United Nations policy forbids its peacekeepers and other personnel from engaging in transactional sex (the exchange of money, favors, or gifts for sex), but we find the behavior to be very common in our survey of Liberian women. Using satellite imagery and GPS locators, we randomly selected 1,381 households and randomly sampled 475 women between the ages of eighteen and thirty. Using an iPod in private to preserve the anonymity of their responses, these women answered sensitive questions about their sexual histories. More than half of them had engaged in transactional sex, a large majority of them (more than 75 percent) with UN personnel. We estimate that each additional battalion of UN peacekeepers caused a significant increase in a woman's probability of engaging in her first transactional sex. Our findings raise the concern that the private actions of UN personnel in the field may set back the UN's broader gender-equality and economic development goals, and raise broader questions about compliance with international norms.

Why do states make claims to some border areas and not others? We articulate three models of territorial claims and test them using a novel geospatial data set that precisely maps disputed and undisputed border segments in post-independence Africa. The geospatial approach helps eliminate problems of aggregation by permitting an analysis of variation both within and between dyadic borders. We find that ethnic political considerations are the most important driver of territorial claims in Africa, while institutional features of the border play a secondary role. Border segments that partition ethnic groups are at greatest risk of being challenged when the partitioned groups are politically powerful in ethnically homogeneous societies. Border segments that follow well-established and clear focal principles such as rivers and watersheds are significantly less likely to be disputed, while changes to the border in the colonial period created opportunities for later disputes to arise. Power considerations or resources play only a minor role in explaining the location of territorial claims.

Using a new measure of immigration policy and examining thirty-six advanced industrial countries between 1996 and 2012, we seek to explain systematically the variation in external labor openness among the more advanced democracies as primary destination countries, using a model where the government feels political pressure through both a voter/electoral channel and a special-interests channel. With voters primarily pressing for immigration restrictions and special interest pressure aimed at immigration openness, democratic political institutions—like a parliamentary system and proportional representation voting with greater district magnitude that make governments more responsive to voters and less responsive to special interests—should be associated with less change toward a more open official immigration policy. Our statistical evidence accords with this expectation.

This paper challenges the long-standing belief that changes in patterns of war and war making caused the emergence of large territorial states. Using new data describing the universe of European states between 1100 and 1790, I find that small political units continued to thrive well into the “age of the territorial state.” Some scholars have argued that changes in the production of violence led to the dominance of geographically large political units during this era. In contrast, I find evidence that variation in patterns of economic development and urban growth caused fragmented political authority in some places and the construction of geographically large territorial states in others. Exploiting random climatic deviations in the propensity of certain geographical areas to support large populations, I show via an instrumental-variables approach that the emergence of towns and cities caused the formation of small and independent states.

This paper argues that the climate came to take on a geophysical rather than a bioecological form in global governance because it emerged from a dynamic, interactive process between states and scientists. In the 1950s, state agencies, especially elements of the US military, steered and accelerated the development of the geophysical sciences, which set the discursive frame within which climate politics now plays out. In the 1990s, scientists and IO experts responded to states' requests to study carbon sinks by expanding the climate to include new greenhouse gases and land-use practices. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies as well as discursive theories of global governance, I theorize object constitution as a process of co-production in which states steer the development of scientific knowledge and scientists assemble epistemic objects. This contingent interaction of political and scientific actors shapes the form and content of global governance objects. The argument extends and challenges the epistemic communities literature and theories of the global governance life cycle that focus on how problems end up on the agenda of states rather than the processes of problem construction.

It remains contested whether peacekeeping works. The impact of peacekeepers’ actions at the local subnational level for overall mission success has lately received critical attention. Local peacekeeping is expected to matter because it reassures local actors, deters resumption of armed hostilities, coerces parties to halt fighting, and makes commitment to agreements credible. Thus peacekeepers affect the relations between central and local elites and avoid the emergence of local power vacuums and areas of lawlessness. This study uses new subnational data on the deployment of United Nations peacekeepers. It uses matching and recursive bivariate probit models with exogenous variables for temporal and spatial variation to deal with possible nonrandom assignment of the treatment. We demonstrate that conflict episodes last for shorter periods when peacekeepers are deployed to conflict-prone locations inside a country, even with comparatively modest deployment. The effect of peacekeeping on the onset of local conflict is, however, less clear cut.

To examine the extent to which foreign aid reaches people at different levels of wealth in Africa, I use household surveys to measure the subnational distribution of a country's population by wealth quintiles and match this information to data on the location of aid projects from two multilateral donors. Within countries, aid disproportionately flows to regions with more of the richest people. Aid does not favor regions with more of the poorest people. These findings violate the stated preferences of the multilateral donors under study, suggesting that the donors either cannot or are not willing to exercise control over the location of aid projects within countries. The results also suggest that aid is not being allocated effectively to alleviate extreme poverty.