How do states decide to extend or withhold international recognition in cases of contested sovereignty? We focus on how religion shapes the incentives of states in making this decision, both at the domestic level through religious institutions and at the international level through religious affinities. States with transnational religious ties to the contested territory are more likely to extend recognition. At the domestic level, states that heavily regulate religion are less likely to extend international recognition. We test these conjectures, and examine others in the literature, with two new data sets on the international recognition of both Palestine and Israel and voting on the United Nations resolution to admit Palestine as a non-member state observer, combined with global data on religious regulation and religious affinities. In cases of contested sovereignty, the results provide support for these two mechanisms through which religion shapes foreign policy decisions about international recognition.

Objective: The literature on indiscriminate violence has emphasized how information shapes state capacity and determines whether and where the government employs collective targeting. This article investigates the conditions that influence the government's ability to obtain intelligence in counterinsurgencies. Specifically, it suggests that the government is more likely to use indiscriminate violence in areas characterized by indigenous ethnic homogeneity and forested terrain. These features increase the cost of acquiring information about the insurgents, and reduce state capacity, thereby increasing the likelihood of indiscriminate violence.

Method: We examine district-level data on the Russian government's use of indiscriminate violence and disaggregated data on ethnicity and terrain across the North Caucasus from 2000 to 2011.

Results: The results indicate that ethnically homogeneous and forested areas are significantly more likely targets of indiscriminate violence, and that the effect of ethnicity is markedly stronger when the district is densely forested.

Conclusion: This finding expands on previous studies by testing the observable implications of theories linking information to indiscriminate violence, and by providing new micro-level evidence for important human and physical constraints on counterinsurgencies.

Case studies suggest that ethnic groups with autonomous institutional arrangements are more prone to secede, but other evidence indicates that autonomy reduces the likelihood of secession. To address this debate, we disaggregate their autonomy status into three categories—currently autonomous, never autonomous, and lost autonomy—and then unpack how each shapes the logic of collective action. We argue groups that were never autonomous are unlikely to mobilize due to a lack of collective action capacity, whereas currently autonomous groups may have the capacity but often lack the motivation. Most important, groups that have lost autonomy often possess both strong incentives and the capacity to pursue secession, which facilitates collective action. Moreover, autonomy retraction weakens the government’s ability to make future credible commitments to redress grievances. We test these conjectures with data on the autonomous status and separatist behavior of 324 groups in more than 100 countries from 1960 to 2000. Our analysis shows clear empirical results regarding the relationship between autonomy status and separatism. Most notably, we find that formerly autonomous groups are the most likely to secede, and that both currently autonomous and never autonomous groups are much less likely.

This article analyzes Rousseau’s political theory of private property, fills a lacuna in the literature, and develops a novel interpretation of Rousseau’s apparently contradictory remarks. Although Rousseau was critical of private property, he did not advocate a clear and easy solution to the problems he discerned. Instead, he put forth a highly differentiated perspective that was principled and pragmatic. He rooted the legitimacy of private ownership in an ideal theory of republican property rights, which refers primarily to the normative principle of reciprocity. In his opinion, a balance of private property rights is indispensable to a well-ordered society and a just republic not only because it binds the state, society, and citizen together, and not only because it secures the independence of individual citizens from each other, but also because it enhances political legitimacy and reciprocity. On these principled grounds, Rousseau’s theory rules out “collectivist” solutions as much as vast differences in wealth and “absolutist” theories of more or less unlimited private property rights. Instead, his theory builds on the republican idea of private property as a public political institution. Within this ideal framework, Rousseau allows for certain non-ideal deviations in particular circumstances on prudential grounds.

Indirect rule is one of the means that central authorities have long employed in hopes of defusing communal conflict and civil war in multicultural societies. Yet very little is known about the appeal of indirect rule among the ruled themselves. Why do people in some places demand more indirect rule and local autonomy, whereas others seem content to be governed directly by rulers of an alien culture? This is a crucial question with important implications for determining the form of governance that is most likely to provide social order in culturally heterogeneous societies. Although much attention has been given to consider the relative costs and benefits of direct versus indirect rule for the central authorities, the other side of the coin - namely, the variable demand for indirect rule among the members of distinctive cultural groups - has hardly been examined with systematic empirical data. This paper presents a theory of the differential demand for indirect rule and offers an initial test of its principal empirical implications using original micro-level data from the North Caucasus region of Russia. The theory's core claim is that the middle class should express the greatest demand for indirect rule, while both the upper and lower classes should prefer more direct rule. The theory therefore predicts that there will be an inverse parabolic relationship between the demand for indirect rule and economic class. The findings are largely consistent with these theoretical expectations.