Volume 26, Issue 4

Does status have an independent effect on how countries relate to each other? While scholars long argued that status is a salient foreign policy driver, it has been challenging to establish a causal link between status and foreign policy outcomes. In this project, I use original survey data to evaluate the effect of status on foreign policy decision-making, in particular popular support for military intervention. In an online survey experiment, 3658 United States citizens were confronted with a hypothetical foreign policy scenario in which their country’s status was threatened. The results show that the presence of a status threat increases support for military intervention, even in situations where national security interests are at stake and casualties are likely. I also find that government’s unwillingness to use force to protect the country’s status leads to decreased government approval. Overall, the results provide strong evidence that status is an important foreign policy driver and a source of domestic audience costs.

By extending the extant costly-lottery models of dyadic war to three-party bargaining scenarios, we offer rationalist explanations for two-front war, where a state at the center is fought by two enemies at opposing peripheries. We found that even though private information exists only in one front, war can break out in both fronts. Because the war outcome in one front can affect the outcome in the other through the shift of military balance, a peripheral state may preventively join the war ongoing in the other front to leverage its power (e.g. Napoleonic Wars), or the central state may preemptively initiate war in one front to establish its preponderance in the other (e.g. World War I). These findings echo Waltz’s neorealism concern that a multi-polar system may not be so stable as the bipolar system that bargaining models of dyadic war commonly presume.

Who are the colleagues participating when asked to complete expert surveys? This research note investigates which individuals’ characteristics associate with positive responses. Drawing on an expert survey dedicated to post-conflict trials, we collect data on various attributes of both respondents and non-respondents such as their age, sex, academic positions, disciplines, and research outputs. We expect that decisions to participate result from an interplay of (1) individuals’ levels of context-specific expertise, (2) the value attached to their expert role, (3) their confidence in making authoritative statements, and (4) resource constraints. Employing logistic regression models and statistical simulations (n = 414), we find that context-specific expertise is the primary, but not the only determinant of participation. On the one hand and luckily, individuals whose research corresponds closely to the object of study are most likely to participate. On the other hand and unfortunately, individuals with high citation outputs, female experts, and Area Studies-scholars are less likely to respond. Consequently, certain groups are under-represented in expert evaluations frequently considered as authoritative source of knowledge.

Trade and economic cooperation are often promoted through policy to facilitate post-conflict normalization. The Qualified Industrial Zone (QIZ) model of duty and quota-free industrial regions is a policy tool initiated by the United States as a brokerage in promoting peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Indeed, a vast literature aims to evaluate the economic and political potential of trade liberalization. Yet the mechanisms of trade policy implementation in a post-conflict environment, its timing and underlying political motives, are critical but rather neglected factors, which design the prospects of trade incentives. We therefore question the effectiveness of the QIZ as a tool addressing post-conflict dynamics and ask whether its impact on Israel–Egyptian relations reflects the value of this policy or the circumstances of its implementation. Using mixed methods, this study presents and evaluates the implementation of the QIZ in Egypt since 2004 and its results, both economic and political, fine tuning the broader debate to focus on circumstances of implementation. This case study demonstrates the results of trade opportunity implementation as a reaction to threat rather than mobilization to realize post-conflict rapprochement or even to reap economic opportunity. Notwithstanding the forces of globalization, Egypt’s pre and post-revolutionary internal political economy and delicate relations with Israel serve as the context for understanding the QIZ. This context facilitates contradicting political interpretations, with the QIZ simultaneously celebrated as an economic success, criticized as an Egyptian escape route from structural reforms, and accused as embodying a U.S.–Egyptian elite conspiracy, to coerce Egyptian economic normalization with Israel.

The Colombian State and subversive groups have made attempts to build peace by the establishment of accords since the 1980s. Recently, the signature of a peace accord by former president Santos and the FARC-EP leadership in 2016, has come along with changes in the interpretative frameworks of the conflict and the emergence of new institutions, forms of subjectivity and collective meanings around peace. Nowadays, Colombia is in the transition from being a country at war to a peaceful nation. In this transition, the discourse of victims and state representatives about peace and conflict are predominant in the literature. This article characterizes the simultaneously coexisting discourses about peace and conflict in former combatants. We conducted a discourse analysis of 19 semi-structured interviews with former members of paramilitaries and guerrillas. The results are clustered into two categories: absent peace , in which peace is seen as the lack of something that was missed and lost; and the indefinite war , where peace can be hardly imagined due to the permanence of conflict and longevity of violence. The overlooked angle of the narratives of combatants about peace and conflict is discussed, and the findings are suggested as potential guidelines to navigate displaced and divergent accounts of peace and conflict in transition societies.