Research and Publications

A brisk, practical defense of free speech in America's digital public square that calls on the courts to reject the censors' absolutism, enforce enduring First Amendment principles, and restore a vigorous and robust marketplace of ideas. A vast censorship regime has smothered America's digital marketplace of ideas, squelching free speech on vital policy issues ranging from public health to electoral politics. Its supporters regard its benefits as morally and politically beyond question. They contend it's carried out by private social media platforms, not governmental authorities. And they insist their partnership is voluntary, not coerced. In Free Speech and Turbulent Freedom, Michael J. Glennon offers a timely and incisive response. The censors are short-sighted, he argues. Quibbling over outdated distinctions misses the real threat-which is the fusion of public and private power into a modern-day cartel able to overleap longstanding constitutional safeguards. American democracy, he argues, rests on a decentralized marketplace of ideas independent of the government. In crisp, trenchant terms, Glennon shows how concrete practical concerns justify protecting admittedly harmful online speech-even speech that advocates violence or embraces hatred or apparent falsehood. The intellectual journey of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. from absolutist to skeptic, he suggests, illuminates the value of political pluralism and the perils of the censors' delusory certitude. To safely self-correct, democracy requires open channels of political communication. Glennon calls on the courts to unblock those channels-to measure such speech against enduring First Amendment precepts rather than pliable international norms-and to protect the speech interests not merely of the government and Big Tech, but of all participants in the marketplace of ideas. That includes what's often overlooked: Americans' right to hear. Without robust judicial protection, the specious attractions of censorship-and the absolutist certitude that drives it-will destroy America's marketplace of ideas and, with it, any hope of political self-renewal.

Multinational corporations (MNCs) must balance opportunity-seeking initiatives locally with global programs and imperatives. This balancing act between generating and responding to local insights and exploiting standardized marketing programs calls for some form of marketing agility. Under this lens, this study investigates the relationship between market orientation (MO) and marketing program standardization (MPS)—two critical marketing capabilities—and their dual effects on subsidiary performance. The authors compare the cases of Western MNCs’ subsidiaries operating in Japan and Turkey and inquire about the moderating role of a country's economic development (advanced vs. emerging market) and an industry's global competitive interdependence. Analyzing MO at the subcomponent level, they find a positive relationship between responsiveness and MPS in both markets. MPS also functions as a partial mediator between responsiveness and profitability in an advanced market. In an advanced market, both responsiveness and MPS are positively related to profitability and market share. In an emerging market, MPS is negatively related to profitability in support of adapting the marketing program. The results and follow-up discussions with executives from established MNCs support the conceptualization of MO and MPS as reflections of international marketing agility in subsidiaries.

In Narratives of Civic Duty, Aram Hur investigates the impulse behind a sense of civic duty in democracies.

"Offers a new global history of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, exploring the conflict both within and beyond the framework of the Cold War.

Under what conditions do organizations adopt greening measures? Economic and political factors like wealth, democracy, decentralization, and corruption can influence the shape of sub-state greening behavior. We examine the content, extent, and determinants of port decisions to take on a set of 22 greening measures in the busiest 209 seaports in the world over the period 2005-2020 using data we collected. Greening measure adoption varies widely. We find that most measures are adopted by fewer than half the ports examined and are most frequently undertaken without regulatory mandate or incentive. We generate and statistically evaluate a set of hypotheses about state-level factors that could contribute to the likelihood of port greening. Our findings suggest that voluntary adoption is most likely when the political conditions for mandatory regulation would otherwise be strong—specifically, decentralized democracies with locally affected populations. These conditions may create incentives for ports to act preemptively rather than face regulation.

How do nuclear weapons affect interstate conflict? Empirical studies on this question have returned mixed results. We argue that these results are due to overlooking indirect conflicts, a distinct and prominent form of limited conflict. Expanding current datasets to account for both conflict intensity and directness provides new insights about interstate conflict. We investigate the relationship between nuclear weapons and conflict through a large-n analysis that includes a new indicator for indirect conflict. We find that state dyads which possess nuclear weapons are significantly more likely to engage in indirect conflict. The results suggest the importance of including measures of indirect conflict in future scholarship and the need for policymakers to prepare for increased instances of indirect conflict between major powers possessing nuclear weapons.

How do local organizations at the forefront of refugee responses in conflict-affected environments contextualize global governance frameworks on displacement, and how do they position these frameworks within their “lifeworlds”? This paper addresses these questions through the case of the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR), a policy framework designed to bridge global and local scales of power. Adopted by the United Nations in 2018, the GCR aims to operationalize responsibility-sharing in protracted refugee situations. It highlights host and refugee communities as central actors in the global refugee regime. Despite the Compact’s prominence in global policy discourse, there remains limited understanding of how grassroots actors engage with its localization agenda. Drawing on field research and semi-structured interviews, we examine how local and refugee-led organizations recontextualize and engage with the Compact in complex conflict environments such as Lebanon. Lebanon has inspired extensive research on the nexus between conflict, humanitarianism, and displacement, making it a critical site for rethinking the theory and practice of localization. We develop the notion of experiential localization to unpack the fog and friction that grassroots organizations navigate across scales of power. Our findings show that unequal access to information and knowledge about the Compact, alongside critical interpretations of its potential to close the rhetoric-practice gap and expand refugee inclusion, are central to reframing localization as an experiential and bottom-up process. Far from being passive actors in the political haze surrounding global governance, local organizations recontextualize the policy and practice of localization through their meaning-making narratives.