Introduction to special issue: New research on leaders and peace science

Research on political leaders has reshaped our understanding of international relations over the last 25 years. Much of the most influential contemporary research on leaders resides firmly in the peace science tradition, in terms of its substantive focus on interstate conflict processes and theoretical and methodological approaches to generating and empirically assessing expectations about politics. The articles in this special issue build upon this work to provide us with new insights into leaders’ influence on world politics.