Articles

Matthew Evangelista examines the precedents and possibilities for postwar European security in an interview with International Security Executive Editor Jacqueline L. Hazelton.

At a moment when arms control is deeply troubled and may be dying, two eminent scholars, Marc Trachtenberg and the late Robert Jervis, have taken a fresh look at the beginnings of strategic arms control fifty years after the signing in Moscow of the SALT I agreements in May of 1972. They do so from different vantage points, writes Steven E. Miller.

Calder Walton says both seek to topple the United States from atop world stage, with China's blend of money, influence, all-hands-on-deck approach posing the greater threat.

According to the "Madman Theory" outlined by Daniel Ellsberg and Thomas C. Schelling, and embraced by Presidents Richard Nixon and Donald Trump, being perceived as mad can help make seemingly incredible threats—such as starting a nuclear war—more credible. However, recent research has largely concluded that the Madman Theory does not work. 

Scott Sagan asked Joseph S. Nye to revisit Nuclear Ethics, a book he published in 1986, in light of current developments in world affairs. In doing so, he found that much had changed but the basic usability paradox of nuclear deterrence remains the same. 

While research suggests that democracy offers an answer to the climate crisis, evidence of the effect of regime type on greenhouse gas emissions is mixed and yields inconclusive findings. This article investigates the effect of regime type on carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane emissions and presents new evidence showing that when it comes to climate change mitigation, democracies are no greener than autocracies.

There seems to exist a general consensus on how to conceptualize cooperation in the field of international relations (IR). The authors argue that this impression is deceptive. In practice, scholars working on the causes of international cooperation have come to implicitly employ various understandings of what cooperation is. Yet, an explicit debate about the discipline's conceptual foundations never materialized, and whatever discussion occurred did so only latently and without much dialog across theoretical traditions. In this article, the authors develop an updated conceptual framework by exploring the nature of these differing understandings and situating them within broader theoretical conversations about the role of cooperation in IR.

Divestment is a prominent strategy championed by activists to induce positive social change. For example, the current fossil fuel divestment movement includes over 1,500 institutions that control $40 trillion in assets. A primary pathway through which divestment is theorized to be effective is by influencing public beliefs and policy preferences, thus pressuring policymakers to take action. However, prior research only tests this argument via qualitative case studies. The authors assess the impact of exposure to information about fossil fuel divestment on public opinion through the use of national survey experiments in three major greenhouse gas emitters: the U.S., India, and South Africa.

With rational decision-making, the likelihood of strategic nuclear exchange should be zero. But emotions can create uncertainty, contradicting the expectations of the rational cost-benefit assumptions undergirding deterrence theory.

Following the COP27 climate conference in Egypt, Robert Stavins said in an interview with the Harvard Gazette that the talks were both frustrating and hopeful: frustrating because they did little to accelerate the slow pace of action to reduce carbon emissions, and hopeful because of a reawakened dialogue between the world’s biggest emitters—the U.S. and China—and movement to address climate-related damage to the world’s most vulnerable nations.