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In the aftermath of New START, great-power arms control is at a crossroads. Many observers would like to see a new system established, possibly including China. However, an examination of historical arms control agreements strongly suggests that conditions do not currently favor the establishment of a new framework, because acute competition in nuclear armament is not currently underway. On the other hand, there is an urgent need for risk-reduction measures to address emerging technological and geopolitical trends which threaten to destabilize nuclear deterrence relationships. Governments, academics, and advocates should focus on this area in the near future.
Who loyally carries out the dictator’s dirty work? And which individuals actively conspire against the leader? This book explains such extreme behavior by examining the inner workings of the authoritarian security apparatus and the career pressures faced by individual officers. The unified theory accounts for participation in repression (extreme loyalty) and coups (extreme disloyalty) by focusing on organizational promotion systems and the pressures on by those at the losing end. Officers disadvantaged in their professional advancement have strong incentives to prove their loyalty to the current leadership through repression or to commend themselves to a successor regime by waging a coup. Using individual-level career data on all 14,700 army officers in Argentina, the book systematically traces biographic differences between henchmen, coup plotters, and other members of the officer corps. It finds that officers stuck within the hierarchy and threatened with forced retirement were more likely than their peers to either force their way up in a coup or detour to repressive units in the hope of salvaging their careers. Three qualitative case studies substantiate how career pressure led to extreme (dis)loyalty in Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Jawara’s Gambia. Finally, a global analysis of authoritarian regimes (1945–2020) reveals fundamental interdependencies between repression and coups, shaped by officers’ career pressures. Together, the book’s findings have implications for understanding career trajectories in both nepotistic and meritocratic systems, the bottom-up dynamics of regime survival and collapse, and bureaucratic compliance and sabotage beyond the security apparatus.
Recent research has explored how militant leaders' backgrounds shape their decision-making while in power. However, existing studies primarily focus on leaders of rebel groups participating in civil wars, overlooking smaller, yet lethal and influential, armed groups that operate outside civil war contexts. To address this gap, we introduce the Jihadist Leaders Dataset (JLD), which provides original, systematic data on the backgrounds and prewar experiences of 237 leaders from 110 jihadist organizations. The dataset covers organizations operating across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East between 1976 and 2023, capturing a broad range of actors that are central to contemporary conflicts. Drawing on Arabic, English, French, German, Turkish, and Urdu sources, we document biographical information on 31 leader-level variables, offering the potential for analyzing how jihadist leaders' prior experiences shape their preferences and the behavior of the groups they command. We detail our data collection procedures and present descriptive statistics before illustrating the JLD's utility through a quantitative analysis of the leader-level determinants of suicide bombings. The JLD advances research on militant leaders, jihadist actors, and the role of individual decision-makers in shaping conflict processes and provides multiple avenues for new research on leader-level explanations of various consequential outcomes in conflict zones, including organizational splintering, tactical choices, and militant alliances.
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 not only reshaped national security considerations but also influenced debates in the European Parliament (EP). This article examines how this external shock shaped supranational political discourse in the EP between 2022 and 2024. While crises often generate temporary depoliticising effects, we find that these were conditional and context-dependent. Based on a thematic discourse analysis of EP plenary debates, we show that support for Ukraine remained depoliticised, marked by broad cross-party consensus. However, politicisation re-emerged when the war was framed as an opportunity for EU institutional reform. Unusually, it was mainstream rather than challenger actors who used this strategic window to promote deeper integration. By demonstrating that crises do not automatically generate convergence but instead produce selective politicisation across issues, our findings advance debates on EU crisis governance. We show that even existential security shocks may strengthen coordination without prompting far-reaching institutional change.
Russia has threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons repeatedly in its war on Ukraine to intimidate and break the cohesion of NATO. Does such a strike potentially constitute a winning strategy? This article addresses this question via four waves of vignette-based survey experiments, two prior and two post Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in Germany and the United States, two critical NATO members with diverse cultural sensibilities. Contrary to our expectation, we find that public attitudes in both countries are remarkably similar and favor in the case of a Russian tactical nuclear strike not a conciliatory but a retaliatory NATO response. Moreover, public attitudes following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have grown even more hawkish.
