TY - JOUR A1 - Carmody, Pádraig A1 - Dasandi, Niheer A1 - Jankin, Slava T1 - Power Plays and Balancing Acts: The Paradoxical Effects of Chinese Trade on African Foreign Policy Positions JF - Political Studies N2 - There has been substantial focus on China’s influence in Africa in recent years. Some argue that China’s growing economic ties with African states have increased its political influence across the continent. This article examines whether trade with China leads African states to adopt more similar foreign policy preferences to China in the United Nations. We examine foreign policy similarity using voting patterns in the United Nations General Assembly and country statements in the United Nations General Debate. The analysis demonstrates that more trade with China has paradoxical effects on foreign policy positions of African states—it leads them to align more closely with US foreign policy positions in the United Nations, except on human rights votes. Our findings suggest that African states are engaged in balancing behavior with external powers whereby African elites seek to play off rival powers against one another in order to strengthen their own autonomy and maximize trade. KW - China, Africa, foreign policy preferences, trade, United Nations, General Debate, General Assembly, text analysis Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719840962 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Pomeroy, Caleb A1 - Dasandi, Niheer A1 - Jankin, Slava T1 - Multiplex communities and the emergence of international conflict JF - PLoS One N2 - Advances in community detection reveal new insights into multiplex and multilayer networks. Less work, however, investigates the relationship between these communities and outcomes in social systems. We leverage these advances to shed light on the relationship between the cooperative mesostructure of the international system and the onset of interstate conflict. We detect communities based upon weaker signals of affinity expressed in United Nations votes and speeches, as well as stronger signals observed across multiple layers of bilateral cooperation. Communities of diplomatic affinity display an expected negative relationship with conflict onset. Ties in communities based upon observed cooperation, however, display no effect under a standard model specification and a positive relationship with conflict under an alternative specification. These results align with some extant hypotheses but also point to a paucity in our understanding of the relationship between community structure and behavioral outcomes in networks. Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223040 VL - 14 IS - 10 ER - TY - RPRT A1 - Dasandi, Niheer A1 - Jankin, Slava T1 - AI for SDG-16 on Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions: Tracking Progress and Assessing Impact N2 - The transition from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) brought with it significant changes in the process of creating the goals and with the actual content of the SDGs. One of the most important developments was the inclusion of SDG 16, which recognises the central role of effective, accountable and inclusive political institutions in promoting sustainable development. Yet, a significant shortcoming is the difficulty in measuring progress on this SDG 16. In addition to general issues linked with data availability across the various indicators, a key challenge is aggregating trends across these wide-ranging indicators to track overall progress on SDG 16. A second issue that follows, is that despite claims regarding the centrality of SDG 16 for achieving the other SDGs, little is known about the causal pathways from the different indicators in SDG 16 to the other SDGs and associated indicators. In other words, questions remain over how changes in SDG 16 indicators impact a country’s progress towards indicators linked to health, gender equality, water and sanitation, and climate change. Y1 - 2019 UR - https://sjankin.com/files/ijcai19-sdg16.pdf ER -