Does involvement in territorial conflict affect domestic repression? I argue that seeking to revise territory abroad will affect domestic repression, but conditionally on regime type and conflict severity. For democracies, there may be public pressure to deliver the good of territory. Because of this, territorial revision can lead to in-group/out-group dynamics at home, making it politically beneficial to increase repression domestically against groups seen as being opposed to the conflict. Autocracies may place a different value on contested territory, as they rely on the distribution of private goods to maintain support. While in-group/out-group dynamics may also be in play for autocracies, such states also face different types of constraints than democracies. Autocracies are more likely to use their military for domestic repression, and thus are more likely to simply maintain or reduce repression because the military is now being used abroad. These propositions are tested cross-nationally by examining repression when states are revisionists in conflicts over territory spanning from 1977 to 2001. The results of ordered logit analyses of state repression show that democratic states become more likely to increase repression when they are territorial revisionists, as those conflict-years become more deadly, while autocratic states are less likely to increase repression during the same periods.

Natural disasters often cause significant human suffering. They may also provide incentives for states to escalate repression against their citizens. We argue that state authorities escalate repression in the wake of natural disasters because the combination of increased grievances and declining state control produced by disasters creates windows of opportunity for dissident mobilization and challenges to state authority. We also investigate the impact of the post-disaster humanitarian aid on this relationship. Specifically, we argue that inflows of aid in the immediate aftermath of disasters are likely to dampen the impact of disasters on repression. However, we expect that this effect is greater when aid flows to more democratic states. We examine these interrelated hypotheses using cross-national data on immediate-onset natural disasters and state violations of physical integrity rights between 1977 and 2009 as well as newly collected foreign aid data disaggregated by sector. The results provide support for both our general argument and the corollary hypotheses.

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In this study, we evaluate the effects of alliance behavior on the probability of militarized conflict initiation with specific emphasis placed on the issues at stake in the conflict. After much debate over the relationship between alliances and conflict, recent research suggests that specific types of alliances, namely defensive pacts for target states, decrease the likelihood that potential challengers will initiate militarized disputes. Revisiting the alliance–conflict relationship, we allow the type of issue at stake to vary in order to determine whether this deterrent effect holds even when the most salient of issues are under contention. Specifically, we introduce indicators for whether the two states are competing over territorial issues, a high-salience stake that is particularly conflict-prone. Using a number of different indicators for territorial competition and examining several different time periods, analyses suggest that targeted defensive alliances do indeed have a deterrent effect against named adversaries, even when the most salient of issues are at stake.