Scholars and practitioners of international relations (IR) are paying special attention to three significant ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) and big data (BD) are transforming IR, against a background of earlier debates among IR scholars about the effect of technology on the field.
First, AI and BD have emerged as arenas of interstate, mostly great power competition. In this context, scholars suggest, AI and BD are important because an effective use of AI and BD adds significantly to military and economic power. The current competition in these fields, between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, brought scholars to highlight at least four ways in which AI and BD are important: (a) Automating decisions about the use of nuclear force could affect nuclear stability, but scholars still cannot agree in what direction; (b) The central role played by the private sector. This, as opposed to the Cold War era, when the state played the leading role in the development of technology ; (c) the gap between the current two great powers in these technologies is narrow, in contrast to the significant gap in favor of the United States during the Cold War; and (d) the wave of new technologies, including AI, makes weapons systems cheaper and more available for smaller powers and political entities, thus offering a possible curb on the dominance of great powers.
Second, AI and BD are expected to affect national decision-making in the areas of foreign and security policies. Here, scholars highlight three possible transformations: (a) AI will allow states a path for better decision-making on security and foreign policy matters, through the optimization and speeding of existing policy processes; (b) the technology will omit some of the human shortcomings in decision-making, further optimizing the policy process; and (c) AI will be able to offer predictions about policies of other actors in the international system and create effective simulations to help manage crises.
Finally, the inclusion of AI and BD in weapons systems, most notably the development of lethal autonomous weapons systems, brings the promise (or horror) of greater efficiency and lethality but also raises significant ethical questions. AI and BD are also affecting other arenas of interstate conflict including the cyber domain and information warfare.
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International Relations, Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence
Ehud Udi Eiran
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Interventions/Uses of Force Short of War
Brandon C. Prins
Studying the initial steps of the militarized conflict process may help to better uncover regularized patterns that produce dangerous encounters and decision processes in world politics. An understanding of armed conflict short of war is essential if the international community hopes to prevent conflict escalation and contagion. Interstate war is increasingly viewed as the outcome of a complex decision-making process rather than of a single policy choice that commits a nation from peace to war. In this vein, examining lower-level violent conflict offers three immediate benefits. First, it increases the number of observations for empirical analysis. The second reason for is that wars typically begin as nonviolent disagreements over contentious issues. Third, examining low-level militarized conflict helps avoid, or at least helps to minimize, selection effects. In addition, recent scholarship on foreign policy decision making resulting in violent interstate conflict goes in two very different and possibly incompatible directions. First, theoretical and empirical attention to enduring rivalry suggests that lasting perceptions of threat between states establish an environment of mistrust and fear, which inhibits the resolution of contentious issues. A second research program defines the use of force as part of a larger bargaining process over the allocation of scarce resources.
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Israeli Foreign Policy
Aviad Rubin
The main principles of Israeli foreign policy emerged during the pre-state period and were shaped by Zionist ideology and the lessons of the Holocaust. The primary goal of this policy was, and still is, to secure a sovereign Jewish state in the land of Israel, and a safe haven for world Jewry. Another dominant factor in the shaping of the foreign policy of Israel was the need to encounter the country’s challenging geostrategic situation—small territory; lack of natural resources, until the discovery of natural gas depots in water in the Israeli exclusive economic zone during the last decade; fragile Jewish communities around the world; and a hostile neighborhood. Combined together, these considerations are the issues that rank high on the agenda of Israeli foreign policy and affect Israel’s relationship with the international community, ranging from the global superpowers to third world countries. After maintaining a relatively steady foreign policy program throughout the 20th century, in the 21st century the state made some significant policy shifts, especially under Benjamin Netanyahu’s consecutive governments. These included a halt in Israeli–Palestinian negotiations for peace; a high-profile campaign against Iran’s nuclear weapons program; more emphasis on the maritime domain; and strengthening ties with illiberal leaders around the world. In 2021, the seeming epilogue of Netanyahu’s tenure as prime minister leaves an open question about the relative weight of structural and ideational factors vs. powerful political agents in the design of Israel’s foreign policy.
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Issues in Data Collection: International Conflict
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, Kyle Beardsley, and Sara M. T. Polo
Conflict data sets can shed light on how different ways of measuring conflict (or any other international relations phenomenon) result in different conclusions. Data collection procedures affect our efforts to answer key descriptive questions about war and peace in the world and their relationship to other features of interest. Moreover, empirical data or information can answer some pointed questions about world politics, such as, “Has there been a decline in conflict in the international system?” The development of data on characteristics relevant to the study of international relations has undeniably allowed a great deal of progress to be made on many research questions. However, trying to answer seemingly simple descriptive questions about international relations often shows how data rarely speak entirely for themselves. The specific ways in which we pose questions or try to reach answers will often influence our conclusions. Likewise, the specific manner in which the data have been collected will often have implications for our inferences. In turn, proposed answers to descriptive questions are often contested by other researchers. Many empirical debates in the study of international relations, upon closer inspection, often hinge on assumptions and criteria that are not made fully explicit in studies based on empirical data.
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Jihadist Governance in Civil Wars
Aisha Ahmad
Although many nonstate armed groups try to rule over citizens, of special concern are jihadist groups that take power in conflict-affected states. Not only do jihadists espouse an extreme political vision, but these religiously motivated rebels also have an uncanny ability to rout and even overthrow incumbent governments. Whenever possible, jihadists will try to seize control of the entire state and replace incumbents with a new regime. If decisive military victory is not possible, they will seek control over pockets of territory and will build rudimentary proto-states within official state boundaries. Jihadist insurgents are not only motivated to fight, but are also very keen to govern over territory and people. In their mission to build alternative forms of order, they therefore collect taxes, enforce laws, and even offer rudimentary public services. In many conflict zones, jihadists are able to build stronger social contracts with citizens than the official government.
Because of this success, many scholars and practitioners have erroneously assumed that jihadists must be spreading their ideologies to local communities, and thus converting citizens to their extremist beliefs. This analysis fundamentally misdiagnoses why jihadists are able to establish parallel forms of order in civil wars. Jihadists do not succeed in areas where communities have converted to extremism; rather, they thrive in regions where the official government has catastrophically failed to provide citizens with security, order, justice, and other basic services. Evidence from multiple cases shows that government corruption, ineptitude, and abuse—not extremism or ideological radicalization—best explain the rise of jihadist governance in conflict zones. It is not that local communities are enamored with the idea of jihadist rule; rather, they are disgusted and outraged by their incumbent governments.
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Jus ad Bellum
Caron E. Gentry
Alex J. Bellamy's Just Wars: From Cicero to Iraq (2006), Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars (1977), and Larry May's Aggression and Crimes Against Peace (2008) are three significant works on Just War thinking that offer unique perspectives on the different facets of jus ad bellum. Bellamy's book is a historical examination of the evolution of Just War thinking. Walzer's book is a classic and a crucial component of the Just War canon; this book brought Just War considerations back into political conversations. While classical Realism dominated the post-World War II political landscape for its own moral contemplations towards war and power, it was not able to speak to the anti-Vietnam agonism. Walzer purposefully set out to speak to these considerations in a frankly philosophical framework, one rooted in historical thought and examples. May has a unique voice within the Just War tradition— his starting point is a form of pacifism. Although this is somewhat controversial, it is not without precedence. One of the key pieces on nuclear weapons is the 1983 letter from the US Catholic Bishops that placed the Just War tradition within a pacifist framework. Similarly, May has set out to examine how this ancient tradition can fit the needs of the current international arena, particularly in light of humanitarian intervention.
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Kurdish Politics in the Global Context
Serhun Al
Kurds are considered to be one of the largest ethnic groups in the world—with a population of more than 30 million people—who do not have their own independent state. In the Middle East, they are the fourth largest ethnic group after Arabs, Persians, and Turks. The statelessness of such a major group with an increasing ethnic and national consciousness in the post-Ottoman world led to their traumatic insecurities in the hands of majority-led nation-states that used modern technologies of social engineering including displacement, dehumanization, assimilation, and genocidal acts throughout the 20th century. With the memory of such traumatic insecurities, the driving force of contemporary Kurdish nationalism in the Middle East has primarily been the question of state or state-like entities. Yet, Kurds are not a homogeneous group with a collective understanding of security and self-government. Rather, there are political-organizational rivalries within Kurds across Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran. Thus, it is important to understand the multifaceted Kurdish politics in the Middle East within a global-historical perspective where global power rivalries, regional geopolitics, and intra-Kurdish organizational competition are interwoven together. While the opportunities for Kurdish self-determination were missed in the early 20th century, resilient Kurdish political organizations emerged within the bipolar international context of the Cold War. The American hegemony in the post–Cold War era transformed the Kurdish political status in the geopolitics of the Middle East, where the 1991 Gulf War, the 2003 Iraq War, and the broader war on terror provided the Kurds with many political opportunities. Finally, the shifting regional and global alliances in the post–Arab Spring era—where the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has become the global nemesis—created new political opportunities as well as significant threats for the Kurds.
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The Latin American Long Peace
Nicolás Terradas
Latin America is often hailed as “the most peaceful region in the world.” In both academic and policy circles, this view has taken root under the common perception of the region as a “zone of peace” where war and interstate armed conflict have largely disappeared and are now unthinkable. The region, however, continues to showcase high levels of intra-state violence despite the absence of war among states. In the IR academic debate of the long peace in Latin America, as well, several areas of discord and intense disagreement among the multiple works continue to challenge any encompassing explanations for this rather paradoxical regional phenomenon. In this context, for those interested in conducting further research in this area, there still is plenty of space for making meaningful contributions to both the theoretical study of regional peace dynamics as well as the unravelling of Latin America’s paradoxical coexistence of intra-state violence amid enduring inter-state peace.
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The Law of Genocide
Robert Weiner
Genocide is described as the most extreme form of crime against humanity; Winston Churchill even called it the “crime with no name.” The word “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who embarked on a mission to persuade the international community to accept genocide as an international crime under international law. In 1946, the first session of the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring genocide as a crime under international law. This resolution became the basis for the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, introduced in 1948. However, it would take another fifty years before the Genocide Convention would establish an International Criminal Court that would prosecute international war criminals. In the 1990s, special ad hoc tribunals were created for Yugoslavia and Rwanda to deal with international crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. In reaction to the failure of the international community to deal with genocide in Rwanda, a great deal of emphasis has been placed on the norm of “the Responsibility to Protect.” The Genocide Convention was tested in the case brought by Bosnia and Herzegovina against Serbia (originally Serbia and Montenegro) in 1993. It was the first time in history that a sovereign state was placed on trial for the commission of genocide. The implications and ramifications of the International Court of Justice’s ruling that the Serbian government did not commit genocide in Bosnia became a subject of considerable debate among legal scholars.
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Liberal Peacebuilding and Its Critiques
Pol Bargués
Critical perspectives not only evaluate and assess critically the wrongs of peace operations but also open new avenues for peacebuilding. At their best, critiques become lessons learned, sources of inspiration and regulative norms that contribute to the advancement of policy thinking and practice. Three imaginaries of critiques of liberal peace stand out: a locally driven peace that emerges from below; nonlinear interventions to tackle different aspects of crises ; and indirect forms of facilitation and strengthening resilience. Scholarly critiques have been influential in pushing the practice of peace operations away from the top-down, short-term, and direct mechanisms of governance of the liberal peace.
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The Media and Postmodern Conflict
Chiara de Franco
Contemporary conflicts and warfare are invariably connected to some recurrent elements: globalization; the decline of the State; the emergence of transnational relations, both cultural and economic; late capitalism; post-industrialism; the end of ideologies and metaphysics; and the rise of the “society of spectacle” and the information age. These elements are all generally recognized as being the distinctive characteristics of postmodernity. The media plays an important role in understanding conflict dynamics and in illuminating some characteristics of postmodern conflict. The literature on the relationship between the media and conflict develops concepts and theories which are essential for understanding the role of the media in the evolution and conduct of contemporary conflicts. This literature focuses on two different aspects: firstly, the specific activities of the mass media, i.e. the media coverage of conflicts, and secondly, the interaction between the media and the political and military decision-making processes. Following either the powerful media paradigm or the limited effects hypothesis, these works develop in the same period very different concepts like propaganda and the CNN effect. It is important to keep in mind that these concepts are the result of an attempt to clarify the existing conceptualization of the role of the media in present conflicts and do not represent consolidated categories as such.
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Mediation of Interstate Conflicts and Civil Wars
Isak Svensson
Mediation is a process of managing or resolving a conflict through the intervention of a third party, based on the consent of the combatants. It is one of the primary diplomatic tools available to third parties seeking to decrease violence, find joint agreements on conflictual issues, and transform bellicose relationships. There are different types of mediators. While mediators are always individuals, the mediating agency providing the basis for mediation in interstate conflicts and civil wars can be a single country, formal or informal groups of countries, regional or global intergovernmental organizations, civil society organizations inside or outside the country in conflict, or even, occasionally, individuals acting on their own. These different types of mediators all take actions bringing the parties together toward an agreement on the substance of the conflict or on the procedure for managing it, without relying on the use of direct force or a law-based authority. However, they differ in their motivations, styles, access to—as well as leverage over—the parties, degree of biasness and neutrality, and their ability for internal coordination. On the path from war to peace, mediation plays an important role. Mediators contribute with marginal but important tasks in the process, including the diagnosis of the problem, getting the parties to the table, finding a formula for a settlement, and helping to work out implementation guarantees as well as many other duties. In order to perform these tasks, mediators need to build trust, mount pressure, and sometimes do both. However, mediation is not the only factor and often not the primary one behind the peaceful settlement of armed conflicts. Whereas there are many structural similarities when mediating between governments (interstate conflicts) versus between governments and nonstate armed actors (civil wars), the primary difference is that civil war contexts are permeated more intensively by issues relating to international recognition, power asymmetry, fragmentation, and complexity.
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Military Effectiveness
Stephen Biddle
Military effectiveness is defined as the ability to produce favorable military outcomes per se, incluuding the outcomes of minor skirmishes at the tactical level of war and the outcomes of wars or even long-term politico-military competitions at the strategic or grand strategic levels of war. An alternative, narrower definition equates “effectiveness” with skill, the ability to make the most of one’s material resources, or qualities such as “integration” and “responsiveness.” Regardless of definition, military effectiveness is a central issue for international relations and lies at the heart of key policy debates. Until very recently, military effectiveness had generated little sustained interest from scholars. However, a new generation of academics, armed with new methodologies and analytical approaches, has begun to pay more attention to the subject. Contemporary literature on effectiveness describes three classes of candidate determinants: numerical preponderance, technology, and force employment. Despite increasing attention to effectiveness per se and to non-material contributors to effectiveness, especially force employment, many topics deserve further consideration in future research. These include maritime warfare, amphibious warfare, space warfare, and cyber warfare, chemical, biological, or nuclear combat operations; effectiveness in non-combat missions such as peacekeeping, nation building, signaling, or humanitarian assistance; systematic differences in military behavior for non-state actors, or for state actors in the developing world; and the roles of organization, logistics, leadership, morale, ethnic homogeneity, civil–military relations, and social structure, for example, as determinants of military effectiveness.
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Mill’s Method of Agreement and Method of Difference as Methods of Analysis in International Relations
Payam Ghalehdar
John Stuart Mill’s Method of Agreement and Method of Difference have been well known both in international relations (IR) scholarship and methods discussions. Despite numerous methodological innovations since the publication of Mill’s A System of Logic in 1843, the persuasive logic and intuitive appeal of the Method of Agreement and the Method of Difference have allowed them to remain a staple in IR scholarship. The utility of Mill’s methods, however, has not gone unquestioned. Claims persist that the two methods are not suitable for social science research because their requirements are too demanding.
Sustained criticism of Mill’s methods requires a sober look at their promise and potential to facilitate causal inference. Cautionary notes necessitate awareness of the logic of Mill’s comparative methods, their underlying assumptions, and remedies for potential pitfalls and weaknesses. Three underlying assumptions are associated with Mill’s methods—determinism, the inclusion of all causally relevant causes, and the independence of cases. Three core criticisms have been leveled at Mill’s methods: the inability to deal with equifinality, the narrow focus on single causes, and the purported incompatibility with observational research. Causal inference in observational settings can be strengthened by dealing with interaction effects, by specifying causal connections as correlational or set-relational, by supplementing the use of Mill’s methods with within-case procedures like process tracing, and by using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) as a similar yet more complete comparative method.
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Nationalisms in International Conflict
Cathie Carmichael
Nationalism has made a significant contribution to state formation, but also to state deformation, secessionist movements, and wars. In international relations, nationalism has emerged as a particularly pressing problem over the question of disputed territorial boundaries. Indeed, nationalist movements seeking to change or revise boundaries by either negotiation, stealth, or force have been one of the most fundamental causes of both international and internal conflict in the modern era. The case of Bosnia-Hercegovina is a classic example of a long-running nationalist conflict which has had a profound empirical implications for both the social sciences and the humanities. The massacre at Srebrenica, ruled as genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, had a considerable impact beyond the Balkans and the Netherlands. While discussing genocide and crimes against humanity in fair historical context within parts of Serbia and enclaves within Republika Srpska and Montenegro today has remained a difficult and challenging task, a growing number of scholars have shown interest in comparative genocide and the way in which events can be meaningfully compared. The case of Bosnia has also provoked numerous debates in other areas, including the role of sexual crimes in war; obfuscation and genocide denial among extreme nationalists; issues of citizenship, reconstruction, and peacekeeping; the shortcomings of the international community (with particular reference to the United Nations); and the role of international law, especially the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
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Natural Disasters and Cross-Border Implications
Elena McLean and Muhammet Bas
Natural disasters such as cyclones, droughts, earthquakes, floods, landslides, volcanoes, or pandemics routinely have cross-border implications. Transboundary risks of natural disasters tend to be the greatest for neighboring countries but often extend regionally or even globally. Even disasters with seemingly localized impacts contained within the national borders of a given state may have indirect short-term or long-term effects on other countries through refugee flows, conflict spillovers, volatility of global commodity prices, disruption of trade relations, financial flows, or global supply chains. Natural disasters may increase the risk of interstate conflict because of commitment problems, reduced opportunity costs of conflict, shocks to status quo divisions of resources, or demarcation of territories among countries, or because of leaders’ heightened diversionary incentives in favor of conflict. In some cases, disasters may have a pacifying effect on ongoing hostilities by creating opportunities for disaster diplomacy among conflict parties. Population displacement in disaster zones can send refugee flows and other types of migration across borders, with varying short-term and long-term socioeconomic and political effects in home and host countries. Adverse effects of natural disasters on regional and global economic activity shape patterns of international trade and financial flows among countries. To mitigate such risks from natural disasters and facilitate adjustment and recovery efforts, countries may turn to international cooperation through mechanisms for disaster relief and preparedness. Regional and global governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are common means to initiate and maintain such cooperative efforts.
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Natural Resource Governance in Africa
J. Andrew Grant, Evelyn N. Mayanja, Shingirai Taodzera, and Dawit Tesfamichael
Although Africa is home to an abundant and wide variety of natural resources, both land-based and offshore, the governance of such resources has faced myriad challenges. Mineral and hydrocarbon (oil and gas) resources have often led to the vexing “resource curse” whereby weak institutions, corruption, asymmetrical power structures from local to global levels, and lack of economic diversification result in meager development outcomes and can generate episodes of violent conflict. This has resulted in numerous pledges to improve governance and management of natural resources at all stages of the supply chains, ranging from exploration to extraction to environmental remediation. In turn, global and regional governance initiatives have sought to put these pledges and their constitutive norms into practice in conjunction with varying levels of participation by governments, industry, civil society, and local communities.
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Neutrality Studies
Pascal Lottaz
The study of neutrality, as an academic subject in the fields of history and the social sciences, is concerned with the politics, laws, ethics, economics, norms, and other social aspects of states and international actors that attempt to maintain friendly or impartial relations with other states who are—or might become—parties to international conflict. In this regard, neutrality studies is a subject of international politics in its broadest sense, encompassing international law and international relations. It is an open space that has been explored through various academic lenses, including (but not limited to) realism, liberalism, constructivism, and poststructuralism. Most neutrality research in the early 21st century is focused on particular periods or forms of neutrality. To discuss this topic, it is helpful to distinguish two levels of analysis. First, there is historical research that describes the observable phenomenon of neutral behavior and its related effects, in other words, specific instances when countries (or actors) remained neutral. This is mostly the domain of historians. The second level is the moral, legal, political, and ideational assessment of neutral situations, which are theoretical discussions that treat issues (including but not limited to) the underlying reasons and the larger impact of neutrality on specific conflict dynamics, security systems, identities, and norms. Ideological debates often occur on this level since theoretical assessments of neutrality depend heavily on the subjective framing of the conflicts they accompany.
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Non-State Actors and Conflict Management in Proxy Wars
Daniela Irrera
The influence and impact of non-state actors, particularly humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in conflict management and in contemporary proxy wars, has been at the core of several scholarly debates. Peace research scientists developed knowledge about actors and conditions influencing conflict management and peacebuilding at the global and regional level. They have demonstrated that proxy wars survived the Cold War and developed new features. In particular, non-state actors like NGOs, private foundations, and non-profit associations, slowly but firmly entered the conflict management system, providing expertise and new input.
International relations scholars investigate the main drivers of global humanitarian phenomena and give empirical reflections suitable for adaptive policymaking. It is commonly agreed that conflicts should be solved, human rights violations stopped, and the most inhumane implications reduced, but questions remain about the effectiveness of intervention and the legitimacy of some actors and tools.
The relevance of non-state actors and their roles in conflict management have found in the international relations and peace research an ideal place to develop theoretical and practical implications. Scholars emphasized the various types of actors involved (NGOs, local community representatives, diplomats), and the diverse techniques and approaches developed within and beyond the “traditional” track diplomacy, to conflict transformation.
Starting from the assessment of the state of the literature in the current international relations and peace research theoretical debate on civil and proxy wars, those actors who manage conflicts and the methods and techniques they use are explained further. In particular, it is first sustained that nongovernmental actors are engaged in the management of proxy wars in shared agency with governmental ones. Second, conflict transformation is introduced as an interactive technique to manage proxies.
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Nonviolent Struggle
Stephen Zunes, Hardy Merriman, and Maria J. Stephan
Recent decades have witnessed a dramatic upsurge in the use of strategic nonviolent action as a method of political struggle worldwide, pressing governments and other institutions to change policies and even successfully ousting autocratic regimes. This has led to a growth in scholarly research on the history and dynamics of such popular civil resistance movements, along with growing empirical evidence indicating that nonviolent means are generally effective than armed resistance. Such nonviolent civil resistance is distinguished from pacifism in that it is not predicated on a principled commitment to nonviolence but out of recognition that it is the most effective means of popular struggle under the particular circumstances. Some theorists of nonviolent action advocate a more pluralistic model of power than found in traditional political science literature, emphasizing the withdrawal of consent, while others emphasize a structural analysis whereby the civil resistance targets pillars of support of a regime or other power holders. There are hundreds of methods of nonviolent resistance, which can be utilized in different circumstances and in varying phases of a struggle, which tend to result in higher levels of popular mobilization and defections by security forces and other regime supporters than armed methods.
