Protests constitute a primary way that members of the public express their preferences and seek to change public policy. Focusing on policy protests in the United States, we develop hypotheses about the impact of protesters’ race (Black or white) and violent disruptive tactics on the effectiveness of protests. We test our predictions with parallel experiments that expose citizens, individuals affiliated with civic organizations, and public officials to protest scenarios. We find that violent protests generate disapproval but also, perhaps surprisingly, policy responsiveness.  These relationships hold regardless of the race of the protesters. When it comes to nonviolent protests, however, race fundamentally matters and in countervailing ways. Black nonviolent protesters receive less approval than white nonviolent protesters, but they also are the only ones to generate policy responsiveness. These findings suggest that assertions about the relative impact of violent or nonviolent protests need to consider the identity of the protesters given that not all nonviolent protests are treated equally.

The main elements of global investment governance include decentralised networks of thousands of international investment agreements (IIAs) and ad hoc investor-state dispute settlement tribunals. Nevertheless, a handful of international organisations (IOs) participate in this IIA regime, striving to shape its rules and direction. This chapter seeks to assess their role in context, taking into account recent theoretical insights regarding possible flexible and informal modes of global governance, such as experimentalism, orchestration, and public–private partnerships. After mapping several modes of governance, we examine and compare the role of two United Nations (UN) bodies, the UN Conference on Trade and Development and the UN Commission on International Trade Law, in the IIA regime. We find that they play important parts, but mostly in traditional IO capacities, such as the collection and dissemination of information, policy advice, training and technical assistance, and forums for inter-state negotiations and consensus-building. The functions of these IOs fit more comfortably with traditional IO roles of coordination and centralisation, rather than experimentalist and orchestrational governance.

The 2021 Belarus/Poland border migration crisis exemplifies a “humanitarian dilemma,” in which actors’ efforts to expose human rights abuses unintentionally intensify them. After the EU sanctions, Belarus deliberately facilitated migrant flows from the Middle East and Africa to its EU borders, weaponizing asylumseekers to pressure the European Union. Human rights groups and media coverage, though aimed at relief, inadvertently amplified Lukashenka’s strategy by increasing international attention and moral pressure on the EU. This interplay among humanitarian norms, media spectacle, and political manipulation transformed migrants into instruments of hybrid warfare—revealing how humanitarian advocacy itself can become entangled in the very dehumanization it seeks to prevent.

Why are states rarely expelled from international institutions, even after blatantly defying the principles they were incorporated to uphold? This article examines this puzzle through the case of Russia’s continued membership in key international institutions, including the G7, WTO, G20, the Council of Europe, and the International Space Station, following its 2014 annexation of Crimea and 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Building on existing literature, we develop a three-tiered framework explaining the dynamics influencing the expulsion process, including (1) hegemonic motivation, (2) procedural feasibility, and (3) third-party political support. While the U.S. and or its Western allies viewed Russia’s actions as highly aggressive and as challenging the world order, expulsion was pursued only in select cases where all three conditions were met. Our findings challenge assumptions that informal institutions are inherently more flexible and highlight the enduring constraints of institutional design and multilateral politics. This study contributes to understanding how power, legitimacy, and institutional resilience interact in global governance amid rising geopolitical tensions.

Israel’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza is increasingly remembered as a failed peace initiative. Recently, Israeli commentators have even argued that the policy directly precipitated the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023. Such interpretations are historically inaccurate and are designed to advance the Israeli far right’s contemporary goals in the West Bank and Gaza. The disengagement was never supposed to promote a two-state solution. On the contrary, it sought to freeze the peace process while consolidating Israel’s control over the West Bank. In the event, the disengagement did contain the conflict and entrench the status quo. While current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu resigned in protest as minister of finance over the disengagement in 2005, he perpetuated its strategic logic after he became prime minister in 2009. This led Israel to 7 October.

The growing political divide between rural and urban regions is often attributed to rural deindustrialization and import competition in manufacturing. Yet this cleavage emerged in many countries well before rural industrialization, pointing to underlying economic forces that existing accounts have overlooked. We argue that comparative advantage in agriculture is one such force: rural voters are more likely to support protectionist parties and policies when local agriculture is uncompetitive, as this sector is often central to their communities' economic and social life. Using a new harmonized dataset of surveys from 127 countries and extensive data on voting behavior, we find strong support for our argument. An additional analysis exploiting exogenous subnational variation in agricultural competitiveness in the United States post-NAFTA further corroborates our findings: The political divide between rural and urban voters is pronounced in uncompetitive regions but negligible in those possessing a comparative advantage in agriculture.

How do voters respond to economic crises: Do they turn against the incumbent, reward a certain political camp, polarize to the extremes, or perhaps continue to vote much like before? Analyzing extensive data on electorates, parties, and individuals in 24 countries for over half a century, we document a systematic pattern whereby economic crises tend to disproportionately favor the right. Three main forces underlie this pattern. First, voters tend to decrease support for the party heading the government when the crisis erupts. Second, after crises, voters tend to assign greater importance to issues typically owned by the right. Third, when center-right parties preside over a crisis, voters often drift further rightward to nationalist parties rather than defect to the left. The far-right thus serves as an effective vehicle for keeping the center-right in power even when facing postcrisis disaffection by its voters.

This special issue of Intelligence and National Security examines the persistence of strategic surprise and the limitations of existing early warning frameworks in an era of geopolitical volatility. Despite decades of scholarly and institutional focus, intelligence failures continue to occur across tactical, operational, and strategic levels. The articles in this issue offer new theoretical models, empirical analyses, and comparative perspectives that challenge conventional explanations rooted in cognitive bias, organizational dysfunction, or information gaps. By addressing structural, cultural, and methodological dimensions of warning, the volume proposes a more differentiated and adaptive understanding of intelligence failure and the conditions under which it recurs.

Recent times have been hard for global governance, not least for formal intergovernmental organizations (FIGOs). Given changing conditions and their inability to adapt, many observers argue that FIGOs are drifting and losing ground to low-cost institutions (LCIs). We argue that this widespread perception is incomplete and that it dismisses too quickly the durability of FIGOs. We begin by pointing out that not all FIGOs are drifting and that some may even thrive amid transnational crises and power shifts. We then highlight the possibility that in a densely institutionalized global environment, states can substitute one FIGO for another. Thus, even as one FIGO is drifting, other FIGOs, rather than or alongside LCIs, can take the mantle. We identify and exemplify three key motivations for FIGO substitution: overcoming gridlock, enhancing ideological alignment, and policy laundering. During crises and power shifts, some members might paralyze a FIGO, leading to gridlock and prompting other members to cooperate in another FIGO. Power shifts and crises can also motivate dissatisfied FIGO members to pursue parallel activities in a FIGO that better fits their ideological outlook. Policy laundering occurs when members use one FIGO over another to signal political intent. We conclude by exploring the normative implications of FIGO substitution.

This article examines how digital innovation ecosystems have emerged as strategic institutions of power in contemporary world politics. It argues that, unlike Cold War technological rivalries driven by centralized, state-led control, today’s digital competition depends on states’ capacity to orchestrate scalable, multistakeholder ecosystems. Using a cultural–institutional framework, we explain how differences in strategic culture and institutional governance impact the ecosystem’s vitality and performance. A qualitative comparative analysis of the United States, China, and Russia reveals that constructive orchestration, aligning state institutions with generative, commercial-to-national innovation flows, enhances digital leadership, whereas rigid, obstructive governance limits it. This highlights ecosystem governance as a critical dimension of statecraft in the digital age. The findings underscore that the positions of great powers in the global technological hierarchy depend not only on resources or capabilities but also on the effectiveness of ecosystem governance as an evolving instrument of geopolitical power.