Research and Publications

Religion has resurged as a powerful social and political force worldwide, yet conventional international relations frameworks within the political science discipline offer limited insight into how religious ideas, actors, and institutions shape global dynamics. To bridge this gap, this chapter begins with a conceptual examination, defining religion broadly across diverse faiths. It then reviews relevant literature, highlighting how religious motivations impact not only armed conflicts but also peacebuilding efforts. The analysis recognizes that while religion is seldom the sole cause of conflict, it plays a complex role, providing tools, challenges, and opportunities for conflict resolution and peace. The chapter concludes by advocating for continued research to clarify these dynamics, emphasizing that understanding religion's multifaceted role in IR is crucial for policymakers aiming to address the nuanced ways in which religious values influence global conflict.

We conduct two experiments to identify the value parents place on equality of opportunity when investing in children. The experiments exogenously vary short-run returns to educational investments to identify the weight placed on equalizing “opportunity” (child-level investment) relative to maximizing “returns” (total household earnings) or to equalizing “outcomes” (child-level expected earnings). While parents in both experiments place some weight on maximizing returns, they also display a strong preference for equalizing opportunities and are willing to forgo 15–45 percent of their earnings to do so. Parents in higher-income countries also care about equalizing outcomes, while parents in lower-income countries do not.

Refugee-hosting geographies represent complex sites of encounter where power and knowledge intersect with territoriality. While they cannot be inherently 'unusual', they become so when they deviate from dominant discourses, categories and practices that seek to impose order and meaning within the global refugee regime. The introduction to the Special Issue sets the stage for the collection of papers by conceptualizing (un)usual spaces of refuge. It explores how complex entanglements between policy and knowledge production cast certain geographies of refuge as 'unusual', obscuring their role, relevance, and challenges within the global refugee regime. Drawing on perspectives from critical geopolitics, refugee studies and international relations, the collection seeks to achieve three aims. First, it pluralizes perspectives on refugee-hosting geographies beyond the core and periphery and the North/South divide. Second, it calls for mapping everyday cartographies that reflect refugees' experiences of placemaking. Third, it highlights how policy assumptions about 'interim' versus 'preferred' geographies can obscure understanding of how refugees perceive durable solutions and destinations beyond the 'territorial trap'.

The concept of soft balancing emerged in 2005 to analyse how states engage in non-military balancing against the United States. By 2025, soft balancing has become extensively discussed in the context of BRICS, which has evolved from a loose grouping of diverse powers into an active, complex and rapidly growing entity. However, scholars remain divided on the nature and drivers of soft balancing within BRICS. How has BRICS developed into a robust soft balancing coalition? This article uses insights from compensatory layering - a process where transformative change occurs through sequential bargains over institutional design - to demonstrate how BRICS builds soft balancing collaborations, selectively institutionalizes some cooperative activities, and expands its scope to include both soft balancing and non-soft balancing elements. It clarifies balancing and non-balancing behaviours within BRICS, providing new insights into soft balancing in contemporary power dynamics. The study shows how states centre their cooperation around a specific informal institution, enabling effective soft balancing outcomes.

This chapter considers how cognitive studies can inform and augment constructivist approaches to international law. The central argument is that research into the working of the human mind and inter-group relations helps to explain how the institutional environment in which rules are developed and interpreted shapes the legal positions of states. States send signals to one another, they negotiate, they argue, and they engage in diplomatic conversation about international law—how it is made, interpreted, and implemented. Accordingly, this chapter considers how cognitive studies can help to explain the argumentative behavior of government officials and other international actors associated with a particular type of “community of practice,” namely interpretive communities. It identifies avenues for improving the design of legal regimes and institutions to address biases and heuristics associated with individual and group decision-making. The chapter emphasizes the importance of mechanisms that stimulate reasoned deliberation as opposed to purely intuitive and/or “automatic” cognition in global governance institutions. A case study of cybersecurity regime-building is used to highlight both the value and limitations of cognitive studies in understanding international legal argumentation and interpretation.

An explosion of survey experimental research shows that public support for nuclear use is alarmingly high and malleable. Thus, nuclear nonuse may depend on elite restraint. Can elites be counted on to resist nuclear use? How do national security elites think about nuclear weapons, and what does this imply for potential nuclear use and our understanding of public-elite gaps in political behavior? Drawing on the literature on public opinion formation, I argue that two features of public attitudes toward nuclear weapons help explain elite-public gaps on nuclear weapons: low salience and low knowledge. I then test this explanation using parallel preregistered survey experiments assessing support for nuclear use across three samples: the US public before the Ukraine conflict; the US public after the Ukraine conflict began; and a highly elite sample of US military officers and strategists, also after the Ukraine conflict began. While the US public is willing to support nuclear use, US national security elites are significantly more reluctant. Among the public, respondents for whom nuclear weapons are a high-knowledge or high-salience issue behave more like elites: they are less likely to support nuclear use. The findings have important implications for survey experimental research, scholarship on nuclear weapons, public opinion formation, and elite-public gaps in political behavior.

Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have expressed support for better ties between the US and Russia. In some ways, the countries have different interests. Trump would like to see lower energy prices to boost the US economy, while Putin needs higher prices to support his war effort. However, both Trump and Putin have a mutual interest in growing the oil and gas sector and likely will join forces to undermine progress at future international climate talks. The negative consequences for health and food security among the most vulnerable countries will likely be severe.

Despite the best efforts of international human rights treaties and other instruments, rest and leisure continue to struggle for recognition as well founded guarantees in international human rights law. This study investigates the rationales, background, and scope of the right to rest and leisure in international human rights law. With an evolution closely linked to the predatory and exclusionary histories of slavery, post-colony, and gender discrimination, and epistemically anchored in foundations of human dignity, agency, autonomy, and solidarity, this study argues that rest and leisure as human rights defy convenient categories and potentially emerge as the rights that calibrate the capacity of everyone to be truly human.

We have the tools and solutions we need to address shared water challenges in a changing climate; however, we lack the political will to implement them through effective cooperation.

Urban in-migration, high birth rates and unchecked development are driving the continued growth of African cities. Much of this urbanization occurs in informal settlements, where unplanned growth exacerbates the impacts of climate hazards. Our paper explores the challenges faced by urban planners seeking to address climate change threats in African cities. Focusing on Addis Ababa, we conduct a robust policy analysis of urban government response. Our main finding is that Addis Ababa's environmental challenges are primarily a result of urban development and inadequate planning and policy enforcement. Environmental challenges are exacerbated by rapidly intensifying climate impacts, but not driven by them. Improved city-level policy responses can potentially mitigate many of Addis Ababa's current environmental challenges and prepare the city to weather future ones. We highlight four areas of policy weakness: (1) ineffective or absent policies concerning green space; (2) the exclusion of informal settlements from ongoing resilience planning efforts; (3) limited public trust and transparency; and (4) a lack of coordination across the multiple agencies in Addis charged with planning. Holistic, multi-stakeholder planning is inhibited by a lack of collaboration, limited stakeholder participation, and a reluctance to engage in productive dialogue. Resolving all four issues will only occur with sustained increases in social trust, expertise, governance capacity and capital.