Bøker i Elements in International Relations-serien

Providing new empirical evidence to support the theory, the author provides an explanation for the power of weak states in international climate negotiations. It is argued that assumptions on their coordinated salience for climate issues are insufficent and the author pushes the leaders of strong countries to concede power to weaker states.

The 2016 US election highlighted the potential for foreign governments to employ social media for strategic advantages. This Element explores how social media can amplify and shift the balance of popular opinion on complex foreign policy issues and the different impacts in an open media, democratic environment and a more controlled regime.

This Element provides an overview of six areas of research in neuroscience and moral psychology. It surveys existing literature to see how literature from moral psychology is already being put to use, and then recommends a research agenda for norms researchers engaging with this literature.

When new leaders come to office, there is often speculation about whether they will take their countries' foreign policies in different directions or stick to their predecessors' policies. We argue that when new leaders come to power who represent different societal interests and preferences than their predecessors, leaders may pursue new foreign policies. At the same time, in democracies, leadership selection processes and policymaking rules blunt leaders' incentives and opportunities for change. Democracies thus tend to pursue more consistent foreign policies than nondemocracies even when new leaders with different supporting coalitions assume office. Statistical analyses of three distinct foreign policy areas - military alliances, UNGA voting, and economic sanctions - provide support for our argument. In a fourth area - trade - we find that both democracies and nondemocracies are more likely to experience foreign policy change when a new leader with a different supporting coalition comes to power. We thus conclude that foreign policy responds to domestic political interests, and that, even as the interests supporting leaders change, democracies' foreign policies are no less stable than those of nondemocracies and often exhibit greater consistency.

A seemingly never-ending stream of observers claims that the populist emphasis on nationalism, identity, and popular sovereignty undermines international collaboration and contributes to the crisis of the Liberal International Order (LIO). Why, then, do populist governments continue to engage in regional and international institutions? This Element unpacks the counter-intuitive inclination towards institutional cooperation in populist foreign policy and discusses its implications for the LIO. Straddling Western and non-Western contexts, it compares the regional cooperation strategies of populist leaders from three continents: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. The study identifies an emerging populist 'script' of regional cooperation based on notions of popular sovereignty. By embedding regional cooperation in their political strategies, populist leaders are able to contest the LIO and established international organisations without having to revert to unilateral nationalism.

The field of grand strategy is exceptionally American-centric theoretically, methodologically and empirically. Indeed, many scholars treat the United States as a unique case, and thus incomparable. This Element addresses the shortcomings of this approach by developing a novel framework for the purpose of systematic comparison, both within and among different countries. Using the United States as a benchmark, three dimensions are considered in which grand strategy can be compared: first, attributes of the major types commonly discussed in the literature; second, similarities and differences in the implementation of grand strategies over time, using US strategic relations with contemporary Russia as an example; and finally, across space, properties of the grand strategies that are interactively employed by other major powers in relation to the United States in the Indo-Pacific. The Element can be used by scholars and students alike to expand analysis beyond the confines that currently dominate the field.

"How and why did token troop contributions - tiny military deployments within much larger coalitions - become the most common form of state participation in UN peace operations? In December 2020, the UN mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO) had 48 troop contributing countries (TCCs) but 93 percent of its 12,758 troops were deployed by just ten states.1 35 MONUSCO troop contributors deployed less than 40 troops (roughly equivalent to a platoon) each, including 27 states contributing fewer than ten troops each. Collectively, these token contributors accounted for just 200 MONUSCO troops. Likewise, 32 of the 50 TCCs in the UN mission in the Central African Republic, MINUSCA, deployed fewer than 40 troops each, jointly contributing just 168 of the mission's 11,457 military personnel. As we show in this Element, similar patterns are observable in other UN missions, consolidating from the mid-2000s onwards"--