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Most nuclear dyads are characterized by some degree of nuclear and conventional asymmetry. This paper argues that these asymmetries create an environment in which deliberate nuclear first use (DNFU) can be rational. This possibility has been discarded in the formal literature on nuclear escalation because of the common reliance on the assumption of mutually assured destruction (MAD). This paper develops a formal model that traces how and under what circumstances two types of DNFU are rational. First, nuclear imbalances and advancements in counterforce technologies create a damage limitation incentive for a strong actor. Second, conventional asymmetry creates an incentive for the coercive use of nuclear weapons by the weaker player. Moreover, this paper illustrates that these asymmetric conditions are a relevant characteristic in important and very different nuclear dyads: DPRK–US, Pakistan–India, and Russia–US. Thus, the model demonstrates the potential core drivers of DNFU in today's nuclear landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that existing quantitative studies mistakenly assume that all nuclear states can impose nuclear destruction on opponents by simply distinguishing nuclear states from non-nuclear states. This practice, however, does not capture variation in 1) nuclear states' possession of delivery capabilities, 2) the range of deployed nuclear delivery systems, and 3) the geographic distance between nuclear states and their dyadic counterparts. Instead of this monadic nuclear statehood approach, I propose the dyadic nuclear reach approach, which uses a new dyad-specific measure of states' strategic nuclear delivery capabilities. It codes whether a nuclear state can launch a nuclear strike against a given opponent by using the information about the estimated range of each nuclear state's strategic nuclear delivery platforms, nuclear operation bases, and states' capital cities. An empirical application shows that using an appropriate measure of nuclear capabilities does significantly alter existing empirical knowledge of nuclear weapons and international conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "rally 'round the flag" effect—a short-term boost in a political leader's popularity during an interstate political dispute—was first proposed by Mueller (1970) more than half a century ago. However, there is no scholarly consensus on its empirical validity and the circumstances under which the effect becomes most prominent. In this paper, based on a natural experimental design, we analyze large-scale worldwide surveys of 34,118 responses and causally identify the effects of 46 militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) on the approval ratings of political leaders in 27 countries. We find that MIDs, on average, decrease public support for national leaders. However, the public backlash could be attenuated depending on theoretically relevant contexts. Our finding implies that political leaders cannot rely on MIDs for public support increases, as they are generally penalized for such decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A purported advantage of secrecy in international politics is its ability to reduce pressures for conflict escalation by obscuring responsibility for hostile actions. Delegating these actions to proxies is one strategy states use to retain plausible deniability and limit escalation risks. Yet, proxies often have strong ties to sponsoring states, raising questions about their ability to influence blame and demands for retaliation. This paper tests these effects by analyzing American responses to hypothetical attacks by Chinese, Russian, and Iranian actors through experiments administered on three surveys. The results show that using proxies for these attacks modestly reduced how much Americans blamed the respective foreign governments, while also limiting demands that their senior leadership be sanctioned. However, the use of proxies did not affect Americans' attitudes toward more forceful responses by the US government. These findings contribute to understanding of how proxies shape plausible deniability and escalation risks in international conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the latest statistical evidence for the nuclear emboldenment thesis—nuclear-armed states are more likely to initiate military aggression than non-nuclear states—from (Bell and Miller 2015). If correct, their findings have important theoretical and policy implications regarding the effect of nuclear proliferation on international conflict. This paper shows, however, that Bell and Miller's findings heavily rely on two important components of their statistical analysis: (1) using all state dyad observations, and (2) employing pooled regression models to analyze time-series-cross-sectional (TSCS) data. I argue that those components are based on questionable assumptions on heterogeneity in their dataset. Based on alternative strategies dealing with heterogeneity in dyadic data, my reanalysis shows that the emboldening effect of nuclear weapons is not as robust as originally claimed. Instead, I find the robust deterrent effect of nuclear weapons: nuclear-armed states are less likely to be targeted in military disputes. These findings highlight the need for careful application of quantitative methods to produce a more robust understanding of nuclear issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the special feature “Leaders, Crisis Behavior, and International Conflict.” Individual leaders play a central role in world politics. Yet, for the last several decades, international relations scholarship has downplayed or ignored leaders, focusing instead on system-wide variables and domestic political institutions. A new wave of research, however, has helped to reintroduce the leader-level back into models of international politics. The papers that constitute this special feature represent some of the cutting-edge work in this area. This introductory paper traces the evolution of research on leaders in international relations and provides a conceptual framework that highlights different approaches to the study of leaders. It also distills several key themes that emerge from the papers, in addition to offering directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper puts forth a theory explaining domestic backlash against international investment law by connecting media coverage—specifically the bias in the news media's selection of international disputes—to public opinion formation towards international agreements. To test our theory, we examine both the content and effects of the media's reporting on international disputes, focusing on the increasingly controversial form known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). We find that newspaper outlets in both the United States and Canada have a bias in favor of covering disputes filed against their home country as opposed to those filed by home country firms. Using two national survey experiments fielded in the United States and Canada, we further find that the bias in news story selection has a strong negative effect on attitudes towards ISDS and related agreements, especially among highly nationalistic individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Defense policy makers have become increasingly concerned about conflict in the "gray zone" between peace and war. Such conflicts are often interpreted as cases of deterrence failures, as new technologies or tactics—from cyber operations to "little green men"—seem to increase the effectiveness of low-intensity aggression. However, gray zone conflict could also be a case of deterrence success, where challengers adopt a constrained form of aggression in response to a credible escalation threat. We develop a model that formalizes both scenarios and identifies distinct empirical patterns across the two cases. We use the model's findings to empirically analyze Russian gray zone activity since the 1990s, finding that Russian activity appears, in part, to be restrained by NATO's deterrent threat. Our model also shows that developing gray zone conflict capabilities can lead to more peace but could also backfire and provoke a challenger to escalate to war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

UN peace missions are constantly evolving. Yet, we lack a detailed understanding of the shifting types and objectives of peace missions beyond broad categorizations that distinguish for instance between observer, traditional, multidimensional, and peace enforcement missions. To address this gap, we present the UN Peace Mission Mandates (UNPMM) dataset. With global coverage, 30 years of data between 1991 and 2020, a broad scope that includes peacekeeping and political missions, and information on 41 mandate tasks, the UNPMM represents one of the most detailed and up-to-date datasets on UN peace mission mandates. We use it to highlight how mission types, objectives, and specific tasks have changed since the end of the Cold War, and to analyze what factors influence the kind of missions the UN is willing to authorize. The descriptive statistics and empirical analysis reaffirm the need for a greater disaggregation of data on UN peace missions and their mandates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the experience of this interdisciplinary journal dedicated to rigorous scientific research on the issues of war and peace. It opens with Journal of Conflict Resolution’s birth at the University of Michigan and then proceeds through its thirty-seven years at Yale and then to its period from 2009 to the present at the University of Maryland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholars have made many claims about US military interventions, they have not come to a consensus on main trends and consequences. This article introduces a new, comprehensive dataset of all US military interventions since the country's founding, alongside over 200 variables that allow scholars to evaluate theoretical propositions on drivers and outcomes of intervention. It compares the new Military Intervention Project (MIP) dataset to the current leading dataset, the Militarized Interstate Disputes (MID). In sum, MIP doubles the universe of cases, integrates a range of military intervention definitions and sources, expands the timeline of analysis, and offers more transparency of sourcing through historically-documented case narratives of every US military intervention included in the dataset. According to MIP, the US has undertaken almost 400 military interventions since 1776, with half of these operations undertaken between 1950 and 2019. Over 25% of them have occurred in the post-Cold War period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantitative datasets of international conflict skew temporally to modern times and geographically and culturally to the West. Yet post–1815 conflicts featuring Western actors are only a small part of the history of warfare. Many scholars have bemoaned the potential selection bias which this introduces to studies of the causes and effects of military conflict, but as yet quantitative datasets which remedy both these temporal and geographic shortcomings have been lacking. Some datasets have expanded the scope of existing offerings temporally and others spatially, while others have attempted to expand both but with an important lack of detail in terms of location, participants, timing and outcomes. This dataset sets out to remedy the deficit. Using military history's most extensive encyclopedia of conflict events, we have created a dataset of conflict events spanning the globe and a timescale from 1468BC to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, complete with precise geographic coordinates, year, participants and outcome. We demonstrate the promise of this data-set by using it to assess the frequently asserted relationship between conflict history and economic development, combined with Nordhaus' GECON sub–national wealth data and historical data on population density from the Netherlands Environmental Agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a game-theoretic approach to the analysis of the emergence or survival of buffer states. We analyze a two-stage game with three players orderly located on a linear territory, where the player in the middle is passive, and the players on the two ends are aggressive with options to declare war against the others. We conduct an equilibrium analysis and characterize the conditions under which the passive player acts as a buffer state between the aggressive players. We find various equilibrium outcomes, which can be grouped into the following categories: (i) peace with buffer, (ii) peace without buffer, and (iii) the last man standing. Our comparative static analyses reveal valuable insights regarding the factors affecting the existence of buffer states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the problem of international responsibility sharing for a refugee group seeking protection from the dangers of mass violence arising from inter-state conflict or the collapse of a fragile state. After reviewing several proposed solutions, we characterize responsibility sharing as a coordination problem in a simple sequential "moves" game between two potential host countries. We demonstrate that, ultimately, the country that makes the first move to receive refugees bears a disproportionate responsibility. We then draw on two historical case studies that illustrate the difficulties of coordinating a fair division of refugee responsibilities. To solve the coordination problem, we adapt a fair division procedure by inverting one first presented by Hugo Steinhaus for dividing "goods." We demonstrate that the procedure is applicable to costly "obligations" under different scenarios and is manipulation proof, as each participating country has an obviously dominant strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping in civil conflict has received important consideration in a growing body of literature. Little research, however, has focused on UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions and their ability to determine and affect peacekeeping. New data on UNSC resolutions coded to UCDP/PRIO internal conflicts with peacekeeping operations (PKOs) is presented here. The data illustrate that resolutions vary importantly across conflicts and missions regarding their timing, sentiment toward rebel and government factions, level of action, mandates, authorized force levels, and substantive policies. Through a series of negative-binomial regressions using conflict-month replication data, we demonstrate that PKOs with both higher troops levels and a higher intensity of resolutions that condemn rebel actors experience a significant reduction one-sided rebel violence against civilians. In short, UNSC resolutions differ importantly before and during peacekeeping operations and may have an important impact on PKO effectiveness in civil conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study argues that the effect of third-party trade on dyadic conflicts is conditional on the naval power of both the potential conflict initiator and its target state. This conditional effect occurs mainly because naval power allows trade-integrated initiators to reduce their trade dependence on a given trade partner and its allies more easily. At the same time, the target's naval power increases the costs that conflict inflict on the initiator's trade. As maritime trade accounts for about 80 percent of world trade volume, naval capability has an important effect on combatant states' ability to substitute trading partners during a conflict and to mitigate trade-related costs, thereby affecting the relationship between third-party trade and conflict. The findings of our statistical analyses support our theoretical expectation that the pacifying effect of third-party trade diminishes as the initiator's naval power increases, yet increases as the naval power of the potential target increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing scholarship shows that a history of military rule increases the risk of democratic breakdown. However, scholars overlook the fact that military rule takes two distinct forms: collegial and personalist military rule. I argue that the two types of military rule provide different structural settings for post-authoritarian contexts. Collegial military rule hands over more cohesive and hierarchical militaries to their subsequent democracies than personalist military rule. These militaries remain organized, politicized, and powerful in emerging democracies, which increases the risk of military intervention and coups. I hypothesize that collegial military rule poses a greater threat to the survival of the ensuing democracies than personalist military rule. Empirical analysis reveals that democracies after collegial military rule are more likely to collapse than other democracies, including those emerging from personalist military rule. This shows that the previous finding on the detrimental effect of military rule is largely driven by collegial military rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars argue that institutions in democracies constrain leaders and prevent international conflict. However, many democracies specify rules of governance in times of emergency that divert substantial power to the head of state. The manipulation of these "emergency powers" provides a rational motivation for conflict. Using a novel data set of emergency provisions within democracies, I test the relationship between emergency power strength and conflict propensity using several steps to achieve causal inference, including an instrumental variable analysis that exploits the specificity of the state's constitution as a plausibly exogenous determinant of emergency power strength. I find that emergency power strength is a strong predictor of conflict onset in democracies in each test and that states with strong emergency powers are substantially more likely to enact a state of emergency due to an international conflict. I conclude with a discussion of my findings and avenues of future research using these data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship has found evidence that refugee flows may inadvertently contribute to the spread of conflict across borders. Little is known, however, about the spatial diffusion of conflict within a state’s borders and what role internal displacement plays in such a dynamic. This question is of relevance because of the particular marginalization of internally displaced persons, which make them at risk of predation and militarization by armed groups. Drawing on a novel global data set on internal displacement, we evaluate this question and find evidence for a similar mechanism leading to conflict spread operating at the domestic level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If peace fails due to incomplete information and incentives to misrepresent power or resolve, war is supposed to serve as a learning process and allows parties to reach a mutually preferable bargain. We explore crisis bargaining under a third type of uncertainty: the extent to which one side wishes to conquer the other. With incomplete information and take-it-or-leave-it negotiations, this type of uncertainty is isomorphic to incomplete information about the probability of victory. However, with incomplete information and bargaining while fighting, standard convergence results fail: types fail to fully separate because there is no differential cost for delay. Wars correspondingly last longer while benefiting no one. These results help explain empirical differences between territorial versus nonterritorial conflicts and interstate versus intrastate wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its establishment in 1963, the Correlates of War (COW) project has sought to build cumulative knowledge about international conflict through the application of the scientific method to the study of militarized interstate behavior. Early analyses from the COW project found substantial variation in the causal model of war across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but COW scholars later sought to develop a general model of war that avoided post hoc historical periodization. We use out of sample cross validation to evaluate the plausibility of assuming temporal homogeneity for statistical models of international conflict that span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our results suggest that the causal model of war changes substantially across historical eras. In particular, great care should be taken in generalizing Cold War findings to other historical eras. Our findings demonstrate the importance of exploring temporal variation in the causal model of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we contend that the current gender and conflict literature ignores the context of military decisions and thus underestimates the support of women for certain types of military interventions. We argue that the issues related to humanitarian crises are likely to provoke support from women. Consequently, as more women enter elected positions in state legislatures, the more likely a state will become involved in a humanitarian military intervention. To test our argument, we compile a data set of humanitarian military interventions and women legislators from 1946 to 2003. A series of estimation approaches and robustness tests support our assertion that more women legislators impact the likelihood that a state will become involved in a humanitarian military intervention. Our research has specific implications on the role of gender in conflict processes and more general implications on the connection between domestic political processes and foreign policy decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes a new data set consisting of precise digital maps of regions that were the subject of interstate territorial disputes in the period 1947 to 2000. Each dispute identified by Huth and Allee is rendered as a polygon corresponding to the area subject to overlapping claims. After describing the data collection procedures and presenting some descriptive statistics, this article develops three novel results that demonstrate the potential of geospatial data to advance our understanding of the causes and consequences of territorial conflict. In particular, I use the data to (1) show how different measurements of the geographic extent of disputes can help unpack the mechanisms through which they dampen international trade, (2) cast doubt on the role of oil deposits in fueling territorial conflict by analyzing the relationship at a finer level of spatial resolution than previously possible, and (3) examine the harmful legacy of territorial conflict on local development in formerly contested regions along the El Salvador-Honduras border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops expectations about the use of military force by democracies facing domestic terrorism. Due to the necessity of balancing effective counterterrorism with liberal acceptability, domestic terrorism typically represents a significant but nonexistential threat to democracies that is ineradicable via repression; as such, it is likely to generate appreciable diversionary incentives. Moreover, the use of force abroad, coupled with counterterrorist strategies that seek to safeguard democratic legitimacy, allows leaders to provide benefits both to citizens who seek retribution against terrorists and to those who value the preservation of liberty. Tests of the correlates of dispute initiation across all democracies, 1970–2000, provide support for this hypothesis. Further analyses reveal that diversion from domestic terrorism is most likely by democratic governments with relatively greater diversionary capacity and with lesser repressive capacity and incentive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both threats and assurances can be useful in international negotiations. Threats help convince the adversary that a state will fight if challenged, and assurances can convince the adversary that a state will not attack if not challenged. We develop a model that analyzes when threats and assurances are used. Threats are widely useful because there is typically a range of outcomes that are preferable to war for each side, and threats can secure a better deal within that range by strengthening a state's bottom line. In contrast, assurances are only necessary when war would result without them because of insufficiently valued intermediate outcomes or shifting power. We discuss insights from the model, including the role of false assurances, in the context of both the Sudetenland crisis and Cold War Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical researchers of civil war rarely collect data on violence themselves and instead rely on other sources of information. One frequently used source is media reports, which serve as the basis for many ongoing data projects in the discipline. However, news reports rarely cover a conflict comprehensively and objectively and may therefore be prone to various reporting issues. This article provides an analysis of the accuracy of information given in news reports. In particular, if focuses on two types of “hard facts” that event data sets require: the location of an event and its severity. By linking media reports to firsthand accounts from a military database, the article does two things: (1) it analyzes the determinants of inaccuracy and confirms the expectation that events with a low number of observers tend to have higher reporting inaccuracies and (2) it assesses the magnitude of these inaccuracies and the implications for conducting empirical analyses with media-based event data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many conflict studies regard formal democratic institutions as states’ most important vehicle to reduce deprivation-motivated armed conflict against their governments. We argue that the wider concept of good governance—the extent to which policy making and implementation benefit the population at large—is better suited to analyze deprivation-based conflict. The article shows that the risk of conflict in countries characterized by good governance drops rapidly after a conflict has ended or after independence. In countries with poor governance, this process takes much longer. Hence, improving governance is important to reduce the incidence of conflict. We also decompose the effect of good governance into what can be explained by formal democratic institutions and less formal aspects of governance, and into what comes from economic development and what is due to how well countries are governed. We find that informal aspects of good governance to be at least as important as formal institutions in preventing conflict and that good governance has a clear effect over and beyond economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Who gets what in bargaining between states and international organizations (IOs)? Although distributional conflict is unavoidable in international cooperation, previous research provides few empirical insights into the determinants of bargaining outcomes. We test a simple bargaining model of cooperation between states and IOs. We expect that nonegalitarian international organizations, such as the World Bank, secure more gains from bargaining with economically weak than with economically powerful states. For egalitarian international organizations, such as most United Nations (UN) agencies, the state’s economic power should be less important. We test these hypotheses against a novel data set on funding shares for 2,255 projects implemented under the auspices of the Global Environment Facility, from1991 to 2011. The data allow us to directly measure bargaining outcomes. The results highlight the importance of accounting for the interactive effects of international organization and state characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing literature examines the link between preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and peace among member states. However, despite the potentially competitive nature of these agreements, there has been little research examining whether and how PTAs could induce hostilities between members and nonmembers. In this article, I argue that dyadic conflict is more likely when one dyad member’s exclusive PTA with a third party results in lower exports for the dyad member that is excluded from the agreement. Importantly, I contend that trade creating as well as trade diverting PTAs can have this effect. I use a triadic extension of the gravity model of trade to estimate how an exclusive PTA influences the exports of nonmembers relative to PTA members. Using these estimates in statistical tests of dyadic militarized interstate dispute onset spanning 1961 to 2000, I find that PTA-induced trade distortions are associated with a higher likelihood of conflict between members and nonmembers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We examine the effect of nuclear weapons on interstate conflict. Using more appropriate methodologies than have previously been used, we find that dyads in which both states possess nuclear weapons are not significantly less likely to fight wars, nor are they significantly more or less belligerent at low levels of conflict. This stands in contrast to previous work, which suggests nuclear dyads are some 2.7 million times less likely to fight wars. We additionally find that dyads in which one state possesses nuclear weapons are more prone to low-level conflict (but not more prone to war). This appears to be because nuclear-armed states expand their interests after nuclear acquisition rather than because nuclear weapons provide a shield behind which states can aggress against more powerful conventional-armed states. This calls into question conventional wisdom on the impact of nuclear weapons and has policy implications for the impact of nuclear proliferation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How does the hawkish or dovish nature of the domestic opposition in one state influence its own, as well as an international opponent’s, negotiating behavior? I show that doves, when negotiating in the presence of a hawkish opposition, have more bargaining leverage in international negotiations. The key is to understand an international opponent’s preference to deal with a dove rather than a hawk in future negotiations. I argue that adversaries have an incentive to concede more in negotiations to doves in order to sustain them in office, because failing to give concessions may lead to their replacement by less conciliatory (more hawkish) governments in the future. For this reason, doves are more likely than hawks to extract critical concessions from adversaries. The empirical results support this argument, which altogether suggests that doves are more successful in international negotiations not because they are more conciliatory, but rather because, for domestic reasons, they have greater bargaining leverage to extract counter-concessions from adversaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]