Modern India is a political creation. The citizens of the world’s most populous country speak 100 languages, practice eight major religions, and belong to over 700 tribal groups and thousands of castes. The challenge of democratically representing such a range of interests is compounded by deep material scarcity and striking economic and social inequality.

Latin America continues to provide a fertile hunting ground for students of comparative politics. There is plentiful variation between, within, and across countries and subsectors. Yet, there are also shared scope conditions, cultural and institutional commonalities, and region-wide interactions and demonstration effects. There are some areas where comparisons can be based on either the “most similar” or the “most different” system design, but most causal variables of real interest are imprecise, unstable, and mutually interactive. They often operate within discontinuous and unstable political systems that evade mechanistic modeling. Temporal discontinuities and compartmentalized sectors can be so prevalent that “kaleidoscopic” patterns may seem more typical than smoothly institutionalized regularities or predictable convergences.

This article engages with the burgeoning literature on the conceptualization of corruption, a literature animated by the view that failures in anticorruption practice—the limited progress made in tackling global corruption—are in part a consequence of the ways in which corruption is theorized by academics. In response, the article proposes and elaborates a four-dimensional definition of corruption with detailed subdefinitions and seeks to advance thinking in both academic and practitioner circles on how corruption can be most effectively identified in context. The article makes five distinct contributions to live debates in the conceptual literature and clarifies several ambiguities and disagreements that have arisen within it.

First, it presents a set of grounded subdefinitions that make explicit the scope of each dimension of the definition. Second, it recommends applying the four dimensions in a predetermined sequence, enabling uncertainties or gray areas in each dimension to be resolved and clarified by subsequent dimensions. Third, it addresses the much-contested “abuse” dimension, acknowledging not only the flexibility required to identify abuses in different political and social settings but also the need to limit the scope of abuse so that it is not wholly idiosyncratic or relative. Fourth, it incorporates systemic and institutional forms of corruption, which creates an important bridge between individual and institutional approaches to corruption. Finally, it offers a defense for integrating the notion of public interest into the definition, which not only provides additional clarity to the conceptualization but also does justice to the reasons we care about corruption in the first place.

As interstate cyberconflict intensifies, the intersection of national security, cybersecurity, and International Relations (IR) theory has emerged as a critical venue for scholarly inquiry. Yet due mainly to epistemological problems, IR theory has been limited in examining how it informs the maximization of strategic cyberpower and in testing key realist concepts and assumptions against cyberactualities, risking theoretical stagnation and conceptual infertility in the study of statecraft and cybersecurity. I seek to bridge these theory-testing and conceptual gaps by assessing offensive realism’s assumption about the scope of hegemonic expansion in cyberspace using the crucial case of the United States. I argue that offensive realism has meaningful explanatory and predictive power in cyberspace but sometimes lacks this power under conditions assumed by the theory, emphasizing the need to modify offensive realism’s understanding and scope conditions of hegemony. The US pursues global, not regional, cyberhegemony using offensive strategies to maximize its cyberpower for cybersecurity. Therefore, I critically examine defensive realism and cyber persistence theory as alternative structural perspectives on the pursuit of security in cyberspace and introduce a modified conceptual framework for hegemony to adapt offensive realism to cyber-realities. This conceptual innovation can potentially contribute to policy making and help to build a cyber-specific version of offensive realism.

Russia’s 2014 seizure of parts of Ukraine, notably the Crimean Peninsula, set in motion a flurry of legal activity. Ukraine’s “lawfare” strategy, which aims to fight Russia via international legal means, included explicit encouragement of Ukrainian investors to file disputes under the Ukraine-Russia Bilateral Investment Treaty. We consider the resulting Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) arbitrations, the first instances of ISDS in which state parties to the treaty are actively engaged in armed conflict. Although Ukrainian actors have consistently won at ISDS arbitrations, Ukraine moved to formally withdraw from the treaty a year after the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022. Developments before and since the invasion point to the diverging interests between commercial actors and their home states, the weakness of ISDS as a tool during wartime, and a reconsideration of treaty-based commitments to international investor protections. We highlight the implications of these events for several literatures in international relations.

The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 sparked a wave of Black Lives Matter protests in many cities throughout the United States. Protesters’ demands ranged from constraints on police use of force to defunding and disbanding the police altogether. These have led some to worry about the possibility of a “Ferguson Effect,” where police withdraw from policing, and in particular discretionary stops and searches, with deleterious consequences for crime. Drawing on data from four cities, we evaluate whether the 2020 BLM protests impacted police behavior, and whether changes in policing negatively impacted public safety. Regression discontinuity-in-time estimates suggest that although depolicing followed the BLM protests, in some respects the quality of policing improved, and public safety was not clearly impacted. Our findings have important implications for research on policing, social movements, and structural inequality in cities.

This article uses the literature on subnational undemocratic regimes (SURs) and regime juxtaposition in Latin America to gain analytical leverage on the recent process of subnational democratic erosion in the United States. Based on a review of five key dimensions of federalism, we argue that the institutional landscape for the emergence and continuity of SURs is, comparatively speaking, more favorable in the US than in any of Latin America’s three federations (Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico). In addition to showing how federal structures are more detrimental for subnational democracy in the US, we assess how the two main theoretical approaches that have been developed to understand SURs in Latin America and elsewhere can be applied to the US.

Many academics today struggle with their role in the climate and ecological crisis. Increasing numbers take to the streets to demand stronger climate measures, not just as citizens, but as scientists and scholars. How should we conceptualize and evaluate such actions? I examine the responsibilities of academics in the context of the climate and ecological crisis. I offer a defense of academic climate activism that is grounded in membership of the academic community and its special position in the climate crisis, not in the specific expertise of individual scholars. We have a responsibility, as members of the academic community, to listen to our colleagues’ warnings, let their message sink in, reflect on it, and let it move us to action. Such action can take many forms, including collective action. In a context where such warnings are actively thwarted, participating in protest as an academic is not necessarily undemocratic, nor at odds with professional integrity.

Beliefs about the future shape attitudes, experiences, and priorities in the present. This article explores the relationship between democracy and the expected world to come. As it argues, visions of the future are an important resource for democratic politics, putting the present in critical perspective, aiding in the formation of a collective agent, and consolidating commitment in adversity. Indirectly, they contribute also to the legitimacy of democratic institutions, shaping the exercise of citizenship and the capacity to contend with the flaws of representation. The democratic significance of the imagined future becomes even more visible in today’s age of skepticism toward future-regarding politics, in which speculative modes of thinking run up against the desire for certainty and precision.

What is the role of law in imperial state-building projects? We study this question of historical significance with an empirical focus on Russian arbitrazh (commercial) courts in Crimea. We document the increase in the number of disputes that involve the Russian state and strong pro-government favoritism in court decisions. We also find that arbitrazh courts are used as a check on local political elites. At the same time, our analysis establishes favoritism toward local businesses in disputes with Russian businesses. Most importantly, we highlight that this stick-and-carrot legal politics is not only imposed from above: Local judges who defected to Russia act more favorably than outsider judges appointed from Russia toward the Russian state and businesses, plausibly because local judges want to signal their loyalty. The implication is that imperial legal domination emerges not only through directives from the metropole but also through the everyday contributions of local imperial intermediaries.