International Organization最新文献

Key to the success of international peace-building efforts is the cooperation and support of civilian populations. Studies show that economic considerations shape combatants’ willingness to lay down their arms. We study a related but under-studied question: does economic hardship impact civilian support for conflict cessation? If reintegration of former combatants into productive economic sectors threatens civilians’ own incomes, then support for peace-building may diminish. We investigate localized effects of the 2015 Hindu Kush earthquake using individual-level survey data on support for Taliban reintegration. The earthquake reduced support for reintegration into disproportionately impacted economic sectors. We observe no effect for less impacted sectors. Results are robust to a battery of tests, including a novel spatial randomization leveraging geocoded fault lines corresponding to the universe of counterfactual earthquakes. Our findings provide new insight into the resolution of violent conflict: economic hardship may undermine civilian support for rebel reintegration.

This essay argues that the global refugee regime is undergoing a fundamental transformation. While the 1951 Refugee Convention and its legal framework remain formally intact, their practical application has shifted toward a model of flexible containment. Rather than offering protection within their own borders, states increasingly manage displacement through externalization, legal ambiguity, and informal cooperation. Drawing on the concepts of institutional drift and legal substitution, the essay shows how states recalibrate their obligations without renouncing them, preserving the appearance of compliance while limiting access to asylum. These practices form a broader architecture of containment, characterized by border externalization, procedural delays, and institutional delegation. What emerges is not the collapse of the refugee regime but its reconfiguration around a postliberal logic that prioritizes sovereignty, discretion, and risk management over multilateralism and rights enforcement. By tracing this shift across legal frameworks and policy instruments, the essay contributes to debates on norm erosion, soft law, and the future of international cooperation. It concludes by calling for a rethinking of solidarity and responsibility in global governance, recognizing that the challenge is not simply to restore past commitments but to confront the evolving politics of mobility and protection in a fragmented international order.

Any theoretically informed predictions about the future of international order and global governance must reckon with the power and intentions of the United States. We argue that fundamental changes in the nature of domestic audience constraint within many democracies, and the United States in particular, undermine both the willingness and the capability of the United States to continue its role as the underwriter of international order and global governance. A US government unbound by domestic constraint will have difficulty building broad coalitions to solve national and international problems because it will have reduced incentives to invest in public goods, including national defense, science and technology, and future economic prosperity; reduced barriers to corruption that undermines the quality of and trust in US capabilities; and reduced state capacity, including the capacity to finance wars and other long-term international commitments. We argue that three trends were especially relevant in reshaping domestic audience constraint: information fragmentation, extreme polarization, and a global threat environment that facilitated executive power concentration. Together they reduce the costs and risks for leaders to escape domestic audience constraints, weakening the institutional and accountability mechanisms that give democracies advantages in the international system. Though these trends affect many democracies, the undermining of US domestic constraint is particularly consequential because the United States shaped and buttressed the current system. An unconstrained United States likely means a less cooperative and less predictable global order, irrevocably altering the post-1945 system.

The actions of the second Trump administration pose a serious threat to the dominance of the US dollar. Erratic US policies erode global trust in the United States and force states and private actors alike to reconsider their reliance on the dollar. This is reflected across three dimensions of dollar dominance: in trade and payments, as reserve currency and safe asset, and as global investment and funding currency. What distinguishes the current moment from previous predictions of a decline of financial hegemony is that the dollar’s global role is now challenged across all three dimensions simultaneously. Following the Global Financial Crisis, growing uneasiness with US financial power, especially the use of financial sanctions, already created cracks at the margins of the system and prompted a search for alternatives, triggering partial reserve diversification and de-dollarization of trade and payments systems. Under Trump, the undermining of the global economic order, growing fiscal deficits, and continued attacks on the institutional foundations of the administrative state are fundamentally undermining trust in the United States that is fundamental for the dollar’s global role. This signals a rupture in the US-centric global financial system, altering the foundations of the rules-based liberal international order (LIO). However, existing network effects slow down this process and no alternative can yet replace the dollar. The result is a financial interregnum where rising powers seek autonomy and influence without assuming hegemonic responsibility, leading to a more fragmented, multipolar financial order.

In the post–Cold War era, many authoritarian regimes engaged in strategic liberalization in response to international norms promoted by Western powers. As US support for democracy and human rights recedes, will this retreat prompt a global rollback of liberal reforms? While pessimistic accounts predict a return to overt repression, we argue that liberal norm adaptation within autocracies is likely to prove more resilient. We highlight two sources of continuity. First, autocrats’ domestic control strategies create incentives to retain certain liberal practices—such as elections, gender reforms, or limited media openness—that bolster legitimacy, co-opt dissent, and help manage opposition. Second, reforms anchored in treaties, international organizations, and domestic bureaucracies have generated expectations and mobilizational platforms, making wholesale reversals politically costly and prone to backlash. Our analysis illustrates how reforms, even when adopted instrumentally, have become sufficiently embedded in domestic politics to persist in the absence of strong external enforcement.