Social media platforms have an increasingly central influence on global politics. Media of unprecedented reach, they have the power to sway elections, exacerbate societal polarization, promote or provoke conflict at all levels, and jeopardize relations between states. But what of the people who govern and oversee these platforms? For although algorithms and automation may underpin how social media content influences politics, the policies, approaches, and international relations of social media companies are directed or conducted by corporate executives and their representatives, actors who receive limited critical attention in International Relations (IR) scholarship. Combining multiple data sources, including field interviews with Meta and Twitter staff on three continents, this reflection suggests an approach to studying social media companies and their relationships to global politics that moves beyond abstraction and aggregation. Examining these actors and their internal dynamics through an organizational lens can shed fresh light on the contingent spatial, temporal, and normative drivers and enactments of their influence across the international system.

Under what conditions are user-generated digital content platforms responsive to pressures from users, businesses, and states? I propose that digital platforms show different levels of responsiveness to users, businesses, and states over time. Early in a platform’s life, the platform is highly sensitive to the demands of users, who have an opportunity to directly shape the institutional characteristics of the platform through the threat of user revolt. The unique power of its users stems from the network logic that underpins the value of the platform. As a platform grows and the size and centrality of its network increase, it becomes more sensitive to pressures by businesses (through boycotts) and the state (through regulation). At the same time, the power of users lessens as collective action problems become more severe and exit threats become less credible. The threat of user revolts has a temporal significance: Unless users alter the institutional architecture of the platform and lock in pro-user institutional characteristics early, the threat of user revolts becomes less consequential as the platform grows. Comparative case studies of Facebook, Wikipedia, Digg, and Reddit provide support for the theory.

Citizens’ resentment at losing out to the rest of society is commonly regarded as the foundation of the demand for the populist radical right (PRR). Yet whether this motive has an objective economic basis remains disputed. Relying on European Social Survey individual-level data from 23 elections across Western Europe, combined with Eurostat data, I demonstrate that the PRR polls better among social classes facing economic status loss. To do so, I leverage a novel positional measure of income. This approach allows me to gauge economic status loss as a distinct experience from worsening financial circumstances, which has been the initial focus of empirical research. Evidence that economic status loss is the economic engine of PRR support is corroborated by data on cultural stances and redistributive preferences. My study confirms the complementarity of cultural- and economic-based explanations of PRR voting and reveals one electoral consequence of rising economic inequalities.

Which autocratic elites are more likely to return to cabinet in a democracy? Elites’ incentives are at the core of the explanations of why, how, and when democratization happens, yet existing studies on elites’ post-democratization trajectory are mostly anecdotal, case-study–based, region-specific, or based on aggregate, slow-moving structural variables. This article offers a novel theory and systematic empirical evidence of autocratic revolving doors that explain which former autocratic elites are more likely to return to cabinet positions under democracy. Using a demand-and-supply logic of cabinet formation, I propose that the return of former autocratic elites to cabinet is explained both by the need for cabinet leaders with policy-making experience and to appease old autocratic elites and their interests. More specifically, the political experience and the characteristics of the position that political elites held under autocracy explains which of them are more likely to meet these objectives and return to cabinet in a democracy. These theoretical propositions receive support in a quantitative analysis using a novel measure of returning elites for 12,949 former autocratic elites from 68 new democracies between 1966 and 2020.

How does ideology affect relations between armed groups within a state? While existing research has underscored how ideological proximity can foster alliances among armed groups, this article posits that ideological proximity can also breed hostility among them. When organizations share foundational narratives, they gain access to each other’s ideational resources, which can, in turn, pose challenges to these groups’ cohesion and leadership status. These challenges manifest in the form of questioning the sincerity and authenticity of each other’s beliefs, thereby threatening the group’s survival, sometimes overshadowing the risks posed by their shared ideologically distant adversaries. Focusing on Iran’s Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO), this article highlights its evolution as one of the first armed groups to transform Islam into a potent ideology before transitioning to Marxism and later reverting to Islamism. It examines how the organization’s ideological proximity with other Islamist and Marxist actors led to conflict and outbidding violence instead of cooperation. Drawing upon a trove of the MKO’s secret documents, this article reveals how a significant portion of the rhetoric and actions of armed groups is directed at outperforming their ideologically similar rivals, rather than confronting ideologically distant adversaries.

Modern India is a political creation. The citizens of the world’s most populous country speak 100 languages, practice eight major religions, and belong to over 700 tribal groups and thousands of castes. The challenge of democratically representing such a range of interests is compounded by deep material scarcity and striking economic and social inequality.

Latin America continues to provide a fertile hunting ground for students of comparative politics. There is plentiful variation between, within, and across countries and subsectors. Yet, there are also shared scope conditions, cultural and institutional commonalities, and region-wide interactions and demonstration effects. There are some areas where comparisons can be based on either the “most similar” or the “most different” system design, but most causal variables of real interest are imprecise, unstable, and mutually interactive. They often operate within discontinuous and unstable political systems that evade mechanistic modeling. Temporal discontinuities and compartmentalized sectors can be so prevalent that “kaleidoscopic” patterns may seem more typical than smoothly institutionalized regularities or predictable convergences.

This article engages with the burgeoning literature on the conceptualization of corruption, a literature animated by the view that failures in anticorruption practice—the limited progress made in tackling global corruption—are in part a consequence of the ways in which corruption is theorized by academics. In response, the article proposes and elaborates a four-dimensional definition of corruption with detailed subdefinitions and seeks to advance thinking in both academic and practitioner circles on how corruption can be most effectively identified in context. The article makes five distinct contributions to live debates in the conceptual literature and clarifies several ambiguities and disagreements that have arisen within it.

First, it presents a set of grounded subdefinitions that make explicit the scope of each dimension of the definition. Second, it recommends applying the four dimensions in a predetermined sequence, enabling uncertainties or gray areas in each dimension to be resolved and clarified by subsequent dimensions. Third, it addresses the much-contested “abuse” dimension, acknowledging not only the flexibility required to identify abuses in different political and social settings but also the need to limit the scope of abuse so that it is not wholly idiosyncratic or relative. Fourth, it incorporates systemic and institutional forms of corruption, which creates an important bridge between individual and institutional approaches to corruption. Finally, it offers a defense for integrating the notion of public interest into the definition, which not only provides additional clarity to the conceptualization but also does justice to the reasons we care about corruption in the first place.

As interstate cyberconflict intensifies, the intersection of national security, cybersecurity, and International Relations (IR) theory has emerged as a critical venue for scholarly inquiry. Yet due mainly to epistemological problems, IR theory has been limited in examining how it informs the maximization of strategic cyberpower and in testing key realist concepts and assumptions against cyberactualities, risking theoretical stagnation and conceptual infertility in the study of statecraft and cybersecurity. I seek to bridge these theory-testing and conceptual gaps by assessing offensive realism’s assumption about the scope of hegemonic expansion in cyberspace using the crucial case of the United States. I argue that offensive realism has meaningful explanatory and predictive power in cyberspace but sometimes lacks this power under conditions assumed by the theory, emphasizing the need to modify offensive realism’s understanding and scope conditions of hegemony. The US pursues global, not regional, cyberhegemony using offensive strategies to maximize its cyberpower for cybersecurity. Therefore, I critically examine defensive realism and cyber persistence theory as alternative structural perspectives on the pursuit of security in cyberspace and introduce a modified conceptual framework for hegemony to adapt offensive realism to cyber-realities. This conceptual innovation can potentially contribute to policy making and help to build a cyber-specific version of offensive realism.

Russia’s 2014 seizure of parts of Ukraine, notably the Crimean Peninsula, set in motion a flurry of legal activity. Ukraine’s “lawfare” strategy, which aims to fight Russia via international legal means, included explicit encouragement of Ukrainian investors to file disputes under the Ukraine-Russia Bilateral Investment Treaty. We consider the resulting Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) arbitrations, the first instances of ISDS in which state parties to the treaty are actively engaged in armed conflict. Although Ukrainian actors have consistently won at ISDS arbitrations, Ukraine moved to formally withdraw from the treaty a year after the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022. Developments before and since the invasion point to the diverging interests between commercial actors and their home states, the weakness of ISDS as a tool during wartime, and a reconsideration of treaty-based commitments to international investor protections. We highlight the implications of these events for several literatures in international relations.

The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 sparked a wave of Black Lives Matter protests in many cities throughout the United States. Protesters’ demands ranged from constraints on police use of force to defunding and disbanding the police altogether. These have led some to worry about the possibility of a “Ferguson Effect,” where police withdraw from policing, and in particular discretionary stops and searches, with deleterious consequences for crime. Drawing on data from four cities, we evaluate whether the 2020 BLM protests impacted police behavior, and whether changes in policing negatively impacted public safety. Regression discontinuity-in-time estimates suggest that although depolicing followed the BLM protests, in some respects the quality of policing improved, and public safety was not clearly impacted. Our findings have important implications for research on policing, social movements, and structural inequality in cities.

This article uses the literature on subnational undemocratic regimes (SURs) and regime juxtaposition in Latin America to gain analytical leverage on the recent process of subnational democratic erosion in the United States. Based on a review of five key dimensions of federalism, we argue that the institutional landscape for the emergence and continuity of SURs is, comparatively speaking, more favorable in the US than in any of Latin America’s three federations (Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico). In addition to showing how federal structures are more detrimental for subnational democracy in the US, we assess how the two main theoretical approaches that have been developed to understand SURs in Latin America and elsewhere can be applied to the US.

Many academics today struggle with their role in the climate and ecological crisis. Increasing numbers take to the streets to demand stronger climate measures, not just as citizens, but as scientists and scholars. How should we conceptualize and evaluate such actions? I examine the responsibilities of academics in the context of the climate and ecological crisis. I offer a defense of academic climate activism that is grounded in membership of the academic community and its special position in the climate crisis, not in the specific expertise of individual scholars. We have a responsibility, as members of the academic community, to listen to our colleagues’ warnings, let their message sink in, reflect on it, and let it move us to action. Such action can take many forms, including collective action. In a context where such warnings are actively thwarted, participating in protest as an academic is not necessarily undemocratic, nor at odds with professional integrity.

Beliefs about the future shape attitudes, experiences, and priorities in the present. This article explores the relationship between democracy and the expected world to come. As it argues, visions of the future are an important resource for democratic politics, putting the present in critical perspective, aiding in the formation of a collective agent, and consolidating commitment in adversity. Indirectly, they contribute also to the legitimacy of democratic institutions, shaping the exercise of citizenship and the capacity to contend with the flaws of representation. The democratic significance of the imagined future becomes even more visible in today’s age of skepticism toward future-regarding politics, in which speculative modes of thinking run up against the desire for certainty and precision.

What is the role of law in imperial state-building projects? We study this question of historical significance with an empirical focus on Russian arbitrazh (commercial) courts in Crimea. We document the increase in the number of disputes that involve the Russian state and strong pro-government favoritism in court decisions. We also find that arbitrazh courts are used as a check on local political elites. At the same time, our analysis establishes favoritism toward local businesses in disputes with Russian businesses. Most importantly, we highlight that this stick-and-carrot legal politics is not only imposed from above: Local judges who defected to Russia act more favorably than outsider judges appointed from Russia toward the Russian state and businesses, plausibly because local judges want to signal their loyalty. The implication is that imperial legal domination emerges not only through directives from the metropole but also through the everyday contributions of local imperial intermediaries.

The past two decades have seen many social, political, and international relations (IR) theorists make extensive use of Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics—or how political power interacts with biological life. What has so far passed unnoticed, however, is that Foucault formulated his highly influential theory about how living populations became political objects in the context of an overarching concern with what he termed “the power to kill life itself.” This essay reassesses Foucault’s biopolitics in light of his broader discussion of the potentially existential threats posed by nuclear weapons and gene editing technology. In doing so, it invites readers to reassess Foucault’s famous critiques of both sovereignty and political universalism, while also providing a succinct introduction to his theories of power and the general history of anthropogenic existential threats. The article concludes by raising fundamental questions for political and IR theory concerning what happens when the biological survival of the human species ceases to be a necessary prerequisite for politics and instead becomes a contingent outcome of politics.

The political status of Washington, D.C., is a longstanding question in American political thought. Intervening in that debate, I argue that Washington, D.C. deserves democratic equality. Democratic equality entails that, at a minimum, D.C. residents should have the power to vote for representatives in national and local legislatures (like residents of the several states), that their vote should have equal weight to others, and that D.C.’s elected legislative representatives should have power to vote on what the law is. This ideal of democratic equality for D.C. is only possible via D.C. statehood. Drawing on original archival research, the article provides a historical overview of D.C.’s democratic disenfranchisement, outlines three principal forms of democratic inequality faced by D.C. residents, and imagines what democratic equality for D.C. might look like. It concludes by sketching a broader research agenda about the democratic injustices accorded to those Americans living outside the several states.

Democratic backsliding, the slow erosion of institutions, processes, and norms, has become more pronounced in many nations. Most scholars point to the role of parties, leaders, and institutional changes, along with the pursuit of voters through what Daniel Ziblatt has characterized as alliances with more extremist party surrogate organizations. Although insightful, the institutionalist literature offers little reflection about the growing role of social technologies in organizing and mobilizing extremist networks in ways that present many challenges to traditional party gatekeeping, institutional integrity, and other democratic principles. We present a more integrated framework that explains how digitally networked publics interact with more traditional party surrogates and electoral processes to bring once-scattered extremist factions into conservative parties. When increasingly reactionary parties gain power, they may push both institutions and communication processes in illiberal directions. We develop a model of communication as networked organization to explain how Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement rapidly transformed the Republican Party in the United States, and we point to parallel developments in other nations.

In his last finished work, The Law of Peoples (1999b), John Rawls wrote repeatedly of “our hope for the future.” In recent decades hope has become a recurrent trope in the politics of Anglo-American liberal democracies. Yet its appearance in a major work by the most influential political theorist of the postwar era has attracted little notice. Rawls’s discovery of the need for hope in liberal society represents a major development in his thought and a little-noticed departure from his previous thinking about moral psychology, stability, and theodicy. Situating this episode in the evolution of Rawls’s thought and the context of intellectual history sheds light on the wider issue of the ambivalent relationship between hope and liberalism.