Built on Borders? Tensions with the Institution Liberalism (Thought It) Left Behind

The Liberal International Order is in crisis. While the symptoms are clear to many, the deep roots of this crisis remain obscured. We propose that the Liberal International Order is in tension with the older Sovereign Territorial Order, which is founded on territoriality and borders to create group identities, the territorial state, and the modern international system. The Liberal International Order, in contrast, privileges universality at the expense of groups and group rights. A recognition of this fundamental tension makes it possible to see that some crises that were thought to be unconnected have a common cause: the neglect of the coordinating power of borders. We sketch out new research agendas to show how this tension manifests itself in a broad range of phenomena of interest

Political opportunity structures, democracy, and civil war

Theories of mobilization suggest that groups are more likely to resort to violence in the presence of political opportunity structures that afford greater prospects for extracting concessions from the government or better opportunities to topple ruling governments. However, existing efforts to consider the possible influences of political opportunity structures on incentives for violence and civil war empirically have almost invariably relied upon measures of democracy to proxy for the hypothesized mechanisms, most notably the argument that the opposing effects of political accommodation and repression will give rise to an inverted U-shaped relationship between democracy and the risk of civil war. The authors detail a number of problems with measures of democracy as proxies for political opportunity structures and develop alternative measures based on the likely risks that political leaders will lose power in irregular challenges and their implications for the incentives for resort to violence. The authors evaluate empirically how the security with which leaders hold office influences the prospects of violent civil conflict. The findings indicate that recent irregular leader entry and transitions indeed increase the risk of conflict onset, while democratic institutions are found to decrease the risk of civil war, after controlling for the new measures of state weakness. </jats:p

Aid on Demand: African Leaders and the Geography of China's Foreign Assistance

This article investigates whether China’s foreign aid is particularly prone to political capture by political leaders of aid-receiving countries. Specifically, we examine whether more Chinese aid is allocated to the political leaders’ birth regions and regions populated by the ethnic group to which the leader belongs, controlling for indicators of need and various fixed effects. We have collected data on 117 African leaders’ birthplaces and ethnic groups and geocoded 1,650 Chinese development finance projects across 3,097 physical locations committed to Africa over the 2000-2012 period. Our econometric results show that current political leaders’ birth regions receive substantially larger financial ows from China than other regions. On the contrary, when we replicate the analysis for the World Bank, our regressions with region-fixed effects show no evidence of such favoritism. For Chinese and World Bank aid alike, we also find no evidence that African leaders direct more aid to areas populated by groups who share their ethnicity, when controlling for region-fixed effects