Are states more interested in claiming territories that have economic resources? While previous theories of international relations assume that resources make a territory more tempting to claim, all else equal, I argue that certain types of economic resources can make states less willing to claim a territory. The presence of capital-intensive resources—such as oil or minerals—raises concerns about how the benefits of acquiring the territory would be distributed within the nation. These distributional concerns make it harder and costlier for leaders to mobilize widespread and consistent support for claiming resource-rich lands. Using original geocoded data on territorial claims in South America from 1830 to 2001, I show that states are indeed less likely to claim lands that have oil or minerals, even when they can be claimed for historical or administrative reasons. I then illustrate the theoretical mechanism through a case study of Bolivia, comparing Bolivian attitudes toward reclaiming its two lost provinces, the Chaco and the Litoral. By showing how the presence of economic resources can become a liability in mobilizing unified support, this paper questions the widespread assumption that resources make territories more desirable to claim.

A large literature has argued that domestic competition increases a militant organization's use and severity of terrorism to differentiate their “brand” and “outbid” other organizations. However, most empirical analyses infer such competition from the quantity of groups present in a geographic area. This approach neglects specific group relationships, such as cooperation, rhetorical or violent rivalry, or peaceful coexistence. We introduce a behavioral measure of group competition and argue that variation in the quality, rather than the quantity, of competition affects the violence profile of militant groups in unexpected ways. Violent competition, where militants attack one another, imposes significant constraints on group resources and increases groups’ dependence on civilian support, which exacerbates the costs of a popular backlash against brutality. Moreover, violent competition effectively substitutes for crowding out rivals via outbidding. As competition becomes extreme, we posit that groups increasingly opt for a strategy of terrorist restraint and reduce the share of high-profile attacks on soft civilian targets. We test this argument at the macro and micro levels with cross-national data on 290 organizations in civil war (1970–2018) and granular data on the subnational targeting strategy of the Islamic State in Syria (2013–2018). Both analyses provide robust support for our argument. The findings shed light on the strategic limitations of outbidding and provide important insights for research and policy.

This paper advances a theory for the autocratic logic of internet control. Politically motivated internet control generates a positive externality for domestic data-intensive firms and a negative externality for domestic knowledge-intensive research entities. Exploiting a major internet control shock in 2014, I find that Chinese data-intensive firms gained 26 percent in revenue over other Chinese firms as the result of internet control. The same shock incurred a 10 percent decline in research quality from Chinese researchers, conditional on the knowledge intensity of their discipline. It also reduced the research quality from Chinese researchers relative to their US counterparts by 22 percent in all disciplines. Due to the positive data externality, internet control enacted to prevent domestic threats challenges the state's competing need for data sovereignty against foreign threats. Meanwhile, the state shields certain foreign knowledge-intensive actors from the negative knowledge externality to avoid the immediate economic costs they might otherwise impose. Qualitative evidence supports both implications, highlighting the centrality of short-term interests and foreign actors in autocratic decision making.

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.

How do leaders select their top-level foreign policy appointees? Through a formal model of the domestic and intragovernmental politics surrounding an international crisis, I investigate the trade-offs shaping leaders’ appointment strategies. In the model, a leader selects a foreign policy appointee, anticipating how the appointment will affect the advice he receives in the crisis, the electorate's evaluation of his performance, and ultimately the policies that he and his foreign counterparts pursue as a consequence. The analysis uncovers a fundamental tension in the leader's ability to use appointments to advance his core political and policy objectives of deterring foreign aggression, obtaining accurate advice, and maximizing domestic approval: any appointment that advances one of these objectives invariably comes at the cost of another, and the leader's appointment strategy must balance across these trade-offs. Analyzing cross-national appointment patterns to the offices of ministers of defense and foreign affairs, I find descriptive evidence consistent with the model's predictions: leaders from dovish parties are more than twice as likely as leaders from hawkish parties to select cross-partisan and politically independent appointees, and such appointments are less likely for leaders of either party as they approach re-election.

Recent years have witnessed the theorizing of international order from a global, rather than purely Western, perspective. We contribute to this approach by reviewing recent book-length theorizations by four prominent contemporary Chinese scholars. We outline how these conceptions of international order converge and diverge, identify their contributions and limitations, and compare them with Western paradigms of international order, such as realism and liberalism. We then demonstrate how insights from these Chinese approaches enrich existing international relations debates and shed light on contemporary Chinese foreign policy.

This study explores how race impacts the legitimacy of international organizations (IOs). Specifically, we examine whether the representation of Black people in IO leadership positions influences perceptions of IO legitimacy among Black and white individuals. To do so, we fielded seven survey experiments in two racially diverse countries, South Africa and the United States, and three experiments in one predominantly Black country, Kenya. Our experiments were designed to distinguish the effects of an IO leader's race from their region of origin. We find that Black IO leadership enhances perceptions of institutional legitimacy among Black citizens, but does not strongly influence the legitimacy perceptions of their white counterparts. Our findings suggest that improving the representation of historically marginalized racial groups within IOs can enhance their popular legitimacy.

In 2014, Russia denied that its military was assisting separatists in eastern Ukraine, despite overwhelming evidence. Why do countries bother to deny hostile actions like this even when they are obvious? Scholars have argued that making hostile actions covert can reduce pressure on the target state to escalate. Yet it is not clear whether this claim applies when evidence of responsibility for the action is publicly available. We use three survey experiments to test whether denying responsibility for an action in the presence of contradictory evidence truly dampens demand for escalation among the public in the target state. We also test three causal mechanisms that might explain this: a rationalist reputation mechanism, a psychological mechanism, and an uncertainty mechanism. We do find a de-escalatory effect of noncredible denials. The effect is mediated through all three proposed causal mechanisms, but uncertainty and reputational concern have the most consistent effect.