The study of religion and international relations has achieved renewed attention in the last two decades. This study investigates a specific aspect of this field: religious soft power. It focuses on individuals who were affected by religious soft power and develop a typology of courses of action these individuals can take vis-à-vis their home state. I argue that individuals can take three different types of actions: disruptive, reformative, and transnational. Using the cases of the Catholic Church and its followers, ISIS and Sunni believers, and the relations between Israel and the Evangelicals, I assess how these alternative actions are being manifested by different groups of individuals. Lastly, I offer an answer to the question of when individuals would use disruptive action and when will they use reformative one.

Some technologies have dramatic effects on international politics as significant power components, affecting the balance in the international system while raising communal challenges. Their holders are credited as members of exclusive informal Security Technology Clubs (STCs). To mitigate communal challenges and secure their advantages, these tech-haves seek to prevent the spread of these strategic and sensitive capabilities, especially those with strategic lethal significance. Thus, they are often willing to relinquish some of their freedom of action and cooperate to control the distribution and use of technology, resulting in the greater institutionalization of these STCs. What conditions motivate established tech-haves to institutionalize STCs, and how can emerging tech-haves join them? We argue that this occurs under two conditions: (1) increasing numbers of actors seek to earn the technological capabilities; (2) they fear other tech-haves (would) irresponsibly use or transfer the technology to others. Institutionalization has a gradual dynamic, beginning with informal, often self-limiting, equitable arms control mechanisms benefiting the tech-haves; the following are less equitable mechanisms. Thus, emerging tech-haves are likely to become members of these more institutionalized STCs when publicly joining them before the walls are raised. We test our model by examining two cases: the institutionalization of the nuclear club in the 1960s and the early stages of institutionalization of the space club, centering on counterspace capabilities.

For populist leaders, naming is an important political tool, helping them to consolidate their leadership while harming the legitimacy of their opponents. The article offers a theoretical framework explaining populist tactical uses of naming; how they name and misname their opponents. The explanation locates the naming tactics within the overall populist framework as a thin-centered ideology. The following three naming tactics are described and analyzed: (1) coining ridiculing nicknames, (2) appropriating existing nicknames, and (3) avoiding the opponent’s name. To substantiate the theoretical arguments, we discursively analyze these three tactics, as were employed by the former US president, Donald Trump, the prime minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu, and the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin.

What is the impact of uncommon but notable violent acts on conflict dynamics? We analyze the impact of the murder of a Palestinian child on the broader dynamics of Israeli-Palestinian violence in Jerusalem. By using novel micro-level event data and utilizing Discrete Fourier Transform and Bayesian Poisson Change Point Analysis, we compare the impact of the murder to that of other lethal but more typical Israeli-Palestinian events. We demonstrate that the murder had a large and durable impact on the average number of daily riots in Jerusalem, whereas the other events caused smaller, short-term effects. We demonstrate that scholars should devote more attention to the analysis of atypical violent acts and indicate a set of tools for conducting such analyses.

We analyze whether—and, if so, how—Americans reacted to the escalation of the trade war between the United States and China in June 2018. To address this issue, we leverage surveys conducted in the United States during this phase of the economic clash. We find a significant reduction in support for Donald Trump and his trade policy immediately following the announcement of retaliatory tariffs by the Chinese government. Moreover, respondents’ economic concerns about the trade war were primarily sociotropic and only weakly related to personal pocketbook considerations or local exposure to Chinese retaliatory tariffs. We also find that the trade war’s intensification was politically consequential, decreasing support for Republican candidates in the 2018 midterm elections. Our findings indicate that trade wars can be politically costly for incumbent politicians, even among voters who are not directly affected by retaliatory tariffs.

What solutions can we find in the research literature for preventing sexual violence, and what psychological theories have guided these efforts? We gather all primary prevention efforts to reduce sexual violence from 1985-2018 and provide a birds-eye view of the literature. We first review predominant theoretical approaches to sexual violence perpetration prevention by highlighting three interventions that exemplify the zeitgeist of primary prevention efforts at various points during this time period. We find a throughline in primary prevention interventions: They aim to change attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge (i.e. ideas) in order to reduce sexual violence perpetration and victimization. Our meta-analysis of these studies tests the efficacy of this approach directly, and finds that while many interventions are successful at changing ideas, behavior change does not follow. There is little to no relationship between changing attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge and reducing victimization or perpetration. We also observe trends over time, including a shift from targeting a reduction in perpetration to targeting an increase in bystander intervention. We conclude by highlighting promising new strategies for measuring victimization and perpetration and calling for interventions that are informed by theories of behavior change and that center sexually violent behavior as the key outcome of interest.

Since the global financial crisis central banks expanded their roles and responsibilities and their impact on the economy and society grew significantly. Thus, during the euro-area crisis, the European Central Bank (ECB) engaged in decisions with profound human and societal implications while turning a blind eye towards them. The Bank’s dismissive approach is remarkable given EU institutions duty to respect fundamental rights, and EU’s identity as a human rights protector. Building on literature and interviews with ECB officials, this work suggests that organizational cultural features, i.e. mainstream economic thinking and narrow mandate interpretation steered the Bank towards overlooking the impact of its policies on EU citizens’ rights. While much has been written about central banks and organizational culture, the two spheres have rarely been connected in research. This research addresses the intersection between the two and calls for broader perspective to consider a wider range of factors influencing economic policies.

The ability to ensure compliance with investor-state arbitral awards is often regarded as one of the strengths of the international investment regime. Yet, there have been few systematic studies of compliance to assess the extent to which states have actually complied with adverse investor-state compensation awards. This paper presents a new dataset that enables empirical research on compliance with these decisions; it is the first publicly available dataset to focus on what happens after awards are handed down, and in this way complements other databases on international investment law. This paper explains the data collection process (and its associated challenges), discusses the design choices made in selecting inputs and variables, presents a descriptive overview of the data, and examines how variables can be used in future research. Moreover, various cases are used as illustrations of the challenges of collecting and coding data on post-award processes and we explore what missing data can tell us about compliance dynamics.

Populist politics in Southern Europe displays several distinctive patterns related to a shared history, geography, culture, and economy, while being subject to similar geopolitical pressures. In the last decade, moreover, the Euro-Mediterranean region has been struck by destabilizing shocks: the Eurozone crisis and the refugee crisis, which led to a realignment of party politics, with populist parties of both the left and the right enjoying high levels of popular support and taking, or have gotten close to taking, governmental power. These patterns make Southern Europe an interesting case for the study of populism and foreign policy through a (sub-)regional comparative approach. This article applies a structured, focused comparison of the populist foreign policies (PFP) of France, Italy, Spain, and Greece, seeking to explain how populist leaderships have shaped foreign policy in these countries and the conditions under which their PFP were translated into action. After putting Euro-Mediterranean populism in context, we examine four structural themes of catalysts or constraints that populists face when ‘navigating’ PFP around the European Mare Nostrum: international power distribution, ideological underpinnings, domestic political system, and policy domains. The comparative analysis reveals how; while, populist performances are often aimed at executing a rupture and, as a result, gaining legitimacy, the implementation of PFP in Southern Europe has ultimately been affected by structural pressures to discard these revolutionary impulses and align with the mainstream.

Across countries and over time, support for economic globalization is highest among individuals with the highest levels of education. Yet despite long-lasting debates about the sources of this correlation, reliable evidence that isolates the causal effect of education from the nonrandom selection of individuals into education is lacking. To address this fundamental issue, I exploit compulsory schooling reforms that increased the minimum school leaving age in eighteen countries. Employing a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, I find that the reform-induced added years of education substantially and durably increased support for trade liberalization. Using new longitudinal data on the content of school curricula, I find that the effect of schooling largely stems from instilling tolerance and pluralism in citizens and reducing perceived cultural threat from globalization. In contrast, there is little evidence that the effect of schooling reflects the distributive consequences of international trade separating globalization winners and losers.