Special Feature on Russia-Ukraine Conflict

The more that states depend on oil exports, the less cooperative they become: they grow less likely to join intergovernmental organizations, to accept the compulsory jurisdiction of international judicial bodies, and to agree to binding arbitration for investment disputes. This pattern is robust to the use of country and year fixed effects, to alternative measures of the key variables, and to the exclusion of all countries in the Middle East. To explain this pattern, we consider the economic incentives that foster participation in international institutions: the desire to attract foreign investment and to gain access to foreign markets. Oil-exporting states, we argue, find it relatively easy to achieve these aims without making costly commitments to international institutions. In other words, natural resource wealth liberates states from the economic pressures that would otherwise drive them toward cooperation.

This paper analyses Russia's military behaviour in the post-Soviet space from 1992 to 2010 and empirically tests what international and domestic factors drove decisions to escalate.

New regimes often face intense power consolidation challenges. This article examines how US military aid influences this dynamic, using instrumental variables for aid levels and proxies measuring regime vulnerability.

Many states have become concerned with Russian cyberattacks and online propaganda. The Ukrainian government responded to the information threat in 2017 by blocking access to several Russian websites, including VKontakte, one of the most popular social media websites in Ukraine. By exploiting a natural experiment in Ukraine, I find that the sudden censorship policy reduced activity on VKontakte, despite the fact that a vast majority of the users were legally and technically able to bypass the ban. Users with strong political and social affiliations to Russia were at least as likely to be affected by the ban as those with weak affiliations. I argue that the ease of access to online media—not political attitudes toward the state—was the main mechanism behind the users’ response to the ban. These findings suggest that this pragmatic view on the effects of censorship holds, even in the highly politicized military conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which later evolved into a full-scale Russian invasion.

New research examines the relationship between oil income and authoritarian personalism in countries like Russia, Nigeria, and Venezuela.

Does the threat of third-party punishment reduce intentional civilian casualties in war? This study argues that combatants anticipate sanctions when their alliances and trade networks are dominated by nations enforcing international treaties prohibiting civilian targeting. Data from all interstate wars (1900–2003) show fewer civilian deaths occur as ratifier strength increases within these networks.

Countries commonly use economic sanctions to pressure foreign governments into policy changes. Elena V. McLean and Mitchell T. Radtke ask when sanctioning states will take into account the targeted leader's political prospects—and how that calculation interacts with whether the target is an ally or an adversary. Understanding this trade-off matters for explaining puzzling patterns in who gets sanctioned and for predicting the political consequences of coercive diplomacy.

Elite cohesion is essential to authoritarian stability, yet high-level defections can threaten regimes. Analyzing 4,291 Russian ruling party candidates provides insights into elite integrity under autocracy.

This study examines how major powers strategically place troops during international competitions.

Researchers analyzed how exposure to media with a clear political slant affects voters' choices during elections. Using the availability of Russian analog television signals across Ukraine as an exogenous factor, this study examines real-world consequences.

Economic crises threaten electoral autocracies, but how citizens form perceptions and attribute blame remains unclear. This study analyzes subnational economic performance in Russia during recent downturns using over 67,000 survey responses paired with regional growth and unemployment data.

This paper develops a new typology of revisionism and then uses it to explain why Russia's foreign policy claims escalated from regional to global scope. The typology rests on three core dimensions—what revisionist powers want, how they pursue it, and where they seek change—and is applied to Russia's military interventions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria to identify the type of revisionism at work in each case.