International Organization最新文献

Fratricidal Coercion in Modern War

IF 7.8 1区社会学

International Organization Pub Date : 2025-01-30 DOI: 10.1017/s002081832400033x

Jason Lyall, Yuri Zhukov

{"title":"Fratricidal Coercion in Modern War","authors":"Jason Lyall, Yuri Zhukov","doi":"10.1017/s002081832400033x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s002081832400033x","url":null,"abstract":"Armies sometimes use fratricidal coercion—violence and intimidation against their own troops—to force reluctant soldiers to fight. How this practice affects battlefield performance remains an open question. We study fratricidal coercion using a mixed-methods strategy, drawing on (1) monthly panel data on Soviet Rifle Divisions in World War II, built from millions of declassified personnel files; (2) paired comparisons of Rifle Divisions at the Battle of Leningrad; and (3) cross-national data on 526 land battles and war outcomes from 75 conflicts (1939–2011) to assess generalizability. We offer three sets of empirical findings. First, coercion keeps some soldiers from fleeing the battlefield, but at the cost of higher casualties and reduced initiative. Second, wartime and prewar coercion (such as mass repression and officer purges) affect soldiers’ behavior in similar, mutually reinforcing ways. Third, the resolve-boosting, initiative-dampening effects of fratricidal coercion generalize across belligerents and wars. Fratricidal coercion generates compliance through fear, compelling soldiers with variable levels of resolve to conform to a uniform standard of battlefield behavior. But the net utility of this approach is dubious. On balance, countries employing fratricidal coercion are less likely to win wars.","PeriodicalId":48388,"journal":{"name":"International Organization","volume":"53 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143057027","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Nuclear Shibboleths: The Logics and Future of Nuclear Nonuse 核信条：不使用核的逻辑和未来

IF 7.8 1区社会学

International Organization Pub Date : 2025-01-10 DOI: 10.1017/s0020818324000341

Stacie E. Goddard, Colleen Larkin

{"title":"Nuclear Shibboleths: The Logics and Future of Nuclear Nonuse","authors":"Stacie E. Goddard, Colleen Larkin","doi":"10.1017/s0020818324000341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020818324000341","url":null,"abstract":"Thomas Schelling argued that “The most spectacular event of the past half century is one that did not occur. We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger.” To this, he added a question: “Can we make it through another half dozen decades?” Contemporary technological innovation, weapons proliferation, increased modernization efforts, and nuclear saber-rattling have made Schelling's question an urgent one. Recently, there has been an explosion in scholarship attempting to test the resilience of nonuse. These scholars have focused primarily on methodological innovations, generating an impressive body of evidence about the future of nonuse. Yet we argue that this literature is theoretically problematic: it reduces mechanisms of nuclear nonuse to a “rationalist” versus “normative” dichotomy which obscures the distinct pathways to nuclear (non)use within each theoretical framework. With rationalist theories, the current literature commits the sin of conflation, treating what should be distinct mechanisms—cost and credibility—as a single causal story. With normative theories, scholars have committed a sin of omission, treating norms as structural and overlooking mechanisms of norm contestation. We show that teasing out these different causal pathways reveals radically different expectations about the future of nonuse, especially in a world of precision nuclear weapons.","PeriodicalId":48388,"journal":{"name":"International Organization","volume":"84 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142939793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Building from the Brain: Advancing the Study of Threat Perception in International Relations 从大脑出发：推进国际关系中的威胁感知研究

IF 7.8 1区社会学

International Organization Pub Date : 2024-12-20 DOI: 10.1017/s0020818324000328

Marika Landau-Wells

{"title":"Building from the Brain: Advancing the Study of Threat Perception in International Relations","authors":"Marika Landau-Wells","doi":"10.1017/s0020818324000328","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020818324000328","url":null,"abstract":"“Threat perception” is frequently invoked as a causal variable in theories of international relations and foreign policy decision making. Yet haphazard conceptualization and untested psychological assumptions leave its effects poorly understood. In this article, I propose a unified solution to these two related problems: taking the brain into account. I first show that this approach solves the conceptualization problem by generating two distinct concepts that generalize across existing theories, align with plain language, and are associated with specific brain-level processes: threat-as-danger perception (subjectively apprehending danger from any source) and threat-as-signal perception (detecting a statement of the intention to harm). Because both types of perception occur in the brain, large-scale neuroimaging data capturing these processes offer a way to empirically test some of the psychological assumptions embedded in IR theories. I conduct two such tests using assumptions from the literatures on conflict decision making (“harms are costs”) and on coercion (“intentions are inscrutable”). Based on an original analysis of fifteen coordinate-based meta-analyses comprising 500+ studies and 11,000+ subjects, I conclude that these assumptions are inconsistent with the cumulative evidence about how the brain responds to threats of either kind. Further, I show that brain-level data illuminate aspects of threat perception's impact on behavior that have not yet been integrated into IR theory. Advancing the study of threat perception thus requires a microfoundational approach that builds from what we know about the brain.","PeriodicalId":48388,"journal":{"name":"International Organization","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142869902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Ideology and Legitimacy in Global Governance 全球治理中的意识形态与合法性

IF 7.8 1区社会学

International Organization Pub Date : 2024-12-20 DOI: 10.1017/s0020818324000304

Matthias Ecker-Ehrhardt, Lisa Dellmuth, Jonas Tallberg

引用次数: 0

The Role of Pan-African Ideology in Ethnic Power Sharing 泛非意识形态在种族权力分享中的作用

IF 7.8 1区社会学

International Organization Pub Date : 2024-11-22 DOI: 10.1017/s0020818324000158

Janina Beiser-McGrath, Sam Erkiletian, Nils W. Metternich

{"title":"The Role of Pan-African Ideology in Ethnic Power Sharing","authors":"Janina Beiser-McGrath, Sam Erkiletian, Nils W. Metternich","doi":"10.1017/s0020818324000158","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020818324000158","url":null,"abstract":"What are the conditions under which governments form more ethnically inclusive coalitions? Previous contributions highlight strategic incentives as well as colonial and precolonial legacies as determinants of ethnically inclusive government coalitions but overlook the impact of political mobilization during the decolonization period. We argue that ideological exposure and commitment to the Pan-African anticolonial movement played a vital role in African leaders’ decisions to share power with other ethnic communities. We leverage novel data on African government leaders’ attendance at decolonization-era Pan-African conferences through a unique collection of conference delegate lists. Accounting for rival mechanisms, we find that African political elites who attended Pan-African conferences formed ethnically more inclusive government coalitions when they became government leaders. Our findings imply that the ideological influence and commitment signaled by conference attendance affected political leaders’ approach to form more inclusive governments and that ethnic coalitions have systematically unexplored legacies in the Pan-African decolonization movement.","PeriodicalId":48388,"journal":{"name":"International Organization","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142684532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Secret Innovation 秘密创新

IF 7.8 1区社会学

International Organization Pub Date : 2024-11-19 DOI: 10.1017/s0020818324000250

Michael F. Joseph, Michael Poznansky

{"title":"Secret Innovation","authors":"Michael F. Joseph, Michael Poznansky","doi":"10.1017/s0020818324000250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020818324000250","url":null,"abstract":"Conventional wisdom holds that open, collaborative, and transparent organizations are innovative. But some of the most radical innovations—satellites, lithium-iodine batteries, the internet—were conceived by small, secretive teams in national security agencies. Are these organizations more innovative because of their secrecy, or in spite of it? We study a principal–agent model of public-sector innovation. We give research teams a secret option and a public option during the initial testing and prototyping phase. Secrecy helps advance high-risk, high-reward projects through the early phase via a cost-passing mechanism. In open institutions, managers will not approve pilot research into high-risk, high-reward ideas for fear of political costs. Researchers exploit secrecy to conduct pilot research at a higher personal cost to generate evidence that their project is viable and win their manager's approval. Contrary to standard principal–agent findings, we show that researchers may exploit secrecy even if their preferences are perfectly aligned with their manager's, and that managers do not monitor researchers even if monitoring is costless and perfect. We illustrate our theory with two cases from the early Cold War: the CIA's attempt to master mind control (MKULTRA) and the origins of the reconnaissance satellite (CORONA). We contribute to the political application of principal–agent theory and studies of national security innovation, emerging technologies, democratic oversight, the Sino–American technology debate, and great power competition.","PeriodicalId":48388,"journal":{"name":"International Organization","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142670708","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Elections, War, and Gender: Self-Selection and the Pursuit of Victory 选举、战争与性别：自我选择与追求胜利

IF 7.8 1区社会学

International Organization Pub Date : 2024-11-19 DOI: 10.1017/s0020818324000249

Stephen Chaudoin, Sarah Hummel, Yon Soo Park

引用次数: 0

The Effect of Education on Support for International Trade: Evidence from Compulsory-Education Reforms 教育对支持国际贸易的影响：义务教育改革的证据

IF 7.8 1区社会学

International Organization Pub Date : 2024-11-18 DOI: 10.1017/s0020818324000262

Omer Solodoch

引用次数: 0

Race, Representation, and the Legitimacy of International Organizations 种族、代表性和国际组织的合法性

IF 7.8 1区社会学

International Organization Pub Date : 2024-11-14 DOI: 10.1017/s0020818324000225

David A. Steinberg, Daniel McDowell

引用次数: 0

Denying the Obvious: Why Do Nominally Covert Actions Avoid Escalation? 否认显而易见：为什么名义上的隐蔽行动会避免升级？

IF 7.8 1区社会学

International Organization Pub Date : 2024-11-13 DOI: 10.1017/s0020818324000183

Chase Bloch, Roseanne W. McManus

引用次数: 0