International Organization最新文献

Climate treaties have progressed over time to pledge substantial reductions in global warming. This is surprising, given that theories of climate politics emphasize collective-action problems and domestic deadlock. I first describe the process of updating climate mitigation targets under the Paris Agreement. Then I develop a theoretical argument that explains target changes based on how countries are situated in economic and political networks. Trade flows create competitive economic pressures that may undermine climate action, but these pressures may ebb when partners also commit to act. I argue that political networks support conditional cooperation, especially when institutional design promotes gradual commitments. I use spatial regression models to study how countries’ climate targets are related to their partners’ prior targets. I find that countries pledged stronger updated mitigation targets in the Glasgow Climate Pact when their closest political partners submitted strong targets in the Paris Agreement. This suggests the Paris Agreement drove conditional cooperation on mitigation.

Under what conditions do insurgents challenge gender norms in the midst of conflict? And what do they gain by doing so? Using an original data set of 137 armed groups fighting between 1950 and 2019, I argue that armed groups challenge gender customs to reshape local power relations. With 40 percent of rebel groups regulating civilian gender customs during civil war, this strategy is remarkably widespread, comparable to taxation or the provision of basic security in its prevalence. I demonstrate that armed groups exploit pre-existing gender grievances, using strategies like punishing domestic violence (9 percent of groups), banning dowries (15 percent), and enforcing dress codes (11 percent) to empower targeted subsections of the population and undermine local elites. I combine cross-national analysis with qualitative case studies of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Katiba Macina, two Islamist groups in Mali. This allows me to demonstrate how the approach to local elites drives gender governance in two groups with a shared ideology, goals, and societal context.

We introduce a dynamic game of outbidding where two groups use violence to compete in a tug-of-war fashion for evolving public support. We fit the model to the canonical outbidding rivalry between Hamas and Fatah using newly collected data on Palestinian public support for these groups. Competition has heterogeneous effects, and we demonstrate that intergroup competition can discourage violence. Competition from Hamas leads Fatah to use more terrorism than it would in a world where Hamas abstains from terrorism, but competition from Fatah can lead Hamas to attack less than it otherwise would. Likewise, making Hamas more capable or interested in competing increases overall violence, but making Fatah more capable or interested discourages violence on both sides. These discouragement effects of competition on violence emerge through an asymmetric contest, in which we find that Fatah uses terrorism more effectively to boost its support, although Hamas has lower attack costs. Expanding on these results, we demonstrate that outbidding theory is consistent with a positive, negative, or null relationship between measures of violence and incentives to compete.

Armies sometimes use fratricidal coercion—violence and intimidation against their own troops—to force reluctant soldiers to fight. How this practice affects battlefield performance remains an open question. We study fratricidal coercion using a mixed-methods strategy, drawing on (1) monthly panel data on Soviet Rifle Divisions in World War II, built from millions of declassified personnel files; (2) paired comparisons of Rifle Divisions at the Battle of Leningrad; and (3) cross-national data on 526 land battles and war outcomes from 75 conflicts (1939–2011) to assess generalizability. We offer three sets of empirical findings. First, coercion keeps some soldiers from fleeing the battlefield, but at the cost of higher casualties and reduced initiative. Second, wartime and prewar coercion (such as mass repression and officer purges) affect soldiers’ behavior in similar, mutually reinforcing ways. Third, the resolve-boosting, initiative-dampening effects of fratricidal coercion generalize across belligerents and wars. Fratricidal coercion generates compliance through fear, compelling soldiers with variable levels of resolve to conform to a uniform standard of battlefield behavior. But the net utility of this approach is dubious. On balance, countries employing fratricidal coercion are less likely to win wars.

Thomas Schelling argued that “The most spectacular event of the past half century is one that did not occur. We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger.” To this, he added a question: “Can we make it through another half dozen decades?” Contemporary technological innovation, weapons proliferation, increased modernization efforts, and nuclear saber-rattling have made Schelling's question an urgent one. Recently, there has been an explosion in scholarship attempting to test the resilience of nonuse. These scholars have focused primarily on methodological innovations, generating an impressive body of evidence about the future of nonuse. Yet we argue that this literature is theoretically problematic: it reduces mechanisms of nuclear nonuse to a “rationalist” versus “normative” dichotomy which obscures the distinct pathways to nuclear (non)use within each theoretical framework. With rationalist theories, the current literature commits the sin of conflation, treating what should be distinct mechanisms—cost and credibility—as a single causal story. With normative theories, scholars have committed a sin of omission, treating norms as structural and overlooking mechanisms of norm contestation. We show that teasing out these different causal pathways reveals radically different expectations about the future of nonuse, especially in a world of precision nuclear weapons.

What are the conditions under which governments form more ethnically inclusive coalitions? Previous contributions highlight strategic incentives as well as colonial and precolonial legacies as determinants of ethnically inclusive government coalitions but overlook the impact of political mobilization during the decolonization period. We argue that ideological exposure and commitment to the Pan-African anticolonial movement played a vital role in African leaders’ decisions to share power with other ethnic communities. We leverage novel data on African government leaders’ attendance at decolonization-era Pan-African conferences through a unique collection of conference delegate lists. Accounting for rival mechanisms, we find that African political elites who attended Pan-African conferences formed ethnically more inclusive government coalitions when they became government leaders. Our findings imply that the ideological influence and commitment signaled by conference attendance affected political leaders’ approach to form more inclusive governments and that ethnic coalitions have systematically unexplored legacies in the Pan-African decolonization movement.