How does the size of a state’s nuclear arsenal affect the likelihood that the state achieves its goals in an international crisis? Most scholars of this question have argued that having large nuclear arsenals does not especially benefit states in crisis situations. Matthew Kroenig’s The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy (2018) argues that states possessing a larger nuclear arsenal than a crisis opponent will emerge victorious more often. As a result, Kroenig’s book is an important and direct contrast to existing scholarship. If Kroenig’s argument is correct, policymakers should pursue larger nuclear arsenals, even though doing so could potentially trigger dangerous arms races. However, in a detailed reconsideration of Kroenig’s approach, we reaffirm the conventional wisdom that nuclear superiority does not generally determine crisis outcomes. This review essay identifies central concerns with the construction of Kroenig’s argument, including both the logic he uses to argue nuclear superiority confers advantages and his operationalization of superiority. We then utilize alternative methodological techniques to more accurately test the effect of superiority on crisis outcomes, concluding that Kroenig’s findings are flawed.

Why do abortion politics matter? Feminists have long argued that in addition to the importance of the denial of access to a necessary service, abortion politics mark the continued investment in the control of women’s bodies and the construction of womanhood as equivalent to motherhood. Without contesting this feminist insight, this paper argues that abortion politics can also turn our attention to a particular valence of the control of women’s bodies formed through the practice and knowledge production of medicine. Through an analysis of the 19th century criminalization of abortion, I posit the importance of understanding women’s partial political belonging as a form of what Etienne Balibar calls “internal exclusion,” conditioned on the ways in which women’s bodies become vehicles for establishing particular forms of political and social authority. Understanding women’s citizenship as a medicalized citizenship reveals the ways that extra-political social interaction produces horizons of meaning for contemporary abortion politics that remain centrally tied to questions of health as well as a diagnosis for the continued resistance to women’s full political belonging in the United States.

Does electoral accountability harm voters? Air pollution is an invisible killer that claims more than 5.5 million lives annually worldwide. In this paper, we study the effect of electoral incentives on a critical public goods provision — air quality. Building upon the theory of the political pollution cycle (Shen 2018), we find that local politicians in Mexico will accommodate the preferences of their constituencies by engaging in activities that have short-term electoral and economic returns but would generate pollution unintentionally, imposing negative health consequences for the public. We leverage the exogenous variation in electoral timing in Mexican states and municipalities and measure its effect on pollution levels. Our paper contributes to the study of electoral incentives in young, unconsolidated democracies. It also sheds light on how voters fail to internalize the tradeoff between economic growth and environmental quality.

We all have seen the pictures: drowned children washed up on the beach, overcrowded rubber boats engulfed by the Mediterranean sea, throngs of displaced people gathered at border gates. The global migrant “crisis” has opened an unprecedented political quandary that has captured the attention of politicians, policy makers, and the public. It has also opened critical questions about our image-making practices. My discussion will interrogate the visual politics surrounding the recent iteration of this “crisis.” I will also present an excerpt of The Reverie Project (co-created with Martina Bacigalupo), a series of video portraits that provide an intimate encounter with a migrant community in Geneva. Inspired by Édouard Glissant’s notion of the right to opacity, the project aims to cultivate a sense of privacy (refuge) and highlight the political importance of the life of the mind (reverie).

Multilateral treaties’ success depends in large part on decisions made during their drafting and negotiations. Lack of support from key states, weak or non-binding commitments, and sweeping reservations often doom treaties to ineffectiveness or worse.  Challenges to treaty effectiveness have inspired significant bodies of research in international law and relations. Yet existing research in these fields has given little systematic attention to negotiations or to the political origins of treaties generally. This manuscript aims to improve our understanding of treaty-making through both theory development and empirical analysis. I first develop a positive decision-theoretical model of the factors that states consider in drafting, negotiating, approving, and ratifying multilateral treaties. The model takes account of states’ right to opt-out of a treaty and that right’s several implications: that treaty-making entails a three-stage decisional process unique in democratic lawmaking, and that treaty externalities and the quantity and character of future members both affect states’ decisional logic during negotiations. These phenomena have not been fully appreciated in either the legal or international relations literatures, much less formally theorized. I then apply these insights to analyze real-world drafting efforts. Using a novel technique, I code the drafting states’ recorded positions based on two treaties’ negotiating histories, and I use them to estimate states’ ideal points on multiple issues. My findings demonstrate that this method can predict states’ ratifications and reservations with considerable accuracy. The analysis provides new insights into how international law is created and implemented, and under what circumstances it meaningfully affects later state behaviors. Specifically, the issues that divide states differ across treaties, and I find evidence that states’ preferences for particular treaty provisions coincide with those we would expect of utility-maximizing states. That the state positions predict subsequent behavior implies that treaty negotiations yield a rich trove of relatively authentic revealed state preferences. That suggests that, in addition to fueling theory and data-generation, these methods and the insights they provide could also be used to aid ongoing treaty negotiations in the future.

It is commonplace to equate the arrival of a new conservative administration in Washington, DC with the “rolling back” of the federal activities. . We disagree with this conventional perspective, and seek to demonstrate that the equation of conservative Republicanism and retrenchment elides a critical change in the relationship between party politics and State power – a relationship that Donald Trump seems determined to nurture. Drawing on primary research, we argue that partisanship in the United States is no longer a struggle over the size of the State; rather it is a contest to control  national administrative power. Since the late 1960s, conservative administrations have sought to redeploy rather than dismantle or roll back state power. Through “redeployment,” conservative presidents have sustained previous levels of State spending or State activity, but in a way reflecting a new administration’s ideology.