This article explores the strategic decision making of armed groups during war-to-peace transitions—critical time frames during which militant leaders must reconcile their commitment to armed survival with the imperative of postwar civilian conversion. We specify the internal organizational risks rebel groups confront, as well as the menu of strategies from which they select, in navigating the uncertainty inherent in these perilous periods. Our approach broadens the analysis of war-to-peace transitions, offering new insights into the question of why rebels sometimes successfully integrate into postconflict politics, economies, and society, while at other times they forgo participation in the postconflict state. It represents the first step in a wider research program—one that promises to open a number of new directions in the study of insurgent organizations, transitional societies, and postwar outcomes.

We examine the effects of the Nobel Peace Prize on the support for women’s rights groups to highlight the roles of the positive symbolic action, “prize and praise,” in international relations. Based on psychological theories, we argue that the Nobel Peace Prize increases the support for women’s rights activists by reassuring, persuading, and pressuring people across the world. We substantiate the claim by exploiting the as-if random assignment of interviews around the announcements of the Nobel Peace Prizes. The analyses indicate that when the prize was awarded to women’s rights activists, it increased people’s trust in women’s organizations. The analysis of mechanisms implies that the prize pressured conservative people to amend their attitudes. We also explore macro-level implications, finding that the prize decreased violence against women. However, these changes are short-lived. These results imply that symbolic actions entail real-world changes; however, the question of how to sustain these changes remains.

The earliest works of political theory precede Athenian democracy—the traditional starting point of Anglophone histories of political thought—by over two millennia. More time passed between the first written accounts of government in Mesopotamia and the birth of Plato than has passed between Plato’s life and ours. And yet this “other half” of the history of political thought has barely registered in the academic field of political theory. This article seeks to “reset” the starting point of the field back to its earliest origins in ancient Sumer. Beginning then and there opens a new vista on the history of political thought by restoring questions of public administration to the foreground of the field. For while the ancient Athenians enslaved their bureaucrats and wrote almost nothing about them, the analogous actors were free and highly valued in ancient Mesopotamian political culture. It was these scribal administrators who invented the world’s first literature and written political thought. In their writings, they valorized their own administrative labor and the public goods that it alone could produce as objects of wonder and enchantment. From this vantage point, the article calls for a new research agenda that will expand political theory’s recent “rediscovery” of bureaucracy by recovering public administration as a major thematic throughline in the five-thousand-year global history of human political ideas. Understanding public administration as an integral part of large-scale human societies from the very beginning may help to counter oligarchic claims in contemporary democracies that bureaucracy is a recent alien imposition.

Big Tech companies such as Meta, the owner of Facebook, are increasingly accused of enabling human rights violations. The proliferation of toxic speech in their digital platforms has been in the background of recent episodes of mass atrocity, the most salient of which recently transpired in Myanmar and Ethiopia. The involvement of Big Tech companies in mass atrocity raises multiple normative and conceptual challenges. One is to properly conceptualize Meta’s responsibility for the circulation of toxic speech. On one view, endorsed by the corporation itself, Meta can be absolved from any significant share of responsibility for these atrocities because toxic speech is the speech of some (rogue) users, hosted but neither created nor endorsed by the company; if anything, Meta is responsible for failing to anticipate and swiftly remove that speech. I will argue that this view is misleading, as it misses the underlying forces crafting toxic speech. Meta’s business model relies on what one might call the algorithmic capture of attention, which it achieves by manipulating its users and by creating an environment in which manipulative practices of some users thrive over others. This fact alone turns the company into a co-creator of toxic speech rather than a mere conduit of the toxic speech of others. As a result, it is safe to claim that Meta bears significant causal responsibility and sufficient moral responsibility for the dissemination of toxic speech, such that it justifies its inclusion in transitional justice processes and grounds its moral obligation to act in ways that advance these processes.

Republicans too often take for granted features not easy to bring about in the absence of social capital. Lovett and Pettit (2009) consider that it is through collective political actions that citizens shed light on acts of domination. For Pettit (2012), civic vigilance is the only guarantee that “the government will be forced to remain responsive to popular inputs”. As Kimpell (2023) mentions, one of the weak points of republican theories remains the lack of an account of norm generation. I aim to show how this could occur in a way that does not constitute itself an arbitrary interference of the government in the people’s lives. The kind of generalized reciprocity which is of utmost importance for republicanism often depends on the presence of ties that connect different socio-economic groups within communities and, “where such interactions do not naturally occur, forums for interaction can be intentionally created and designed to encourage development of social capital” (Warner 2001). More specifically, I argue that such forums for interaction could be represented by polycentric systems. Furthermore, I argue that embracing polycentricity constitutes a non-dominating way in which we could promote the “resistive community” (Pettit 2012) required by republicanism. I consider that the empirical results extensively documented in the Institutional Analysis and Development framework are an appropriate starting point for designing novel republican policies and institutions that can function alongside sufficient levels of trust.

The neologism “mansplaining” captures an insidious dynamic in which men explain things to women that women already understand, assuming that, by virtue of being a woman, she lacks the man’s knowledge. Mansplaining has started to receive some attention in contemporary scholarship, conceptualizing the phenomenon and identifying its epistemic harm. My purpose is to consider mansplaining and its harms from the perspective of democratic theory. Setting the problem of mansplaining against the norms we expect of democracy—equality, inclusion, and recognition—I argue that mansplaining poses harms that are not only individual and epistemic but also collective and relational. I distinguish two types of mansplaining based on women’s expertise and experience to elaborate on its collective epistemic harms to decision making and its relational harm of political exclusion. Mansplaining poses further relational harms of inequality and misrecognition, undermining the equal social relations and social trust required for deliberation.

While a growing number of refugees is in need of humanitarian protection, most states are reluctant to admit them. For more than two decades, scholars have thought to understand this intricate challenge of international governance through the prism of collective action theory and the concept of refugee protection as an international public good. However, the specific benefits that states gain from refugee protection and that are assumed to constitute the public good remain surprisingly vague and under-specified. In this Reflection, we make three contributions to address this issue. First, we take stock of the literature and assess the evolution of the collective action theory in asylum governance. Second, we identify and conceptualize legitimacy, security, reputation, and development as four types of benefits that states derive from refugee protection. Third, we discuss the limitations of the dominant rational-choice approach and contend that the nature of refugee protection in the international realm is the product of international and domestic politics based on the contestation of interests and norms. These insights result in a series of recommendations for future research of refugee protection as a collective action problem.

The dramatic shifts in policies and practices of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over the course of its tumultuous 75-year history underscore the decisive importance of political leadership. Institutionally, China closely resembles other former and surviving Communist regimes. Operationally, however, its dynamic patterns of governance reflect the shifting concerns of a succession of visionary Communist Party leaders.