United Nationsâ adoption of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. Previous research shows neutral HMIs - targeting all perpetrators - reduce conflict intensity, while biased HMIs-supporting one side-escalate violence. This study empirically tests the effects of these interventions on long-run economic growth in targeted countries from 1960 to 2019. The findings suggest that countries receiving neutral interventions experience approximately 14 percentage points higher cumulative GDP per capita growth over 5 years compared to conflict-affected countries that do not. No statistically significant evidence is found that biased HMIs contribute positively to economic growth. Furthermore, the positive effect of neutral HMIs on growth diminishes as prior conflict duration increases. These results highlight the importance of impartiality in HMIs for sustainable economic recovery.
Institutionalized Defense Cooperation and Regime Security
How does the institutionalization of external security cooperation affect government-military relations? This question has become increasingly salient amid a dramatic increase in bilateral defense cooperation agreements over the past few decades. I argue that DCAs help stabilize government-military relations and bolster regime security by mitigating a persistent credibility problem between signatory governments and their armed forces. By securing military-specific resources, DCAs limit the governmentâs ability to divert benefits elsewhere. The involvement of partner states further enhances credibility, as reneging on these bilateral agreements carries diplomatic and reputational costs. Because the military depends on the government to sustain these arrangements, the costs of plotting a coup increase: any extra-constitutional removal of the government threatens the institutional channels through which critical resources flow. A cross-sectional time-series analysis of 160 countries from 1980 to 2010 suggests that one or more DCAs exhibit significantly lower odds of coup attempts. The study highlights the role of international agreements in shaping domestic political stability. It also expands our understanding of statesâ unique role in managing domestic civil-military relations through international brokerage and cooperation.
The Political Geography of Sanctions Support: Evidence From Kazakhstan
Economic sanctions have become an increasingly prominent tool in twenty first-century statecraft. However, it is relatively easy for third-party states to undermine their effectiveness. This vulnerability makes it important to understand how and why their local publics support or oppose sanctions. Drawing from the case of Kazahkstanâs response to the global sanctions regime against Russia, we find that support for the sanctions varies based on ethnicity and geography. Specifically, ethnic Russians view the sanctions far more negatively than ethnic Kazakhs. Surprisingly, however, ethnic Russians located in non-traditional border regions express approval levels on par with ethnic Kazakhs. We argue that this difference stems from economic interest: due to their geographical proximity and informal ties with co-ethnics across the border, this group is well-positioned to benefit economically from sanctions evasion. Income reporting data offer further support for this argument. Our findings suggest that those developing sanctions regimes would benefit from considering how political geography and identity interact to shape support for sanctionsâand their efficacy.
Political Studies
Policy Diversification without Ideological Attenuation: The Programmatic Changes of Western European Far-Right Parties (1990â2025)
This research examines the programmatic transformations of the far right in Western Europe through two hypothesized mechanisms: the diversification of their agendas, including increased competition on socioeconomic issues, and ideological attenuation, reducing the importance given to their authoritarian and nativist positions. Using data from the Manifesto Project Database (1990â2025), the findings reveal that far-right parties have strengthened their authoritarian and nativist profile in recent decades, particularly during crises related to security and migration. Nevertheless, these parties also have diversified their agendas and placed greater emphasis on socioeconomic issues. As for factors explaining the differences within the far right, participation in national governments is associated with ideological attenuation and thematic diversification, although this effect is not lasting and is limited to contexts in which far-right parties participate as minority partners in governing coalitions.
Colonialismâs legacy still influences democracy in former colonies. This article examines how political rights under colonial rule shape democratic development after independence. We argue that the early extension of suffrage and access to representative institutions create organisational capacity and pressure colonial regimes to grant autonomy, easing the transition to democracy. Without such rights, colonial powers often retain control until the last moment, creating power vacuums and weaker democratic foundations. We assemble a country-year dataset covering 73 former colonies and use path analysis to estimate how early rights affect post-independence democracy, both directly and indirectly via colonial autonomy. Our findings underscore the importance of institutional pathways in shaping postcolonial institutions.