Articles

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.

Kelly Greenhill argues that by exploiting political divisions that exist within targeted states, the threatened or actual deployment of engineered flows of migrants has long been a distressingly effective policy instrument, and it is unlikely to go away anytime soon. Unless policymakers begin to confront the forces that enable weaponized migration, the favored policy responses seem destined to increase, rather than curtail, its use.

The regime built around the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) has helped curtail the spread of nuclear arms for fifty years. In hindsight, it is remarkable only nine states possess the world’s most powerful weapon. The NPT achieved much success during Cold War bipolarity and U.S. unipolarity in its aftermath. But today, China’s rise and Russia’s resurgence have ushered in a new era of emerging multipolarity. Can the treaty withstand the potential challenges of this dynamic environment? There is a real risk that multipolarity may shake the scaffolding of the nonproliferation regime, presenting a significant test to the NPT’s durability. This article identifies four essential elements of the nonproliferation regime: widespread membership, adaptability, enforcement, and fairness. History suggests bipolarity and unipolarity in the international system largely sustained and promoted these NPT features. When international regimes lack such elements, it sharply curtails their long-term efficacy.

Wedge strategy theory explains how states use strategic arms control to divide adversaries by affecting their trust, threat perceptions, and beliefs about a commitment’s trade-offs. Examining three landmark arms control negotiations shows how the wedge motive was a key component to these negotiations.

Opportunistic repression arises when states use crises to suppress the political opposition. An examination of the relationship between COVID-19 shutdown policies and state violence against civilians in Africa, including and a subnational case study of Uganda, tests this theory.

Christopher Ford, John Harvey, Franklin Miller, Keith Payne, and Bradley Roberts respond to Scott Sagan and Allen Weiner’s spring 2021 article, “The Rule of Law and the Role of Strategy in U.S. Nuclear Doctrine.”

This article explores the symbiotic relationship between right-wing evangelicals and the apartheid state in undercutting racial equality in South Africa.

White Southerners opposed to Reconstruction used violence to undermine Black political power and force uncommitted white Southerners to their side. Although structural factors made it harder for the U.S. government to suppress this violence, a series of policy failures prompted Reconstruction’s failure and generations of injustice.

The Moroccan regime has used repression to successfully contain numerous types of opposition. Although research on its repressive policies is now extensive, impartial scholarly work that systematically examines its rational use of repression remains limited. This article addresses this gap by investigating the causal mechanisms behind the regime's repression of opposition actors between 1956 and 2018. Examining these mechanisms sheds light on the multilevel games between ruling actors and opposition groups during various opposition events and shows that liberalization does not ensure the reduced use of repression. Rather, repression remains a strategic policy employed by the regime to pursue important political objectives such as maintaining power.

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.