Russia’s 2014 seizure of parts of Ukraine, notably the Crimean Peninsula, set in motion a flurry of legal activity. Ukraine’s “lawfare” strategy, which aims to fight Russia via international legal means, included explicit encouragement of Ukrainian investors to file disputes under the Ukraine-Russia Bilateral Investment Treaty. We consider the resulting Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) arbitrations, the first instances of ISDS in which state parties to the treaty are actively engaged in armed conflict. Although Ukrainian actors have consistently won at ISDS arbitrations, Ukraine moved to formally withdraw from the treaty a year after the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022. Developments before and since the invasion point to the diverging interests between commercial actors and their home states, the weakness of ISDS as a tool during wartime, and a reconsideration of treaty-based commitments to international investor protections. We highlight the implications of these events for several literatures in international relations.

The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 sparked a wave of Black Lives Matter protests in many cities throughout the United States. Protesters’ demands ranged from constraints on police use of force to defunding and disbanding the police altogether. These have led some to worry about the possibility of a “Ferguson Effect,” where police withdraw from policing, and in particular discretionary stops and searches, with deleterious consequences for crime. Drawing on data from four cities, we evaluate whether the 2020 BLM protests impacted police behavior, and whether changes in policing negatively impacted public safety. Regression discontinuity-in-time estimates suggest that although depolicing followed the BLM protests, in some respects the quality of policing improved, and public safety was not clearly impacted. Our findings have important implications for research on policing, social movements, and structural inequality in cities.

This article uses the literature on subnational undemocratic regimes (SURs) and regime juxtaposition in Latin America to gain analytical leverage on the recent process of subnational democratic erosion in the United States. Based on a review of five key dimensions of federalism, we argue that the institutional landscape for the emergence and continuity of SURs is, comparatively speaking, more favorable in the US than in any of Latin America’s three federations (Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico). In addition to showing how federal structures are more detrimental for subnational democracy in the US, we assess how the two main theoretical approaches that have been developed to understand SURs in Latin America and elsewhere can be applied to the US.

Many academics today struggle with their role in the climate and ecological crisis. Increasing numbers take to the streets to demand stronger climate measures, not just as citizens, but as scientists and scholars. How should we conceptualize and evaluate such actions? I examine the responsibilities of academics in the context of the climate and ecological crisis. I offer a defense of academic climate activism that is grounded in membership of the academic community and its special position in the climate crisis, not in the specific expertise of individual scholars. We have a responsibility, as members of the academic community, to listen to our colleagues’ warnings, let their message sink in, reflect on it, and let it move us to action. Such action can take many forms, including collective action. In a context where such warnings are actively thwarted, participating in protest as an academic is not necessarily undemocratic, nor at odds with professional integrity.

Beliefs about the future shape attitudes, experiences, and priorities in the present. This article explores the relationship between democracy and the expected world to come. As it argues, visions of the future are an important resource for democratic politics, putting the present in critical perspective, aiding in the formation of a collective agent, and consolidating commitment in adversity. Indirectly, they contribute also to the legitimacy of democratic institutions, shaping the exercise of citizenship and the capacity to contend with the flaws of representation. The democratic significance of the imagined future becomes even more visible in today’s age of skepticism toward future-regarding politics, in which speculative modes of thinking run up against the desire for certainty and precision.

What is the role of law in imperial state-building projects? We study this question of historical significance with an empirical focus on Russian arbitrazh (commercial) courts in Crimea. We document the increase in the number of disputes that involve the Russian state and strong pro-government favoritism in court decisions. We also find that arbitrazh courts are used as a check on local political elites. At the same time, our analysis establishes favoritism toward local businesses in disputes with Russian businesses. Most importantly, we highlight that this stick-and-carrot legal politics is not only imposed from above: Local judges who defected to Russia act more favorably than outsider judges appointed from Russia toward the Russian state and businesses, plausibly because local judges want to signal their loyalty. The implication is that imperial legal domination emerges not only through directives from the metropole but also through the everyday contributions of local imperial intermediaries.

The past two decades have seen many social, political, and international relations (IR) theorists make extensive use of Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics—or how political power interacts with biological life. What has so far passed unnoticed, however, is that Foucault formulated his highly influential theory about how living populations became political objects in the context of an overarching concern with what he termed “the power to kill life itself.” This essay reassesses Foucault’s biopolitics in light of his broader discussion of the potentially existential threats posed by nuclear weapons and gene editing technology. In doing so, it invites readers to reassess Foucault’s famous critiques of both sovereignty and political universalism, while also providing a succinct introduction to his theories of power and the general history of anthropogenic existential threats. The article concludes by raising fundamental questions for political and IR theory concerning what happens when the biological survival of the human species ceases to be a necessary prerequisite for politics and instead becomes a contingent outcome of politics.

The political status of Washington, D.C., is a longstanding question in American political thought. Intervening in that debate, I argue that Washington, D.C. deserves democratic equality. Democratic equality entails that, at a minimum, D.C. residents should have the power to vote for representatives in national and local legislatures (like residents of the several states), that their vote should have equal weight to others, and that D.C.’s elected legislative representatives should have power to vote on what the law is. This ideal of democratic equality for D.C. is only possible via D.C. statehood. Drawing on original archival research, the article provides a historical overview of D.C.’s democratic disenfranchisement, outlines three principal forms of democratic inequality faced by D.C. residents, and imagines what democratic equality for D.C. might look like. It concludes by sketching a broader research agenda about the democratic injustices accorded to those Americans living outside the several states.

Democratic backsliding, the slow erosion of institutions, processes, and norms, has become more pronounced in many nations. Most scholars point to the role of parties, leaders, and institutional changes, along with the pursuit of voters through what Daniel Ziblatt has characterized as alliances with more extremist party surrogate organizations. Although insightful, the institutionalist literature offers little reflection about the growing role of social technologies in organizing and mobilizing extremist networks in ways that present many challenges to traditional party gatekeeping, institutional integrity, and other democratic principles. We present a more integrated framework that explains how digitally networked publics interact with more traditional party surrogates and electoral processes to bring once-scattered extremist factions into conservative parties. When increasingly reactionary parties gain power, they may push both institutions and communication processes in illiberal directions. We develop a model of communication as networked organization to explain how Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement rapidly transformed the Republican Party in the United States, and we point to parallel developments in other nations.

As Black Lives Matter protests swept across the United States in recent years, protesters encountered a mix of police reactions: Some news reports described police in military gear and widespread arrests, whereas others reported minimal police involvement. We developed an original dataset of BLM protests that shows that police reactions varied widely, even when comparing protests with similar messages and tactics. We then investigated this variation with a survey experiment and found that observers are more likely to describe protesters as violent when a protest is met with a heavy police presence. These findings highlight the role of the police in shaping public perceptions of violence and social movements and extend a growing body of empirical research on BLM by shifting the focus from protest activity to the impact of protest policing.

In his last finished work, The Law of Peoples (1999b), John Rawls wrote repeatedly of “our hope for the future.” In recent decades hope has become a recurrent trope in the politics of Anglo-American liberal democracies. Yet its appearance in a major work by the most influential political theorist of the postwar era has attracted little notice. Rawls’s discovery of the need for hope in liberal society represents a major development in his thought and a little-noticed departure from his previous thinking about moral psychology, stability, and theodicy. Situating this episode in the evolution of Rawls’s thought and the context of intellectual history sheds light on the wider issue of the ambivalent relationship between hope and liberalism.

Is smaller better for economic development? We argue that states’ past population size can be a powerful determinant of current development. Among states that gained independence shortly after World War II, states with smaller populations in their early years of independence had stronger incentives to adopt more open trade policies and employ larger public sectors. These policies “embedded” smaller newly independent states into the global economy during the Cold War, building the foundations for more inclusive economic institutions and greater political stability. When the Cold War ended, smaller newly independent states were more likely to have developed the institutional infrastructure to prosper in the globalizing yet politically volatile early twenty-first century. We test this argument by examining the developmental trajectories of 83 states that became independent between 1946 and 1975. Newly independent states with smaller populations during this period have had on average higher levels and rates of post-Cold War development. They also had more open trade policies and larger public sectors during the Cold War. These policies correlate with more inclusive economic institutions and greater political stability in the post-Cold War era. A comparative case study of Oman and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen illustrates the mechanisms linking the size of newly independent states at independence and their post-Cold War development.