The World Bank, under the stewardship of the United States, stands out as the global leader among international development organizations. Does China's establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) undermine this status? Examining this question, we focus on the borrowing practices of a special set of countries: the founding members of the AIIB. These founders openly defied the public preference of the United States, arguably to create a potential rival to the World Bank. Using a new causal inference method, Pang, Liu, and Xu's Dynamic Multilevel Latent Factor Model—as well as several well-known estimation models as robustness checks—we document at least a temporary decrease in the number of World Bank infrastructure projects that the developing AIIB founders have entered into. This study presents the first systematic evidence that China's AIIB could unsettle the political influence the United States has enjoyed over developing countries through its leadership of the World Bank. An important set of countries may be parting ways with the World Bank and looking to a Chinese institution for leadership in the world of development.

What effect does state violence have on the cohesiveness and fragmentation of insurgent organizations? This article develops a theory of how state violence against civilians affects insurgent cohesion and fragmentation in civil war. It argues that the state-led collective targeting of an armed group's alleged civilian constituency increases the probability of insurgent fragmentation, defined as the process through which insurgent organizations split into distinct entities, each with its own social composition, goals, and leadership. This effect is driven by the interaction of several mechanisms at the individual, group, and organizational levels: state-led collective targeting enlarges the supply of fresh recruits, strengthens the bonds between immediate group members (interpersonal cohesion), and disrupts intra-organizational coordination, strategic unity, and institutional arrangements that underpin the commitment of individual fighters to the organization as a whole (ideological cohesion). The implications of this argument are empirically tested in an analysis of armed groups fighting against their governments between 1946 and 2008. The results suggest that campaigns of massive state violence directed against the civilian constituency of rebel groups increase the overall risk of insurgent fragmentation, a finding that has important implications for the duration and escalation of civil wars.

The development of parliamentary constraints on the executive was critical in Western European political history. Previous scholarship identifies external wars as a key factor, but with varying effects. Sometimes, willing monarchs granted parliamentary rights in return for revenues to fight wars. Yet at other times, war threats empowered rulers over other elites or caused states to fragment. We analyze a formal model to understand how external wars can either stimulate or undermine prospects for a contractual relationship between a ruler and elite actors. We recover the standard intuition that war threats make the ruler more willing to grant parliamentary rights in return for revenue. Our key insight is that war threats also affect the bargaining position of elites. A previously unrecognized tension yields our new findings: stronger outsider threats increase pressure either on elites to fund the ruler or on the ruler to accept constraints—but not both simultaneously. Elites with immobile wealth depend on the ruler for security. War threats undercut their credibility to refuse funding for an unconstrained ruler. By contrast, war threats make elites with mobile wealth and a viable exit option unwilling to fund a hopeless war effort. Only under circumscribed conditions do war threats align three conditions needed for parliament to arise in equilibrium: ruler willingness, elite credibility, and elite willingness. We apply our theory to posit strategic foundations for waves and reversals of historical European parliaments.

Scholars often assume that courts in authoritarian regimes cannot credibly protect foreign investors’ interests because these institutions lack judicial independence. In this article, we construct a novel data set on multinational corporations’ litigation activities in Chinese courts from 2002 to 2017. This supports the first systematic case-level analysis of foreign firms’ lawsuit outcomes in an authoritarian judiciary. We find that foreign companies frequently engage in litigation in authoritarian courts. Moreover, we theoretically and empirically distinguish between two types of government–business ties in terms of their effectiveness in incentivizing the host state to protect foreign investors’ interests. We argue that ad hoc, personal political connections deliver only trivial lawsuit success for multinational enterprises, while formal corporate partnerships with regime insiders can lead the state to structurally internalize foreign investors’ interests. In particular, we demonstrate that joint venture partnerships with state-owned enterprises help foreign firms obtain more substantial monetary compensation than other types of multinational enterprises. By contrast, the personal political connections of foreign firms’ board members do not foster meaningful judicial favoritism. These findings are robust to tests of alternative implications, matching procedures, and subsample robustness checks. This article advances our understanding of multinational corporations’ political risk in host countries, government–business relations, and authoritarian judicial institutions.

Mitigating climate change requires a global transition from fossil fuels to a “green economy” driven by renewable energies. This shift has fostered massive investments in mining resources, notably lithium in South America, needed to store renewable energies. These mining ventures often produce harmful externalities where lithium is located. In Argentina, a major producer, striking variation has occurred in the fortunes of lithium-mining projects. In some instances, mining companies offered concessions that mitigated environmental damage and improved local socioeconomic conditions. In others, companies made minimal concessions, and in a third set they halted projects in response to local resistance. Why do mining ventures result alternatively in negotiated, unnegotiated, or aborted extraction? The article proposes a new typology of modes of extraction together with a multilevel explanatory framework that centers on the strengths and strategies of transnational mining companies, subnational governments, and local communities in setting the terms for extracting lithium.