Russia has employed the semi-state Wagner Group security company in Ukraine, Syria, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Libya, and Mozambique (so far). Wagner is tightly connected to Russia's military intelligence organization (the GRU), and its contractor, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is one of President Vladimir Putin's close cronies. Why, then, is Wagner technically illegal (and even unconstitutional) in Russia? And what does Russia hope to gain from using it--including in impoverished sub-Saharan Africa? Using the best available evidence, this presentation explores these mysteries.

In this paper we explore the question of party system institutionalization in competitive authoritarian regimes. We begin with a discussion of party system institutionalization in democracies and in conventional authoritarian regimes and its central role in the regime stability in both types. We then explore the extent to which standard indicators of institutionalization, namely electoral volatility, are useful and meaningful within authoritarian contexts.

The legacies of slavery have shaped nearly all aspects of American politics. Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen’s Deep Roots: How Slavery Shapes Southern Politics deploys sophisticated methods of causal inference to empirically identify one of these legacies: the enduring impact that slavery has had on white southerners’ racial attitudes. An important part of their causal argument is the role of the Civil War and Reconstruction, which they argue was the critical juncture when the distribution of white racial attitudes in the South began to diverge based on the prior pervasiveness of slavery.

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to increase military efficiency, but also poses unique challenges to multinational military operations and decision-making that scholars and policymakers have yet to explore. The data- and resource-intensive nature of AI development creates barriers to burden-sharing and interoperability that can hamper multinational operations. By accelerating the speed of combat and providing adversaries with a tool to heighten mistrust between allies, AI can also strain the complex processes that allies and security partners use to make decisions.

The right to vote is a keystone of democracy, but many groups, including those that were long excluded from the ballot, fail to exercise their rights in large numbers. In the United States, cutting edge research has argued that the first women to cast ballots were ``peripheral'' voters: their decisions to participate were even more sensitive to electoral competition than men's, producing larger gender gaps in turnout in less competitive districts. This paper argues that the portability of the peripheral voting thesis depends on how suffrage was sequenced with other democratizing reforms.

Dramatic improvements in military medicine, alongside expansion of veterans’ benefits, have increased long-term costs of war in the U.S. today. Military personnel return home having survived wounds they would not have survived in the past. Veterans, their families, and the government bear these increased costs of war, which are underestimated by policymakers. These trends could increase willingness to use force abroad, with profound consequences for global politics in an era of heightened great power competition.

Scholars of historical democratization have long debated the impact of institutional sequencing on regime outcomes, with most focused on the importance of the relative timing of suffrage vis-à-vis other features of democratic development. In this paper, we examine the impact of the “reverse sequence” using the case of German political development in which suffrage was introduced before both parliamentarization and liberalization. We argue that this sequence had a significant impact on the nature of party formation as well as patterns of inter-party conflict and cooperation.

There is little new in the idea that war requires orchestration or that military campaigning requires coordination. Most generations of applied military thinkers (mostly senior officers) take a great deal of what has come before, sprinkle a little contemporary difference, and rename the mechanics of coordination as something fresh. ‘Now’ is a new moment, one that faces challenges that previous thinkers were fortunate enough not to contend with; their warfare was somehow easier or less complex.

According to conventional state–society scholarship, kinship-based institutions undermine state building. I argue that kinship networks, when geographically dispersed, cross-cut local cleavages and allow elites to internalize the gains to others from regions far from their own. Dispersed kinship networks, therefore, align the incentives of self-interested elites in favor of state building. I evaluate my argument by examining elite preferences during a state-building reform in 11th century China.

After Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, influence operations have become a central focus among American policymakers, foreign policy pundits, and publics alike. Yet, influence operations remain under-explored and under-theorized in international security studies, with disagreement over how to define the phenomenon implicit in the existing literature. In this paper, I engage in concept building by constructing a definition in component parts and showing how influence operations differ from related forms of statecraft.