Armed groups rely on recruitment to sustain their organizations, yet most research on forced recruitment focuses on children. Far less attention has been given to the coercive recruitment of adults, even though adults constitute the majority of rebel members. This article introduces the Coercive Recruitment of Adults Dataset (CROAD), a new cross-sectional dataset covering 390 rebel organizations active in civil wars between 1990 and 2021 that use coercion to recruit adults. CROAD features two forms of coercive recruitment (forced recruitment and conscription), records public pledges to end these practices, and includes additional variables. The dataset can be easily combined with other data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). This article introduces the dataset, presents descriptive statistics, replicates a study on forced recruitment and wartime rape, and highlights avenues for future research.

It is well-established that political leaders matter for domestic outcomes, but statistical evidence for their relevance in international politics is comparatively scarce. We ask whether the personal relationship between political leaders can change the propensity for nonviolent conflict between nation-states in the form of sanctions. Panel probit models with data from 1970 to 2004 are estimated to evaluate whether more similar leaders are less likely to sanction each other. Our results indicate that higher leader similarity reduces the likelihood of sanction imposition. The effect is most pronounced for sanctions imposed through unilateral political decisions. The probability of such sanctions ranges from 2.3 percent at the highest observed leader similarity to 7.2 percent at the lowest. Leader similarity especially matters for sanctions aimed at democratic change or human rights, for non-trade sanctions, and when at least one autocracy is involved. Finally, leader similarity has become more important after the Cold War.

Foreign policy making involves balancing ethical values and instrumental concerns. Do politicians and citizens differ in how they weigh these factors when directly confronted with this trade-off? Focusing on attitudes toward arms exports, we argue that citizens, but not politicians, tend to prioritize human rights concerns over the political and economic benefits for their own states. We tested these arguments in four survey experiments among citizens and parliamentarians in the United Kingdom and Germany. We presented participants with fictitious arms deals and varied the human rights records of recipient regimes as well as the benefits of arms deals to assess how these factors influence attitudes toward arms exports. While we find substantial effects of both human rights violations and benefits on support for arms exports, their interaction remains insignificant across all samples. Hence, our findings yield no evidence for an elite-public gap in weighing ethical and instrumental concerns in foreign policy attitudes.

Event datasets, such as those provided by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), provide high-quality data on conflict fatalities. However, such data are likely to suffer from an unknown extent of bias and uncertainties in the reports they are based on. Although a substantial literature documents reporting bias in conflict research, analyses that quantify this bias are mostly limited to single countries. Here, we combine a survey with UCDP coders and statistical modeling to derive a distribution of plausible number of fatalities given the number of battle-related deaths and the type of violence documented by the UCDP. We provide a generalizable, cross-national measure of uncertainty around UCDP reported fatalities that is more robust and realistic than UCDP’s documented low and high estimates, countering UCDP’s intrinsic tendency to under-estimate fatalities, and we make available a dataset and R package that can be applied to future releases of the UCDP data.

Despite growing work on conflict forecasting, few studies predict conflict termination and none negotiation outcomes. We address this gap, assessing how well we can predict peace agreement content using conflict dynamics – particularly, insurgent distance from the capital. Thus, our study evaluates the predictive power of long-standing arguments in peace research, suggesting that conflict dynamics determine the prospects of negotiations. Utility theory posits that actors learn about their relative strength through conflict events and update their demands in negotiations accordingly. Ergo, actors’ demands become more compatible with increasingly similar perceptions of relative capability. Scholars often proxy relative strength using insurgent distance from the capital, as it holds information on their ability to win battles. We evaluate whether battle locations predict agreement content using PA-X data. We find that a simple, theory-driven model performs almost as well as more complex, data-driven models. Nevertheless, models excluding conflict dynamics also have comparable predictive power.

Numerous countries in recent decades have formally recognized collective indigenous claims to territory and self-governance during civil conflict despite challenges to state authority and social order. How does collective indigenous recognition impact conflict violence within communities? This paper shows that indigenous recognition can shore up order and state reach. It does so in Peru, where the state recognized thousands of indigenous communities during an internal conflict from 1980 to 2000 that disproportionately impacted indigenous Peruvians. Using a staggered difference-in-difference research design and an original spatial mapping of conflict violence to indigenous communities, I find that formal recognition reduced wartime violence. Further analysis of community characteristics as well as state and community counterinsurgency efforts indicates that as recognition fosters greater legibility and transfers disputes into state institutions, it invites state penetration and coordination with state actors that ultimately adheres communities to the state.

This paper analyzes two ideal-type signaling interactions that are fundamental to international relations: reassurance and coercive bargaining. In reassurance, states attempt to signal that their goals are compatible in order to avoid conflict, whereas in coercive bargaining, they attempt to inflate the incompatibility of their goals in order to increase their negotiating leverage over a disputed asset. This article conceptualizes these two types of signaling interaction and delineates semi-overlapping conditions under which each obtains. It then identifies three ways in which credible signaling occurs differently in reassurance versus coercive bargaining. First, the directional effects of power shifts are reversed in each interaction, generating incentives for rising states to misrepresent in reassurance but not in bargaining. Second, whereas signals that are costless to honest, high-resolve senders are widely available in bargaining, the most prominent reassurance signals are typically costly even to honest senders with benign intentions. Third, it is often difficult to infer which issue area motivates senders’ behaviors in reassurance, whereas in bargaining senders have incentives to reveal which issues they prioritize. In combination, these distinctions suggest that reassurance is systematically more difficult than signaling high resolve.

What is the relationship between political ideology and realism in international relations? This article reconceptualizes the realist relationship with ideology in terms of a recurring experience of ideological exile. Exile was a crucial part of the biographical experience of early realists like Hans Morgenthau and John Herz. I argue that the idea of exile also marked an aspect of their relationship to ideology. Realists often allied themselves with ideological camps, through which they aimed to shape political practice. Yet realists mistrusted ideological utopianisms, and these liaisons often ended badly – in effect driving realists into ideological exile. The resulting exile persona has marked realism durably, recurring among later realists who do not have a biographical experience of exile in the conventional sense. Exile has thus become a persistent, constitutive feature of the intellectual project of realism itself. My argument has ongoing implications for how we understand realism as a political project.

International relations scholarship typically treats foreign policy as a taken-for-granted analytical concept. It assumes either that all historical polities have foreign policies or that foreign policy originates in seventeenth-century Europe with the separation between the “inside” and “outside” of the state. It generally holds that foreign policy differs in essential ways from other kinds of policy, such as carrying with it a special need for secrecy. I argue against this view. The difference between “foreign” and “domestic” policy results from specific political processes; secrecy begat foreign policy. Growing domestic differentiation between state and civil society in the eighteenth century—articulated through a relatively free press operating in a nascent public sphere—enabled the emergence of foreign policy as a practical concept. The concept served to delimit the legitimate sphere of political discourse from the exclusive, executive sphere of king and cabinet. I explore these processes in Britain and France, important cases with different trajectories, one of reform, the other of revolution. Historicizing foreign policy like this serves to denaturalize the separation between different forms of policy, as well as the necessity of secrecy. Doing so cautions against the uncritical application of abstract analytical terms across time and space. jel code: historical international relations foreign policy conceptual analysis