abstract: How does land reform occur and under what conditions do land transfers take place? The author argues that to understand contemporary market-driven land reform outcomes, one must examine the supply-side incentives of existing landholders in addition to demand-side explanations. Interviews and descriptive geospatial data from two provinces in South Africa show that landholders made land reform work for them and in doing so the redistribution of land reinforced past forms of segregation. These landholders' strategies were shaped by place-specific historical legacies of racial segregation: Some white farmers—in places in which spatial segregation fell on a rural-urban axis and economic segregation excluded black people from agriculture—used land redistribution to buffer their farms against predominantly black settlements. Other white farmers—in rural areas with dispersed spatial segregation and a large, but different, black farming sector—incorporated black farmers into the commercial value chain via land redistribution. The author's findings have implications for studies of redistribution in highly unequal contexts—that is, market-based redistribution can reinforce historical spatial and economic segregation.

abstract: In autocracies, courts are often perceived as tools of the autocrats, with lawyers viewed as lacking influence. The authors reassess these assumptions by examining criminal defense lawyers as "rightful challengers" within China's legal system. Analyzing an original data set of drug cases in Chinese criminal courts from 2014 through 2018, the authors find that when a lawyer is present, judges are three times more likely to reject prosecutors' arguments and twice as likely to deviate from prosecutors' sentencing recommendations. The deviation on average results in sentences that are shorter than the prosecutor's recommendation—shorter by more than two months in addition to the already shorter sentences judges give compared to prosecutors' recommendations. These findings suggest that lawyers can exert a substantial impact on judicial decisions by encouraging judge-prosecutor disagreement, particularly in cases that are less politically sensitive. Original interviews and close examination of lawyers' arguments reveal that the quality of defense is crucial for understanding lawyers' effectiveness in influencing court decisions. These results highlight how seemingly powerless societal actors, such as lawyers, can act as rightful challengers to powerful state actors within authoritarian regimes.

abstract: When do groups of citizens organize to resist criminal group presence, and what form does their resistance take? Criminal groups operate across the globe, imposing a variety of costs on local communities. Confronted with these conditions, citizens can either accommodate or contest; when they contest, they choose either to engage or to avoid the state. This article leverages variation in three municipalities across Mexico to illustrate how and why communities react differently to the presence of criminal organizations. While the degree of criminal competition and the strength of preexisting civil society drive whether groups of citizens contest, the degree of local state autonomy from criminal groups shapes the form—state centered or nonstate—that contestation takes. Organized crime is broadly considered an impediment to functioning democracy, but this article demonstrates that its presence can also push citizens in some cases to organize and engage with the state in ways that bolster democracy.

abstract: State reach has been linked to civil conflict, democracy, and the power of local authorities. The authors find evidence that state reach may also influence social institutions governing gender and property rights. Many governments implement laws that promise equal land rights to both men and women, thus attempting to change the social institutions governing land management. However, success varies. This article draws on original survey evidence from Malawi to show that state reach is positively associated with the practice of gender-equitable property rights at the community level and household level, even when considering community differences in such factors as land values, proximity to urban areas, migration, market access, ethnic heterogeneity, education, wealth, the nature of customary authorities, and lineage systems. Evidence from thirty-two focus groups reveals the importance of two key state reach mechanisms: state information dissemination and access to state forums. This research has implications for the study of the state, modernization, and social institutions, as well as for property rights and gender equality in Africa.

abstract: Co-optation and repression are central to understanding authoritarian power sharing, but how autocrats implement these strategies with individual elites remains underexplored. The article proposes a theoretical framework conceptualizing dictators as managers of their ruling coalitions who routinely appoint, dismiss, promote, demote, shuffle, or reappoint elites for a mixture of strategic, nonstrategic, or even mundane reasons. The authors argue that autocrats have agency in choosing between dismissals and reshuffles as general elite management strategies. In the process, they alter the information environment and elite incentives with consequences for their own survival. Although dismissals as a general policy reduce elites' power, they also increase intraregime conflict and uncertainty and tend to have adverse effects on ruler survival. In contrast, reshuffles prevent elite coordination but ensure that elites have a stake in regime continuity. These arguments are tested using novel measures of dismissals and reshuffles in autocratic regimes and communist politburos while also considering the mechanisms and alternative explanations driving the results. The findings suggest that autocratic survival relies more on mundane and nonviolent elite management than seen in the predominantly conflictual accounts of authoritarian politics.

We show empirically that interstate conflicts are less likely among countries that share more of their oral tradition. Popular tales and narratives are related to expectations and beliefs about other parties’ behavior, and larger cultural similarities reduce negotiation failures between states. To validate this interpretation, we show that countries with more oral tradition in common are more likely to form military alliances, more likely to participate in the same international organizations, more likely to vote similarly in the UN general assembly, more likely to trade with each other and, in case a conflicts breaks out, more likely to terminate it with a negotiation.

This article introduces a new global dataset tracking the adoption of 31 important arms technologies across all states from 1816 to 2023. Covering eight major categories – from small arms and artillery to combat helicopters and ballistic missiles – the dataset provides a comprehensive long-term view of the global evolution and diffusion of arms technology. We describe the conceptual foundations and coding procedures, as well as transformations of the final data relevant for scholars of international relations and comparative politics. We demonstrate the relevance of the data through three empirical applications: we show that arms technologies spread in ways consistent with the logic of the security dilemma; that technological superiority helps explain which states win wars, and that advanced arms help autocrats stay in power. These findings highlight the central role of arms technology in shaping both the global distribution of power and the durability of autocratic regimes.

The fracture between citizens and elites on European integration remains understudied, most notably when it comes to specific issues. One of these issues, particularly salient in the aftermath of Brexit, is holding further European Union exit referendums across the Union. While regularly floated by (Eurosceptic) parties for electoral purposes, it remains unclear to what extent parties and citizens agree to actually hold European Union exit referendums. We examine the relationship between party and citizen stances on this issue in 10 European Union member states, leveraging original cross-country survey data and expert survey data on parties’ positions, both collected in 2019. The results show that parties tend to be more against holding a European Union exit referendum than their voters, less so the more extreme parties. Moreover, higher media saliency correlates with greater party–voter congruence, and the issue is more polarised among the electorate than at the party level.

How do opposition parties become viable alternatives under dominant-party rule? Existing studies often attribute opposition change to electoral shocks or short-term campaign strategies, offering limited insight into how governing capacity is constructed under asymmetric political conditions. This article introduces the concept of transformative accumulation to analyze the recent trajectory of Turkey’s Republican People’s Party under the long-standing dominance of the Justice and Development Party. Drawing on 13 elite-level interviews with incumbent and former party officials, campaign consultants, and local leaders, the study identifies three interwoven narratives—ideological, institutional, and leadership—that structure this transformation. It shows how the Republican People’s Party recalibrated its ideological appeal, adopted a more inclusive leadership model, and strengthened its administrative and communicative capacities despite persistent institutional constraints. While acknowledging the continued structural advantages enjoyed by the Justice and Development Party, the article demonstrates how opposition parties can reposition themselves as viable alternatives within competitive authoritarian regimes. Conceptually, it shifts the analysis of opposition politics away from episodic electoral moments toward a process-based framework for studying opposition agency under dominant-party rule.

This article examines how poetry intervenes in the visual politics of remembering trauma in postconflict societies. In Timor-Leste, much of the Indonesian occupation (1975–1999) remained unphotographable due to censorship, exile, and repression, making poetry a crucial medium of testimony and resistance. I conceptualize poetic imageries as verbal, mental, symbolic, and sensory forms that evoke sensations and emotions, enabling readers to “see” what cannot be photographed and to bear witness where other forms of testimony are silenced. Drawing on Jenny Edkins’ notion of trauma time, I show how the prison writings of Xanana Gusmão preserved rupture as living memory, resisting closure while shaping collective identity. Their poems condensed violence and endurance into images that traveled across audiences, mobilizing solidarity abroad and sustaining cultural memory at home. By situating Timorese poetry within debates on visual politics, this article argues that poetic imageries constitute political interventions in the struggle over visibility, memory, and justice.

In this article, we examine the extent to which attitudes linked with the populist radical right are associated across Europe with belief in three different types of conspiracy theories: general conspiracy ideation, science conspiracy ideation and Covid-19. To do this, we analysed 2020–2022 European Social Survey data from 28 countries. We found that four sets of populist radical right attitudes were consistently associated with the three levels of conspiracy theory here analysed: Believing that citizens should have the final say in referendums, that decisions should be made nationally rather than at the EU level, that it is not important for minority rights to be protected and that it is acceptable to have a strong leader above the law. In addition, we found that some of these associations were stronger in Western Europe, and others were stronger in Central and Eastern Europe.