Publications

Over the years, the US has intervened covertly in many countries to remove dictators, subvert elected leaders, and support coups. Explanations for this focus on characteristics of target countries or strategic incentives to pursue regime change. This Element provides an account of domestic political factors constraining US presidents' authorization of covert foreign-imposed regime change operations (FIRCs), arguing that congressional attention to covert action alters the Executive's calculus by increasing the political costs associated with this secretive policy instrument. It shows that congressional attention is the result of institutional battles over abuses of executive authority and has a significant constraining effect independent of codified rules and partisan disputes. These propositions are tested using content analysis of the Congressional Record, statistical analysis of Cold War covert FIRCs, and causal-process evidence relating to covert interventions in Chile, Angola, Central America, Afghanistan, etc.

The explosion of cities and megacities has increased scholars’ and policy markers’ attention to the effects such changes might have on conflict: increasingly, urban environments may alter the nature of warfare but not necessarily the incidence of intrastate war. We argue that high levels of urban concentration—the concentration of populations in one or relatively few urban centers—increases both the likelihood of civil wars and their intensity. Urban concentration limits the ability of the state to project power across space, exacerbating grievances in rural areas, easing rebel control of territory, and enhancing their military strength. At the same time, cities become high-value loci of contestation even as urban warfare constrains conventional state military strength. The result is more symmetrical fighting, producing more battle deaths. Cross-national regressions show that urban concentration exerts a crucial effect on the likelihood, nature, and intensity of intrastate warfare.

Do international systems tend to remain anarchic because of recurring balances of power, or do they tend toward imbalances and hierarchy? Leading structural theories posit competing predictions about systemic outcomes, and the historical record offers evidence to support both claims. This suggests the need to theorize conditions under which one tendency or another is likely to dominate and what factors lead systems to transition from one state to another. We draw on constructivist and English School insights about international authority and legitimacy to develop such a framework. We conceive of patterns of international authority as structures independent from, and interacting with, mechanisms usually associated with international anarchy, such as the balance of power. We propose that international authority systems vary along two dimensions: particularist-cosmopolitan and substitutable-nonsubstitutable. Both are emergent properties of ideas and institutions located at the unit level. We argue that certain authority systems—particularist and nonsubstitutable—reinforce, and are reinforced by, anarchy and balanced distributions of capabilities. Others—cosmopolitan and substitutable—facilitate rollup and domination and are likely to emerge or be maintained in hierarchic and highly asymmetric systems. By offering a structural account of international authority, we hope to contribute to the global turn in international relations, offering a framework for comparing systems across time and space. We also aim to help make sense of contemporary struggles over norms and values, their structural causes and consequences, and their potential implications for the future of global power politics.

"While we see considerable variation in the number of female authors in each issue of International Studies Quarterly (ISQ), women publish in the journal at a rate lower than we would expect given the number of research-active female scholars in international studies. The December 2017 issue has 26 authors, six of whom are women. Only two articles are single authored by a woman and only one is coauthored only by women. The pooled average across the last three years is a little less lopsided, but not by much. Only about 36% of articles accepted in 2013–16 had at least one female author, only around 11% were authored solely by women and about 5% were coauthored by all-female teams.

Looking only at ultimate outcomes, however, only provides part of the picture. For example, are there gaps in representation or biases at work in other stages of the editorial process that contribute to the underrepresentation of female authors in “top” journals? Is this pattern reflected in the pool of submissions? Or both? In this article, we use data from our online submissions system—supplemented by hand coding conducted by a variety of editorial and undergraduate assistants—to examine patterns that might suggest bias in ISQ’s peer-review process. Only one model suggests evidence of any such bias (though in the opposite direction), which implies that the “gender gap” in publication rates is mostly—if not entirely—a function of differential rates in submissions. That is, that larger structural factors (and perhaps expectations of bias at ISQ) account for the “gender gap.” But we caution that such analysis is preliminary, based on blunt aggregate data, and therefore of limited value."

"In the March 2009 issue of International Relations, Professor Colin Wight published a very persuasive and insightful – though admittedly still tentative – attempt at tackling the subject of terrorism. Wight argued that the study of terrorism is marred not only by the fact that the term is highly politically and emotionally charged, and that most of the information on the issue is tightly held by both terrorist groups and counter-terrorism agencies, but also by the lack of theoretical understanding about the structural (as opposed to what he terms psychological) causes of terrorism, and about the close relationship between this phenomenon and the historical development of the state. Though his argument is provocative and suggests an interesting avenue for research for critically inclined as well as more orthodox scholars, I believe Wight fails to avoid some of the common pitfalls he warns us against. The considerations presented in this short article regarding matters of definition and conceptualization – as well as motivation – are intended merely as friendly critiques and caveats to drive the discussion forward."