In the context of nationalist and ethnic struggles, framing refers to strategic communication aimed at changing perceptions and behavior, such as persuading members of a group to unite and fight or their opponents to demobilize. The concept and theory behind framing stem from sociology, and in particular American social movements theory, where they have helped reconcile an interest in the construction of identities and “meaning work” with the study of structures that favor participation in collective endeavors. Framing not only unpacks the processes behind this form of strategic communication through notions such as alignment and resonance, but it has also produced extensive scholarship on types of frames that foster mobilization and the socio-psychological keys they play upon in so doing. Framing theory has also focused on some of the elements contributing to the success—or lack thereof—of communication aimed at persuasion.
Considering that participation in crises and conflicts is an extreme form of mobilization, framing has, since the mid-2000s, made headway in conflict studies, where scholars have turned to framing processes to shed light on how people can be convinced to rally around the nationalist or ethnic flag and even take up arms in their group’s name. More recently, framing-centric approaches have been used to shed light on frames deployed in conflicts of a religious nature, as well as in the study of radicalization and the ideological or ideational framing behind it. The future of framing theory with regards to identity-based conflicts depends, however, on scholars’ ability to produce framing concepts and theoretical insights specific to conflict studies able to federate the community or researchers adopting the approach to study armed violence. As growing research on armed conflict turns to understanding the links between national and local realities, framing theorists may in addition benefit from greater attention to local frames and framing dynamics, and how they relate to the broader, elite-driven frames more commonly focused on in the study of armed violence. Finally, though so far little explored, framing proponents may stand to gain from engaging with literature using survey experiments or other promising quantitative approaches that have also sought to generate insights into ethnic relations or government representation and policy regarding crises and war.
Article
Conflict and Nationalist Frames
Marie-Eve Desrosiers
Article
Great-Power Competition
Jonathan M. DiCicco and Tudor A. Onea
Great-power competition (GPC) is a touchstone for strategists and policymakers. Its popularity stems from perceptions of China’s rise, Russia’s resurgence, and the United States’ relative decline. The term’s notoriety in policy circles is related to its use in U.S. national defense and strategy guidance documents. Sometimes GPC is dismissed as a buzzword, but it is a distinctive phenomenon that deserves scholarly investigation.
GPC is a classic feature of modern international relations grounded in a traditional power politics approach. Specifically, GPC is a permanent, compulsory, comprehensive, and exclusive contest for supremacy in a region or domain among those states considered to be the major players in the international system. The contest varies in intensity over time and space but remains a persistent aspect of the international system of sovereign states.
Great powers field uncommonly large, sophisticated, and diversified capabilities and compete for high stakes; their competitive behavior is endemic to a stratified system in which select states are recognized as having special status. That status imparts to members of the great-power club privileges and responsibilities, including collective action to address system-wide problems. However, the competition over power, security, and status among the great powers is always present.
GPC is often parsed into analytically separable dimensions (military, economic, scientific–technological, and so on), but in practice such dimensions are interrelated. Together with the great powers’ extraordinary capabilities and interests, the interdependence of these dimensions of competition tends to push GPC to be comprehensive. GPC is sometimes treated as something other than war, but when GPC intensifies, the possibility of major war looms.
Patterns of GPC are identified through the lens of competing schools of thought on power politics: balance of power and hegemonic–power transition. Each provides a general framework in which GPC may be located. Scholars, however, should not confine their investigations to such frameworks; novel scholarship is warranted to further develop the concept of GPC, to characterize it and theorize about its dynamics, to further study it empirically, and to scrutinize it through critical lenses.
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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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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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Peace, Pacifism, Nonviolence: 21st Century Developments
Aidan Gnoth and Richard Jackson
Despite the achievements of pacifist and nonviolent movements in influencing the course and nature of international politics over the last century or more, and despite obvious theoretical overlaps and connections, pacifism and nonviolence have largely been excluded from contemporary theories and practices of peace. Instead, the dominant conception of peace in both international relations and peace and conflict studies has been of “negative peace” narrowly defined as the absence or management of large-scale political violence. In this conception, states, militaries, and international organizations are viewed as essential to the maintenance of peace, which are primarily associated with stability, law and order, and strong public institutions. Some attempts to expand the conception of peace beyond a negative value have occurred, including the rise of critical peace building in the early 2000s and new mainstream frameworks of peace studies such as quality peace, the peace continuum, world peace, and varieties of peace. Upon examination, it can be argued that these approaches remain rooted in a state-centric, militaristic paradigm, or they problematically fail to go beyond descriptive analysis. Few, if any, take nonviolence and pacifism seriously and seek to radically transform the existing violent state-based international order. Nevertheless, the present historical juncture provides an opportune moment for rethinking the theory and practice of peace and for seeking to transform politics and political theory away from states, militarism, and the values of “negative peace” toward nonviolent, pacifistic, social justice–based forms of “positive peace.” Notwithstanding a number of conceptual and practical obstacles, existing conceptions of agonistic peace, feminist peace, and decolonial peace, among others, as well as expanding interest in the field of nonviolent resistance, provide an important foundation for advancing this important objective.
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Risk Preferences and War
Christopher Schwarz and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
Despite a long legacy within the study of international politics, risk preference remains an understudied source of behavioral variation. This is most apparent within the study of violent conflict, which, being inherently risky, might be naturally explained by variation in the preferences of the actors involved. Rather than taking this seemingly obvious route, much of the formal theoretic literature continues to assume that the actors under consideration are either risk neutral or risk adverse. This blind spot is troubling since the effects of variables on outcomes generally reverse when risk preferences move from adverse to seeking, a generally unrecognized scope condition for many theoretical results. There are three central reasons why risk preferences have been neglected within the recent literature despite their theoretical and empirical importance. First, there is a sociological pathology within the field where the seeming obviousness of risk preference as an explanation for war has led to its lack of attention. Second, many formal applications of risk preference become quickly intractable, indicating a deficiency in the formal architecture available to modelers. Third, until recently, risk preferences have generally been assumed rather than explained, with this theoretical underdevelopment leading to intellectual discomfort in the use of the concept. Under the shadow of these problems, the study of risk preference as an explanation for war has gone through three intellectual periods. Starting in the late 1970s, the concept of risk preference was introduced to the field and applied widely to the phenomenon of war. This cumulative development abruptly ended in the early 1990s with the wide adoption of prospect theory and the undue dismissal of risk preference as a nonrationalist explanation for war. Under these conditions, the field bifurcated into two more or less isolated groups of scholars: political psychologists using nonformal versions of prospect theory and heuristic definitions of risk preference, on the one side, and rationalistic formal modelers universally assuming risk-neutral or risk-averse preferences, on the other. By the early 2000s, the wave of informal applications of prospect theory began to subside, carrying with it the use of risk preference as an explanation for war. By 2010, the concept had all but disappeared from the literature. Following this decade of silence, the concept of risk preference was reintroduced to the field in the early 2020s and has been demonstrated to explain some of the major empirical findings from 1990 to 2020. This reintroduction holds the potential for providing unified theoretical foundations for increasingly wide swaths of the conflict literature and may provide a rich basis for the derivation of novel empirical implications.
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The Sources of International Disorder
Aaron McKeil
Debates on the decline and future of the “liberal” international order have produced increasing interest in the concept and sources of disorder in world politics. While the sources of disorder in world politics remain debated and pluralistic, the concept is increasingly used with more analytical clarity and theoretical interest. This growing research on the intended and unintended sources of disorder in world politics contributes to advancing thinking about the problem and future of international order in world politics.
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Terrorist Targeting in Theory and Practice
Max Abrahms and Joseph Mroszczyk
Terrorist groups exhibit wide variation in their targeting strategies, particularly the extent to which they engage in indiscriminate violence against civilian targets as opposed to more selective violence against military and other government targets. Differences in target selection are evident not only between militant groups but also within them over time. The academic literature on conflict primarily uses three lenses—the Strategic, Ideological, and Organizational Models—to explain terrorist targeting behavior. The Strategic Model views terrorist groups as rational actors that select targeting strategies based on their perceived ability to achieve desired political outcomes. The Ideological Model explains terrorist targeting strategies by examining a group’s political or religious foundation as the source of target selection decision-making. The Organizational Model attributes variation in targeting strategies to intra-organizational dynamics, namely the principal–agent problem, where terrorist operatives often engage targets in defiance of leadership preferences. Each approach has various benefits and drawbacks both theoretically and empirically. These three lenses of explaining terrorist targeting behavior suggest different counterterrorism approaches. The study of terrorist targeting strategies is complicated by multiple methodological limitations such as the availability of data, selection bias, and definitional challenges, all of which are common in the study of militant group dynamics more broadly.
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The Strategic Model of Terrorism
Max Abrahms and Joseph Mroszczyk
Within political science, the strategic model is the dominant paradigm for understanding terrorism. The strategic model of terrorism posits that people turn to terrorism because of its effectiveness in pressuring government concessions. The strategic model Is a specific type of rational actor model with intellectual roots in bargaining theory, which emphasizes in the field of international relations how violence enhances the credibility of threats under anarchy, elevating the odds of government compliance. The strategic model is stronger theoretically than empirically. Terrorism indeed enhances the credibility of threats by demonstrating that nonstate actors possess the will and means to inflict physical pain for political noncompliance. Under anarchy, targets cannot otherwise be certain that aggrieved nonstate actors have the ability and intent to impose physical costs for maintaining the political status quo; the use of terrorist violence against civilians enhances the credibility of the threat by leaving no doubt that withholding concessions to the perpetrators will be costly. Although terrorism enhances the credibility of the threat under anarchy, the empirical record demonstrates that terrorist violence is generally ineffective—even counterproductive—at coercing government concessions. Not only is terrorism highly correlated with political failure, but this form of violence appears to lower the likelihood of government compliance, often by empowering hardliners most opposed to political accommodation. This finding holds across a variety of methodological approaches, raising questions about why terrorism underperforms as a coercive tactic despite enhancing the credibility of nonstate threats.
