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America is a complex tapestry of laws, from the local ones passed by your city council to national laws made by Congress. Sometimes Congress passes a law to build a program, such as the Affordable Care Act, and then hands some or all of its administration over to the states. Was it always like this? What happens when a state and the national government disagree? Readers find out how these issues have evolved since before the Constitution was signed.

Dissociation from international institutions, i.e., states turning away from international cooperation and organizations, is a widespread phenomenon today. It often leads to significant tensions between the states that turn away and those that remain committed to an institution. This introduction to a forum on dissociation from international institutions reviews the state of the art and develops a framework for analyzing the impact of dissociation on relations between departing and remaining states. It centers on the hypothesis that dissociation leads to two types of conflicts between states, ideational and distributive, with ideational conflicts more likely to increase tensions between states. The article then reviews the five cases of dissociation examined in the other contributions to the forum and summarizes their main individual and comparative findings. Taken together, the five cases suggest that dissociation can exacerbate broader structural conflicts between states; that how parties perceive of conflict during the dissociation process matters for its effects on interstate relations and that an emphasis on ideational conflict leads to more confrontational relations; and that domestic politics matter greatly not only for whether dissociation occurs but also for its effects on interstate relations.

States frequently employ overt and covert foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC) to pursue their foreign policy interests. Yet there is little scholarship on the question of whether FIRCs improve relations between the states involved. In fact, most FIRCs either fail to reduce—or increase—the likelihood of militarized disputes between interveners and targets. Fundamentally, FIRC entails a principal-agent problem: foreign-imposed leaders rule over states with interests different from those of the intervener. Whereas the intervening state wants the new leader to pursue policies that reflect its interests, once in power, such leaders are focused on ensuring their political survival, a task that is often undermined by implementing the intervener's agenda. Foreign-imposed leaders who carry out the intervener's desired policies attract the ire of domestic actors. These domestic opponents can force the regime to reverse course or may even remove it from power in favor of leaders who are hostile to the intervener; in both cases, the result can be renewed conflict with the intervener. Rwanda's replacement of Mobutu Sese Seko with Laurent-Désiré Kabila in Zaire illustrates this problem.

What drives the formation and evolution of the global refugee flow network over time? Refugee flows in particular are widely explained as the result of pursuits for physical security, with recent research adding geopolitical considerations for why states accept refugees. We refine these arguments and classify them into explanations of people following existing migration networks and networks of inter-state amity and animosity. We also observe that structural network interdependencies may bias models of migration flows generally and refugee flows specifically. To account for these dependencies, we use a dyadic hypothesis testing method—Multiple Regression- Quadratic Assignment Procedure (MR-QAP). We estimate MR-QAP models for each year during the 1991–2016 time period. K-means clustering analysis with visualization supported by multi-dimensional scaling allows us to identify categories of variables and years. We find support for the categorization of drivers of refugee flows into migration networks and inter-state amity and animosity. This includes key nuance that, while contiguity has maintained a positive influence on refugee flows, the magnitude of that influence has declined over time. Strategic rivalry also has a positive influence on refugee flows via dyad-level correlations and its effect on the structure of the global refugee flow network. In addition, we find clear support for the global refugee flow network shifting after the Arab Spring in 2011, and drivers of refugee flows shifting after 2012. Our findings contribute to the study of refugee flows, international migration, alliance and rivalry relationships, and the application of social network analysis to international relations.

We examine the effect of nuclear weapons on interstate conflict. Using more appropriate methodologies than have previously been used, we find that dyads in which both states possess nuclear weapons are not significantly less likely to fight wars, nor are they significantly more or less belligerent at low levels of conflict. This stands in contrast to previous work, which suggests nuclear dyads are some 2.7 million times less likely to fight wars. We additionally find that dyads in which one state possesses nuclear weapons are more prone to low-level conflict (but not more prone to war). This appears to be because nuclear-armed states expand their interests after nuclear acquisition rather than because nuclear weapons provide a shield behind which states can aggress against more powerful conventional-armed states. This calls into question conventional wisdom on the impact of nuclear weapons and has policy implications for the impact of nuclear proliferation.

Much time and enormous amount of academic effort has gone into defining small states and their position in world politics. This endeavor, sadly, has produced very little agreement. It is therefore time to reposition the discussion. I do so by arguing that the analysis of small states should move from a concentration on ‘smallness’ to looking in more detail at the relationships in which these states are engaged. IR scholars should therefore stop defining and re-defining the concept of ‘small state,’ quite literally setting it aside as an analytical category. This article advocates a whole-hearted embrace of a relational approach, replacing the analytical category of ‘small state’ with a new perspective and terminology.

Studies of articulations between large- and small-scale mining have overlooked the subterranean dimension of extraction and ignored how mining companies and artisanal miners cohabit in places with long histories of small-scale mining and are affected by their different capacities to access specific mineral deposits. Drawing on a study of two gold concessions in Ghana, this article focuses on three factors that influence modalities of governing access to gold in such sites: the stage of a mining operation, the local socio-political context, and the characteristics of the subterranean structure. We call the combination and interplay of these factors ‘in-depth geopolitics’. The article shows how this interplay affects the strategies used by both large- and small-scale miners to work out arrangements of cohabitation and ways of governing access, control and maintenance to gold in spatial settings where both types of gold mining occur side by side. By tracing ethnographically the variations of ‘in-depth geopolitics’, this article critically engages with ideas of subterranean sovereignty, mining enclaves, state–company–community relations, and the socio-spatial characteristics of mining concessions. Les études sur les articulations entre les activités minières à grande et à petite échelle ont occulté la dimension souterraine de l'extraction et ignoré la manière dont les sociétés minières et les artisans mineurs cohabitent dans des lieux qui ont une longue histoire d'exploitation minière à petite échelle et sont affectés par différentes capacités à accéder aux gisements. S'appuyant sur une étude de deux concessions aurifères au Ghana, cet article traite de trois facteurs qui influencent les modalités de gouvernance d'accès à l'or sur ces sites : le stade d'exploitation minière, le contexte sociopolitique local et les caractéristiques de structure souterraine. Les auteurs appellent « géopolitique en profondeur » la combinaison et l'interaction de ces facteurs. L'article montre comment cette interaction affecte les stratégies utilisées par les mineurs à grande et à petite échelle pour trouver des modes de cohabitation et de gouvernance d'accès, de contrôle et de maintenance de l'or dans les espaces où se côtoient ces deux types d'exploitation aurifère. En faisant un tracé ethnographique des variations de « géopolitique en profondeur », cet article traite de manière critique des idées de souveraineté souterraine, d'enclaves minières, des relations État/entreprise/communauté et des caractéristiques socio-spatiales des concessions minières.

The quantitative terrorism literature has largely overlooked interstate relations when evaluating predictors of transnational terrorist attacks, opting to focus on state, group, or individual-level factors to explain patterns of terrorism using analytical methods that are limited to either the origin or target of the attack. In this piece we argue that this is both incongruous with the larger conflict literature and limiting in terms of theoretical impact. Transnational terrorism in many cases is more accurately considered a component of conflicting relations between two states generally hostile towards each other, which necessitates an examination of both states. We demonstrate, by conducting a series of statistical analyses using politically relevant directed dyads, that interstate rivalries are reliable positive predictors of transnational terrorism. We find that interstate rivalries explain a great deal of variation in cross-national patterns of terrorism, a result that is robust to different rivalry measures. Application to Pakistani-Indian terrorism further illustrates the cross-national results.