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.

Daisuke Furuta was the founding editor of Buzzfeed Japan, and is currently working at Google News Lab as a Teaching Fellow. He was also web editor at the Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan's biggest newspaper companies with 7 million daily circulation. He will speak to us about trends in digital publishing in Asia.

Adela Navarro Bello is an award-winning Mexican journalist and general director of Zeta, a weekly publication that is renowned for its coverage of organised crime in Mexico. Her work is so dangerous that in 2010 the government at one point assigned her seven soldiers as bodyguards after she received death threats from the Tijuana Cartel. She has been named one of Foreign Policy’s top 100 Global Thinkers, and as one the 50 most powerful women in Mexico by Forbes magazine.

Journalist and ower of Stuff Ltd Sinead Boucher joins us for a pre-recorded seminar from New Zealand to speak about her 2020 decision to remove all Stuff content from Facebook, and how the business has fared since. Would she make the same decision again? See a pre-recorded seminar and join the discussion with our Journalist Fellows.