Conclusion

This concluding chapter highlights the lessons from the empirical exploration of homelands and their contraction. It reevaluates how one identifies territorial partitions and reassesses the question of whether partitions can be used to resolve conflict. Partitions can succeed in resolving nationalist conflicts where beliefs about the homeland's extent change. While drawing a new border is usually not enough on its own, contexts in which evolutionary dynamics operate on homelands are more likely to experience such transformations. Partitions may therefore be more likely to contribute to peace where the society that lost access to part of its homeland is characterized by long-lasting domestic political contestation. To be successful, in other words, policy makers advocating partitions need to pay as much attention to creating or maintaining domestic political institutions that foster such contestation within the states on either side of the border as to where the particular line is drawn.

Torture and the War on Terrorism

This chapter reviews scholarly theory and empirical results concerning the relationship between terrorism and government torture. It argues that terrorism and torture are forms of dissent and repression, respectively. Recognizing terrorism and torture as subsets of broader conceptualizations common in the literature on political violence provides insights into the conditions under which governments respond to opposition activity with violence (and vice versa) in the context of terrorism. Following a discussion of the literature on political violence, a summary is presented of the behavioral incentives—and disincentives—that government authorities face regarding the use of torture as a counterterrorism strategy. I also review literature about the mediating influence of domestic political institutions on the relationship between terrorism and torture, arguing that democracy does not always constrain—and sometimes incentivizes—government torture.

War Outcomes and Leader Tenure

A growing body of literature argues that war outcomes affect leaders’ tenure in office. But disagreement persists over how domestic political institutions translate performance in war into leader accountability. Some scholars argue that the tenure of democratic leaders is most sensitive to war outcomes, while others posit that autocratic leaders are more likely to be punished or rewarded for the outcomes of conflicts. The authors argue that existing research fails to take into account two important factors: whether the leader is viewed asculpablefor the country's entry into the conflict, and whether the country features domestic institutions that make the leadervulnerableto removal from office, which varies greatly across nondemocracies. After taking leaders’ culpability and vulnerability into account, the authors show that the tenures of culpable, democratic leaders and culpable, vulnerable, nondemocratic leaders are sensitive to war outcomes. By contrast, the tenures of nondemocratic leaders who are less vulnerable to removal are not sensitive to war outcomes, regardless of their culpability.

Dependence Networks and the Diffusion of Domestic Political Institutions

How and to what extent do states influence the level of democracy and autocracy in other states? We argue that states exist internationally in dependence networks with each other and that those networks provide pathways for influence on a state’s domestic institutions. For any given state, a dependence network is a set of partner states with whom it regularly engages in exchanges of valued goods, where those exchanges would be costly to break. We find that an index of three such networks–trade, security and shared international organization membership–significantly influences the domestic political institutions in a given state. These changes are substantively large in the long run, similar in size to regional and global levels of democracy. State capabilities figure heavily in our network measures, thus emphasizing the role of power in the diffusion of domestic political institutions. We also find that network-influenced change works both ways: states can become more autocratic or more democratic.

Explaining National Behavior in Multilateral Interventions

This chapter draws on a variety of literatures to model the national determinants of military behavior during multilateral interventions. Theories of principal-agent relations point to the importance of knowing who are the ultimate decision units having the power to determine how military forces behave when deployed. One cannot know who those ultimate decision makers are without first understanding the domestic political institutions of the relevant nations. Domestic political institutions can either empower a single individual, as is the case with presidential or single-party parliamentary governments, or they can empower a collective body to make decisions, as is the case in parliamentary coalition governments. However, to understand the preferences of various principals requires understanding either their political ideology (in the case of collective principals) or how their previous experiences shape their current and future behaviors (in the case of single principals).

Open international markets without exclusion: encompassing domestic political institutions, international organization, and self-contained regimes

The politics of open international markets are frequently characterized as a Prisoners’ Dilemma, where states’ incentives to adopt protectionist policies are restrained by trading partners’ threat or use of retaliatory exclusion mechanisms. However, because Ricardian theories of comparative advantage suggest that unilateral trade openness enhances aggregate welfare, states whose domestic political institutions are encompassing – where the policymaker is responsive to a large proportion of the population and can authoritatively coordinate policy across diverse issues – have incentives to support open international markets without the threat or use of retaliatory mechanisms by other states. This explanation for the existence of an open international market has implications for theoretical and empirical research in international organization, as well as for discussions on the possibility of ‘self-contained regimes’ in international legal scholarship.