What is the strategic role of membership in an intergovernmental group with unanimity requirements if the group negotiates with an external player in a setting with incomplete information? Being in such a group has a strategic effect compared to negotiating as a stand-alone player and reduces...

Why do some terrorist organizations, but not others, adopt suicide bombing as a tactic? Dominant accounts focusing on organizational capacity, ideology, and efficacy leave certain elements of the phenomenon unexplained. The authors argue that a key factor that influences whether a terrorist...

Although popularly perceived as a positive force important for objectives such as economic development and democracy, social capital may also be linked to less desirable outcomes. This article highlights a dark side to social capital by pointing to its role in a particularly pernicious...

Previous scholarship has largely failed to address the effect of economic interdependence on issue areas other than interstate conflict. This study seeks to redress this lacuna by focusing on states’ visa policies and examining the impact of trade and capital interdependence in the...

This article investigates whether vote-buying and the instigation of violence in the disputed 2007 Kenyan elections were strategically motivated and whether those affected by vote-buying or post-electoral violence changed their views toward ethnopolitics and the use of violence. To answer these...

Although they are arguably the worst violators of human rights, dictators sometimes commit to international human rights treaties like the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT) to appease their domestic opposition. Importantly, however, executives facing effective judiciaries must...

This article reflects on the importance of linking micro and macro levels of analysis in order to advance our current understanding of civil wars and political violence processes and discusses the contributions of the articles in this special issue. We first identify the main problems in...

This article examines desertion in civil wars, focusing on the role of combatants’ hometowns in facilitating desertion. Analyzing data from the Spanish Civil War, the article demonstrates that combatants who come from hill country are considerably more likely to desert than combatants...

Civil conflict appears to be contagious—scholars have shown that civil wars in a state’s neighborhood make citizens more likely to rebel at home. However, war occurs when both rebels and the state engage in conflict. How do state authorities respond to the potential for civil...

This article analyzes the relationship between partisan heterogeneity and cooperation in international organizations. We argue that partisan heterogeneity increases distributional conflict among states during intergovernmental negotiations, thereby increasing the costs of cooperation. This...