How do self-determination groups move toward diplomatic recognition? Although recognition is the dominant activity used to understand international sovereignty, it is perhaps the most costly decision states make towards these groups. Third parties have many substantial interactions with aspiring states, building their sovereignty by other important means. I argue that our understanding of international sovereignty can be improved by conceptualizing it as a dynamic, continuous process, reflected in foreign policy decisions short of the legal recognition. I create a Bayesian latent variable model of international sovereignty, using bilateral data on diplomatic exchange, IGO voting, sanctions, military aid, and intervention in separatist conflicts. Complementing prior work on international sovereignty, my measure provides support for important theoretical expectations previously explored using only recognition as a measure of sovereignty. I find that diplomatic recognition, extant violence, separatist victory, and sour third-party–incumbent relations positively impact latent sovereignty of separatists, while concern for precedent negatively impacts it.
Recent work in international relations has problematized state-centric assumptions of governance to explore variations in authority by a range of nonstate actors (e.g., nongovernmental organizations, criminal syndicates, gangs). This forum centers on the phenomenon of rebel group governance during civil wars and leverages the concept to advance our understanding of current theories and conceptualizations of governance. The nature of rebel organizations provides a unique opportunity for researchers to expand the state-centric focus on governance because rebel actors differ from states in their comparative position within the global state system, the contexts in which they operate, and their lack of legitimizing principles that permit consistent membership as a class of political actors. These differences allow for meaningful extensions of how we theorize and conceptualize governance beyond the state. Furthermore, variation across these differences allows our findings in the study rebel governance to speak directly to the broader literature in international relations on governance by state actors. In our introduction to this forum, we detail the ways in which rebel groups have chosen to address the central components of governance through a variety of governance strategies. We then devote three essays in the forum to the concepts of legitimacy, capacity, and territorial control. In each of the three essays, authors discuss the ways in which rebel governance problematizes and advances these concepts for the broader study of governance. In the conclusion, this forum synthesizes extant and emerging work in the field of rebel governance in order to raise new questions of the governance and state building literatures. In this way, we show how investigating governance by rebel groups in particular advances our understanding of governance more broadly.
This paper considers the implications of construal level theory in the context of survey experiments probing foreign policy opinion formation. Psychology research demonstrates that people discount the long-term consequences of decisions, thinking about distal or hypothetical events more abstractly than immediate scenarios. I argue that this tendency introduces a bias into survey experiments on foreign policy opinion. Respondents reasoning about an impending military engagement are likelier to consider its costs than are those reasoning in the abstract hypothetical environment. I provide evidence of this bias by replicating a common audience costs experimental design and introducing a prompt to consider casualties. I find that priming respondents to articulate their expectations about casualties in a foreign intervention reduces support and dampens the experimental effect, thereby cutting the estimated absolute audience cost substantially. This result suggests a gap between how survey respondents approach hypothetical and real situations of military intervention.
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