Search

In the 3 years between the 2019 and 2022 International Studies Association (ISA) meetings, the profound state of global economic, social, and political upheaval around the world has become unavoidably evident for much, if not most, of the world. Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, movements for inclusion and resulting backlashes sprang up across the globe. As scholars of international affairs, the members of the ISA seek to understand and contextualize world events. However, our members and the organization itself are not passive observers of history. These struggles directly influence the personal experiences of many of our members, within and beyond our profession. For these reasons, ISA leadership felt that it was important to mark the 2022 meeting with a Sapphire Series panel to discuss ``International Studies and Struggles for Inclusion.'' The panel brought together ISA members from various sections and backgrounds to offer diverse perspectives on a host of topics: How does the field of international studies understand these developments? How do struggles for inclusion affect our members and community of social scientists? And perhaps most importantly, what should the ISA be doing about them, in terms of both scholarship and organizational decisions?

Can data on government coercion and violence be trusted when the data are generated by state itself? In this paper, we investigate the extent to which data from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) regarding the use of force by corrections officers against prison inmates between 2008 and 2017 conform to Benford's Law. Following a growing data forensics literature, we expect misreporting of the use-of-force in California state prisons to cause the observed data to deviate from Benford's distribution. Statistical hypothesis tests and further investigation of CDCR data—which show both temporal and cross-sectional variance in conformity with Benford's Law—are consistent with misreporting of the use-of-force by the CDCR. Our results suggest that data on government coercion generated by the state should be inspected carefully before being used to test hypotheses or make policy.

A number of explanations have been advanced for why soldiers commit acts of sexual violence in wartime, yet we have little understanding of why some rebels refrain from sexual violence. We examine ...

While women have participated in a variety of militarized movements across time and space, the determinants of their participation have not been examined systematically. In this article, we seek to explain variation in women's involvement across different violent political organizations. Our research highlights the role that organizational attributes play in influencing women's presence in violent groups. We evaluate our hypotheses using an original dataset on women's participation in and characteristics of 166 violent political organizations across 19 African countries from 1950 to 2011. Our empirical results show strong support for our argument that organization-based opportunities for women's participation explain whether female members are present in a group.

This article seeks to explain the role and salience of culture in interstate conflict management efforts. Past studies of cultural similarity in conflict management involving third parties often focused on two-way cultural relationships: either examining cultural similarity between disputants or similarity between third parties and each of the disputants as individuals. However, we argue that this first wave of research should be augmented by a focus on triads. Our study asks the question: to what extent does cultural similarity among disputants and potential mediators predict the likelihood of a mediation offer? We test our hypotheses using data from the International Conflict Management Dataset between 1945 and 1995 and find that mediation offers are most likely to emerge when the triad is ethnically or religiously similar, while shared political culture is not a reliable predictor of mediation offers to disputing dyads.

Instrumentally, militant groups should seek to maximize their power against governments by forming alliances. However, studies in bargaining theory predict that alliances between militants would suffer from commitment problems. This study seeks to identify the conditions under which militant groups overcome these acute commitment problems and form alliances. Two game theory models of alliances amongst militants are presented, the first capturing bilateral co-operation, and the second under conditions of asymmetry. It may be concluded that while militants less susceptible to government repression should prefer bilateral alliances, vulnerable militants are more likely to form asymmetric alliances involving state sponsors. Following the theoretical predictions, the theory is tested empirically using the UCDP/PRIO data.