Articles

After a century of rebellion, South America experienced a rapid decline in revolts in the early 1900s. Historical narratives and an analysis of a comprehensive new dataset show that the decrease stemmed in large part from the expansion and professionalization of the region’s militaries, which were driven by an export boom and the threat of interstate conflict. 

Jacqueline L. Hazelton's Bullets not Ballots: Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare (Cornell University Press, 2021)is the subject of a Roundtable Review.

When states use moral language in a dispute, they reduce the possibility of compromise. The possibility of military escalation, meanwhile, rises in response to moral language when states’ domestic audiences accuse their governments of hypocrisy for their willingness to compromise. The Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas case explores the theory.

Former Colombian President Iván Duque discussed Latin America’s resurgent left wing and advocated for environmental action at the Harvard Kennedy School on Thursday afternoon.

U.S. power extends beyond the military and economic spheres to include policing. The United States has used its global policing power to capture terrorists, warlords, and drug kingpins. But extradition is not simply a bureaucratic tool. States’ geopolitical interests shape their willingness to cooperate with others in extraditing fugitives. 

Commercial international port terminals owned and operated by Chinese firms provide dual-use capabilities to the People's Liberation Army during peacetime. They enable China to project power into critical regions worldwide by providing military logistics and intelligence networks.

When the U.S. military trains other states’ forces, it tries to impart liberal norms such as respect for human rights. But when liberal norms clash, these soldiers prioritize loyalty to their unit, the military, and shared goals.

Modern states recurrently buttress their militaries with legionnaires—soldiers who are neither citizens nor subjects of the governments for which they fight. Legionnaire recruitment is a function of political constraints on a government's ability to enlist citizens and its perceptions of external territorial threats.

This article reviews the remarkable growth in empirical literature in political science on wartime sexual violence against civilians, including rape, sexual slavery, forced marriage, and other forms.

Analysis of unique data on more than 19,000 reported deserters of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) reveals that organizational decline undermines a group’s instruments to promote collective action—including selective incentives, ideological appeal, and coercion—and leads to desertion.