ABSTRACT Do aspects of current UN peacekeeping operations affect the willingness of that body to authorize new operations? Our theoretical arguments center on the capacity and costs of the organization – specifically the committed resources and risks associated with ongoing operations – with the assumption that greater existing commitments and perceived risks lessen the likelihood that the UN will create new operations. Related to the concern with risk, does successful diplomacy that produces a peace agreement in the conflict at hand lessen expected costs and therefore make authorizing new peacekeeping operations more attractive? To answer these questions, we examine UN peacekeeping authorization decisions over the period 1989–2016. Our results demonstrate that UN decisions to authorize new peacekeeping missions are connected to two forms of conflict management. First, successful attempts at peacemaking (evidence by peace agreements) increased the likelihood that a UN peacekeeping operation would be sent to that conflict in the aftermath of the agreement. We also demonstrate that the number of ongoing UN peacekeeping efforts are a strong negative predictor of whether or not the UN authorizes new missions. Theoretically, the concepts of perceived carrying capacity and risk, derived from other conflict management efforts, provided the explanatory bases for these effects.

ABSTRACT Scholars generally view flexibility in international institutions as a trade-off – flexible agreements attract more signatories at the cost of limiting the institution’s ability to change behavior, because flexibility allows states to make shallow commitments that require little, if any, deviation from current behavior. This paper argues that this trade-off is less severe than previous research suggests, because initially shallow commitments can deepen over time as domestic groups mobilize to press governments to widen the scope of their formal commitments. Such mobilization is most likely to arise in democratic societies, where citizens enjoy greater freedom to communicate, express their views, and direct political pressure toward elites. By contrast, in nondemocracies, influxes of information and assistance from international actors catalyze mobilization processes and enhance domestic actors’ ability to exert influence. I find support for this argument in the context of human rights, where states often use reservations to limit the extent to which a treaty requires modification of existing policies. These findings suggest depth can increase over time, allowing flexible treaties to deliver benefits from cooperation that may not have been achieved if the treaty mandated deep commitments from the start.

ABSTRACT Recent research on multi-actor civil wars highlights that rebel organizations condition their conflict behavior on that of other rebel organizations, with competition and free-riding constituting the core theoretical mechanisms. We provide a new actor-centric approach to explicitly model strategic interdependence in multi-actor civil wars. We argue that rebel organizations have incentives to remain mobilized until the end of a conflict to maintain their power to negotiate, power to spoil, power to enforce, and power to protect. This induces strategic complements that dominate duration dynamics in multi-actor conflicts. Based on a network game-theoretic model, we derive a spatial econometric framework that allows for a direct test of strategic interdependence. We find that the estimated duration interdependence is positive but partially offset in secessionist conflicts where the public goods nature of the incompatibility also induces strategic substitution effects.

ABSTRACT Do private firms act beyond “business as usual” and proactively build peace? Firms are largely absent from the conflict management literature, despite studies suggesting their importance. What conditions encourage firms to actively prevent or resolve violent conflict? Are such actions interdependent with ongoing international conflict prevention and management efforts? I argue international efforts encourage corporate conflict management-related activities since conflict management interdependencies can decrease the costs of conflict management, while increasing the benefits and success of their efforts. In addition, firms respond to gaps in governance and instability, especially when they are norm entrepreneurs or their reputation is threatened. I test these arguments on original cross-national data of conflict management-related efforts by large, domestic firms in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa from 1999–2013. The findings bring large-N empirical analysis to a topic dominated by case studies and emphasize the need for conflict management scholars to account for the role of the private sector in our studies.

ABSTRACTDoes the introduction of UN forces impact terrorism? We argue that at least initially, UN peacekeeping missions may significantly shift the local conflict bargaining process, creating incentives for terrorist and insurgent groups to increase their attacks against civilians. UN missions create a symbolic endpoint to initial negotiations, alter the balance of power between combatants, and may change the relationship between local combatants and the civilian population they rely on for support. We test this argument using monthly data from 12 African countries, analyzing the risk of terrorism at the local level. We find that the introduction of UN forces in an area significantly increases the short-term risk of terrorism, but longer missions in the country reduce this risk.

ABSTRACT Leadership decapitation, as a means of hindering the operations and hastening the demise of terrorist organizations, has been the subject of a growing body of research. However, these studies have not examined how an organization’s position in a broader network impacts its ability to weather decapitation. We argue that highly networked organizations possess characteristics that make decapitation less effective. To test this argument, we combine data on leadership decapitation with network data on terrorist organizations and find that well-networked organizations are resilience to leadership decapitation. Our study has implications for our understanding of how terrorist organizations respond to counterterrorism efforts.

ABSTRACTRecent research has provided evidence that conflict improves a belligerent’s status. I argue that this finding is based on a specification error. The relationship between the CINC index, which is used to control for material capabilities as a potential confounder, and change in diplomatic rank is not linear. Accounting for this non-linearity eliminates the apparent positive effect of MID initiation on change in diplomatic rank, and also reduces the effect of MID victory. The analysis has significant implications for foreign policy, for ongoing debates over the most useful way to model the link between status dissatisfaction and belligerence, and, more broadly, for analyses that use CINC to control for material capabilities.

ABSTRACTThis study explains how the economy affects the foreign policy rhetoric used by American presidents. When economic conditions deteriorate, presidents criticize foreign nations to boost their approval ratings. Presidents use this “diversionary cheap talk” in response to the misery index of unemployment plus inflation, which poses a unique threat to their popularity. They target historical rivals, which make intergroup distinctions most salient. Diversionary cheap talk is most influential for and most frequently used by Democratic presidents, whose non-core constituents prefer hawkish foreign policy but already expect it from Republican presidents. I test the observable implications of the theory with the American Diplomacy Dataset, an original record of 50,000 American foreign policy events between 1851 and 2010 drawn from a corpus of 1.3 million New York Times articles.

ABSTRACTWhy do some transitions of power from military rule occur violently while others do not? What effect, if any, does the international security environment have on how violent breakdowns of authoritarian rule are? I argue a conflict-prone security environment ameliorates the commitment problem by ensuring an influential role for the military out of power. Therefore, when facing a domestic crisis in a threatening security environment, military leaders are more likely to peacefully cede power rather than wield violent measures to stay in office. Perhaps counter-intuitively, international conflicts thus lead to transitions of power from military rule that minimize violence and human costs. International conflicts do not have this moderating effect on other types of authoritarian rule.

ABSTRACTPostwar trade politics in the USA have exhibited intermittent periods of rising industry demands for protection from imports. At present, however, we do not fully understand why industry demands for protection rise and fall overtime. We argue that intermittent protectionism in postwar USA has been driven by changes in the real exchange rate. To do so, we incorporate the real exchange rate into a basic model of sectoral trade policy preferences to show how the number of sectors that expect to benefit from protection grows as the real exchange rate appreciates. We test two hypotheses generated from this model: first that the number of antidumping and escape clause petitions rises as the dollar strengthens and falls as the dollar weakens. Second that competitive sectors are more sensitive to exchange rate movements than comparatively disadvantaged and comparatively advantaged sectors. We evaluate these expectations with a Bayesian statistical analysis of data on antidumping and escape clause petitions in the USA between 1974 and 2012. The empirical models provide robust support for the study’s principal hypotheses.