Smith College’s Mlada Bukovansky presents work in progress on the relationship between corruption and revolutions.

Jenna Norosky presents her dissertation-prospectus-in progress on norm development and diffusion around recognizing conflict-related sexual violence against men in war.

UMass Amherst Professor of Economics Kevin Young presents on global elites, education inequity and diversity at the “Global and Human Security” workshop.

Charli Carpenter, Bernhard Leidner and Alex Montgomery present new survey experimental results on the political impact of the nuclear ban treaty.

Doctoral candidate Gabriel Mares presents a working paper at the Conflict, Violence and Security workshop.

Doctoral student Jaeye Baek presents new research on social movements and justice discourse in South Korea.

Visiting Doctoral Fellow Rahmat Baloch will present his research in progress at the first fall 2021 meeting of Conflict, Violence and Security Workshop.

Doctoral Affiliate Joseph Tyler Lovell, Graduate Affiliate Nathan Trin-Tranh and Professor Charli Carpenter presented a paper this Spring on the impact of the cluster munitions treaty on non-party states at the Conflict, Violence and Security working group. The working paper, “Beyond Compliance: The Effects and Effectiveness of the Cluster Munitions Treaty” examines shifts in both behavior and rhetoric and argues that treaties have impacts that go beyond legally binding signatories.

The increasing convergence of criminal law and immigration law often disadvantages immigrants, but there is little information as to what the public thinks about refugee applicants who are somehow affiliated with human rights violations abroad. Through a nationally representative survey study, we examine public opinion on granting immigration benefits to individuals working in different roles within a Taliban prison camp. Our analysis shows that concerns about culpability for wrongdoing commonly associated with a criminal justice framework, particularly an international criminal justice framework, could lead to a more generous attitude towards immigrants affiliated with violence abroad than current policies suggest. The findings underscore the dilemmas of determining which immigrants from war torn countries should be offered immigration benefits, complexities that law and policy related to denying safe haven should better consider.

Do concerns about appearing racist matter in international politics? What is the impact of such concerns, if any, on US foreign policy? These questions are especially timely in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests, the proliferation of white supremacist groups in the US, and increased Sino-American competition for allies in the Global South. International Relations (IR) has little to say about these timely questions even as it has examined similar reputational concerns, such as those about appearing irresolute. This paper combines the reputation literature in international security with interdisciplinary studies of race to articulate a racial reputational account that addresses these questions. It fleshes out the main elements of the reputational concern of appearing racist. It then explains how under specific conditions this concern shapes US foreign policy by (1) leading to rhetorical reputation management that aims to burnish the country’s racial reputation as anti-racist or at least non-racist; and (2) by providing incentives to refrain from behaviors seen as racist by the relevant audience. The paper illustrates these arguments in two case studies: the Korean War (1950-53) and the first two Taiwan Strait Crises (1954-55 and 1958). It shows that racial reputational concerns reinforced US nuclear non-use, because nuclear bombing was widely seen as racist in Asia after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These concerns also nudged US decisionmakers to launch information campaigns to improve the United States’ racial reputation, a key issue in the Cold War competition with Communists for Asian allies. The paper concludes with promising future research avenues.

In this chapter, I show that there is a significant amount of variation in cooperation between elite groups within the transnational drone advocacy network, despite a general common interest in advocating on the issue. These disagreements primarily center around whether armed drones are an issue of policy, or one of technology. While interrelated, these frames are distinct and carry with them different policy implications. I argue that these fights over elite frames correlate with variation in partnerships at the transnational level – and subsequently with missed opportunities for joint drone activism. I zoom into a specific network cluster in which we can find sustained, heterogenous cooperation: the European Forum on Armed Drones (EFAD). Upon close analysis, I show that this coalition was only able to reach a clear call-to-action after the smaller, less powerful actors first de-radicalized their political goals. In line with studies that find reputation-maintenance as a key obstacle to the transformative power of INGOs, I find that this dampening effect extends to smaller peace groups when they partner with these gatekeepers. This study draws on an original database of over 200 drone advocacy documents as well as field site visits and in-depth interviews with transnational drone activists.

What impact does women’s participation in armed violence have on the likelihood that violence will be carried out in compliance with the laws of war? Several areas in IR scholarship, including the study of the resort to war, and the study of peacekeeping effectiveness, suggest a connection between the empowerment and participation of women with more pacifist outcomes. However, we know very little about whether the participation of women in interstate or civil conflict, while such conflict is active, might have a moderating effect through international rules and laws meant to mitigate the impact of violence on civilians. Preliminary studies on wartime sexual violence and violent women cast doubt on this hypothesis but have not yet been extended to study the effects of international humanitarian law on state militaries or armed groups. Using non-state armed groups as a hard case for war law compliance, we explore this hypothesis through two preliminary analyses: first, whether the presence or proportional representation of women in armed groups correlates with less civilian victimization by those groups generally and in light of international law that prohibits that targeting of civilians; second, whether any such correlation extends beyond the targeting of civilians per se to other war law violations particularly likely to affect children and other civilians, including prohibitions against landmines, child soldiering, and sexual violence. Our findings will contribute to knowledge about the conditions under which war crimes are likely to be perpetrated during armed conflict and whether women have a pacifying effect on the way that wars are fought.

This paper outlines how the concept of weaponized interdependence can be applied to the human rights regime, highlighting the disproportionate ideological location of powerful western liberal democracies in that regime and the way in which this confers disproportionate power onto these states. We discuss ways in which such states may attempt to use their ideational centrality to exercise productive power over regime norms to suit their material interests. Next, discuss why this strategy often fails given the way in which weaker actors can use ideational, institutional and technological leverage to disrupt ideational choke-points with reverse-panopticon effects of their own. We illustrate the plausibility of this model with case studies of two decades of recent US foreign policy under three different US Presidents.