Research

How and when does aligning with great powers shape the costs and benefits that minor powers face? While much attention has been given to great powers’ perspectives, the experiences of weaker states have received less scrutiny. This paper investigates how power distribution between asymmetric alliances and their rival great powers influences weaker states' economic and security environments. Given that power of alliance could heighten security concerns for external actors, I argue that great power challengers are more likely to impose economic sanctions on members of the rival alliance camp to weaken the alliance, as the alliance's military capabilities increase. However, the challenger is less likely to initiate a military threat because the alliance camp’s enhanced military strength reduces the challenger’s confidence in securing a victory. Using a series of regressions analyzing great powers’ initiation of low-level militarized interstate disputes and economic sanctions from 1950 to 2010, I show that minor powers face a greater risk of economic sanctions by their patrons’ great power rivals as the alliance camp’s military capabilities grow but become less vulnerable to military threats.

An emerging literature debates whether leaders benefit from acting against their ideological type, which is often refers to hawk’s advantage in making peace, as exemplified in "only Nixon could go to China." Yet, dove's advantages when going against their type in crisis bargaining have not been studied much. I argue that dovish leaders are advantageous over hawkish ones in crisis bargaining because doves face domestic disapproval for hawkish policies but can offset these costs if they achieve favorable outcomes, making their threats more credible. Targets take dovish challengers' military threats more seriously than those from hawks, as doves have stronger incentives to end conflicts successfully. However, this effect depends on domestic political participation of the challengers' citizens because domestic audiences must be able to punish leaders for deviating from expected type, in order for doves to send credible signal about their resolve. Using a dataset of interstate conflicts from the Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data, the analysis shows that targets are less likely to reciprocate threats from dovish challengers when their citizens can participate stably in politics. Thus, doves enjoy an advantage in crisis bargaining only when domestic audiences have the ability to hold their leader accountable.

Although targeted sanctions are designed to address the shortcomings of comprehensive economic sanctions, such as low success rates and adverse humanitarian effects, the existing literature overlooks key questions: Have targeted sanctions lived up to expectations, and if so, under what conditions? I argue that targeted sanctions, or so-called smart sanctions, can yield better outcomes than comprehensive sanctions only when imposed on non-democracies. Given that non-democratic leaders have strong incentives to use private goods to secure political support from domestic constituents, coercive measures that specifically target these private goods are likely to be more effective against non-democratic regimes. Using the Global Sanctions Database (GSDB) data from 1950 to 2014, I demonstrate that targeted sanctions are more likely than conventional sanctions to compel policy concessions from non-democratic targets. Moreover, they are more effective at mitigating the negative humanitarian consequences of coercion. However, when imposed on democratic targets, whose leaders rely on public goods to maintain support, targeted sanctions fail to produce significant differences compared to comprehensive sanctions.

Alignment in contemporary international relations can be defined as the political, economic, and security affiliation of any country with a global superpower. Using the Bayesian item response theory approach and leveraging thirteen political, economic, and security variables, we estimate dyadic alignment patterns of all countries vis-à-vis the United States and China between 2000 and 2020. The alignment patterns show that realignments are rare, revealing a non-zero-sum nature of contemporary alignment politics. These findings have important implications for understanding the current and future world order. 

This article explores the role of market size in shaping capital outflow restrictions during periods of capital flow volatility (CFV). Due to the domestic demand, economic diversification, and central role in global supply chains of large markets, investors remain confident in its long-term growth and can reallocate capital already invested across sectors to mitigate losses. Large markets thus face lower reputational costs for violating capital freedom and property rights norms. We argue that countries with large markets are more likely to adopt capital outflow controls during CFV. Empirical analysis supports our arguments, showing that countries facing CFV tighten restriction on capital outflow only when they possess large domestic market despite the peer effects. The placebo tests confirm that the results are not driven when capital inflow restrictions rather than outflow are considered. Mechanism tests, furthermore, show that outflow restrictions significantly reduce investment flows in small markets, while investment flows to large markets are not affected. This study provides insights for policymakers and investors by highlighting the importance of market size in shaping capital control decisions.

The use of economic sanctions has changed significantly in two recent decades: Western governments have shifted from their reliance on comprehensive sanctions toward targeted measures. Consequently, more narrowly tailored sanctions against individuals, companies, and organizations have increased substantially since the early 2000s. Yet, despite the growing prominence of targeted sanctions as an instrument of economic coercion, research comparing their implications to those of conventional sanctions remains insufficient, leaving a key policy question unanswered: Why do sender states increasingly favor targeted sanctions? We study targeted sanctions as part of a broader exercise of coercive statecraft and identify their utility as complements to more costly and more impactful elements of countries’ coercive strategies, such as military coercion. Targeted sanctions force sanctioned governments to redistribute their resources in a way that results in spending cuts in the military budget. This weakening of the adversary’s military capability is valuable for governments facing rising international tensions and military aggression in contemporary international relations. The paper contributes to the understanding of targeted economic sanctions by highlighting their broader strategic value and implications for international conflict. 

Conventional wisdom dictates that a patron can reassure its protégés by sending costly signals. Are reassurance measures effective for reassuring protégé? We argue that a sender-receiver gap may exist between the patron and the progressive constituencies of the protégé as the latter's political ideology inhibits interpreting the costly signal from the patron as reassurance measures. We test this argument on the South Korean case using a mixed-methods strategy. First, we examine how the major media outlets describe security issues of nuclear umbrella and the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles using Structural Topic Models. Second, we examine the speeches of the political elites and conduct regression analysis to investigate whether progressive political elites are more likely to express the deployment of the THAAD missiles in negative terms. Third, we extend two prior experimental studies examining the effect of patron's reassurance measures on the protégé's support for the acquisition of independent nuclear arsenals and show that progressives are likely to express greater support for the acquisition of independent nuclear arsenals when the patron offers a high credibility commitment of nuclear use or promises to deploy nuclear weapons to the protégé. The findings from the the three studies collectively confirm our expectations that progressives have been less likely to be reassured from the costly signals sent by the patron. Our research has important implications for understanding the role of political ideology in asymmetric alliances and reassurance dynamics.