AGS staff and faculty affiliates are active contributors in the fields of foreign policy and national security.
See below for some recent highlights from the past few years.
Articles:
John C.W. Pevehouse and Caileigh Glenn: "International Dimensions of Democratization". World Politics 75, no. 5 (2023).
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Since the 1970s, international influences on democratization have received increasing attention from scholars and policymakers. Scholars pointed to multiple mechanisms by which international factors could influence the transition to and the consolidation of democracy. While the arguments mostly pointed to positive influences, the optimism of the post– Cold War era have given way to concern about international sources of authoritarianism and democratic backsliding. The authors provide a framework for thinking about what we know about international forces and democratization, outlining several unanswered questions. Several research challenges remain, including how to best assess mechanisms linking international processes and actors to democracy (and democratization); while others concern threats to those democratic transitions via democratic backsliding. The article concludes by calling for more integration of existing theoretical frameworks on international factors and democracy with the current wave of research on authoritarianism and democratic backsliding.
Andrew Kenealy: “The Velvet Revolution's Best Supporting Actors: Shirley Temple Black and U.S. Embassy Prague, 1989”. Journal of Cold War Studies 26, no. 1 (2024).
This article discusses the contours of U.S. diplomacy in Czechoslovakia before and during the Velvet Revolution of 1989, showing how the U.S. embassy in Prague, in collaboration with the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) and State Department, crafted U.S. policy. Drawing on recently available primary materials (including declassified U.S. telegrams, Czechoslovak archival documents, unpublished memoirs, and original interviews), this article highlights the role of the U.S. embassy during the period from August to November 1989, including how key officials, above all Ambassador Shirley Temple Black, analyzed political developments, assisted Czechoslovak dissidents, and pursued extensive engagement with the Communist government. The article provides the first scholarly, granular account of U.S. diplomacy in Czechoslovakia during the November 1989 upheavals and contributes to the historiography on U.S. foreign policy and the end of the Cold War.
Rachel Myrick and Chen Wang: "Domestic Polarization and International Rivalry: How Adversaries React to America's Partisan Politics." Journal of Politics 86, no. 1 (2024).
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How do foreign rivals perceive and respond to heightened domestic polarization in the United States? The conventional thinking is that polarization weakens and distracts the United States, emboldening its adversaries. However, untested assumptions underlie this claim. We use two strategies to explore mechanisms linking domestic polarization and international rivalry. First, we field a survey experiment in China to examine how heightening perceptions of US polarization affects public attitudes toward Chinese foreign policy. Second, we investigate how US rival governments responded to an episode of extreme partisanship: the US Capitol attacks on January 6, 2021. Drawing on Integrated Crisis Early Warning System event data, we explore whether foreign rivals increased hostility toward the United States following the Capitol riots. Both studies fail to show robust evidence for the Emboldening Hypothesis. Extreme polarization has other negative consequences for American foreign policy, but we find no evidence that it makes adversaries materially more assertive toward the United States.
Books:
Susan Colbourn: Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO. Cornell University Press, 2022.
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Peter D. Feaver: Thanks for Your Service: The Causes and Consequences of Public Confidence in the U.S. Military. Oxford University Press, 2023.
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What explains the high levels of public confidence in the US military and does high confidence matter? In Thanks for Your Service, the eminent civil-military relations scholar Peter D. Feaver addresses this question and focuses on what it means for the military. Proprietary survey data show that confidence is partly based on public beliefs about the military's high competence, adherence to high professional ethics, and a determination to stand apart from the bitter divisions of partisan politics. However, as Feaver argues, confidence is also shaped by a partisan gap and by social desirability bias, the idea that some individuals express confidence in the military because they believe that is the socially approved attitude to hold. Not only does Feaver help us understand how and why the public has confidence in the military, but he also exposes problems that policymakers need to be aware of. Specifically, this book traces how confidence in the institution shapes public attitudes on the use of force and may not always reinforce best practices in democratic civil-military relations.
Shelley Liu: Governing after War: Rebel Victories and Post-war Statebuilding. Oxford University Press, 2024.
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Post-war politics is a continuation of war: although violence has formally ceased, the victor seeks to prevent civil war recurrence by consolidating power and eliminating armed rivals. This means engaging in internal conquest, carefully making choices about governing strategies and resource allocation towards development and violence in different parts of the state. Where does the victor choose to use which strategy, and why? And what are the implications for ultimately consolidating power?
Governing After War explores how rebel governance affects post-war state-building and regime stability. During war, rebel groups establish control over communities by forming ties with civilians and implementing rebel institutions. Once in power, these wartime experiences then explain how—and how successfully—rebel victors exert control, state-build, and eliminate support for rivals. Ultimately, greater breadth and depth of wartime rebel governance help to clear the victor’s path towards consolidating power—resulting in a more stable but also more authoritarian regime.
The book marshals mixed-methods evidence from Zimbabwe and Liberia to provide an in-depth examination of subnational variation in wartime rebel governance and post-war state-building efforts. A comparison of these two cases alongside Burundi, Rwanda, Côte d'Ivoire, and Angola further highlight how rebels’ wartime activities lay the groundwork for post-war rebel party survival and the consolidation of power. Governing After War’s central insights point to war and peace as part of a long state-building process and argues for the need to pay attention to subnational political constraints that new governments face. These findings offer implications for recent rebel victories and, more broadly, for understanding the termination, trajectories, and political legacies of such conflicts around the world.
Simon Miles: Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War. Cornell University Press, 2024.
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In a narrative-redefining approach, Engaging the Evil Empire dramatically alters how we look at the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Tracking key events in US-Soviet relations across the years between 1980 and 1985, Simon Miles shows that covert engagement gave way to overt conversation as both superpowers determined that open diplomacy was the best means of furthering their own, primarily competitive, goals. Miles narrates the history of these dramatic years, as President Ronald Reagan consistently applied a disciplined carrot-and-stick approach, reaching out to Moscow while at the same time excoriating the Soviet system and building up US military capabilities.
The received wisdom in diplomatic circles is that the beginning of the end of the Cold War came from changing policy preferences and that President Reagan in particular opted for a more conciliatory and less bellicose diplomatic approach. In reality, Miles clearly demonstrates, Reagan and ranking officials in the National Security Council had determined that the United States enjoyed a strategic margin of error that permitted it to engage Moscow overtly.
As US grand strategy developed, so did that of the Soviet Union. Engaging the Evil Empire covers five critical years of Cold War history when Soviet leaders tried to reduce tensions between the two nations in order to gain economic breathing room and, to ensure domestic political stability, prioritize expenditures on butter over those on guns. Miles's bold narrative shifts the focus of Cold War historians away from exclusive attention on Washington by focusing on the years of back-channel communiqués and internal strategy debates in Moscow as well as Prague and East Berlin.
