Research

The rise of China as a global power has been a prominent feature in international politics. Simultaneously, the United States has been engaged in ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and South Asia for the past two decades, requiring a significant commitment of resources, focus, and determination. This paper investigates how third-party countries react to the United States' preoccupation with these conflicts, particularly in terms of diplomatic cooperation and alignment. We introduce a measure of US distraction and utilize network-based indicators to assess diplomatic cooperation or alignment. Our study tests the hypothesis that when the US is distracted, other states are more likely to cooperate with its principal rival, China. Our findings support this hypothesis, revealing that increased cooperation with China is more probable during periods of US distraction. However, a closer examination of state responses shows that democracies generally distance themselves from China under these circumstances, while non-democracies move closer to it.

Researchers have begun to investigate the effectiveness of a wide range of diplomatic tools used by various international and domestic actors in the field of human rights. Using new data on official visits by the UN Secretary-General (UNSG), we investigate whether and how UN diplomacy improves human rights in a visited state. We reason that UNSG visits can improve human rights conditions in the visited states for two related reasons. First, news and discussions around UNSG visits serve as focal points for the media and civil society’s efforts to improve human rights. Second, recognition and endorsement of local civil society organizations and activists by the UNSG can raise the visibility and status of these organizations, and thus empower their organizational capacity. Our empirical analysis lends strong support to the hypothesis that, controlling for the factors associated with the UNSG’s visits, these visits substantially improve human rights conditions in the visited countries.

Understanding the relationship between trade and conflict has always been meaningful, but it has never been more pressing due to rising trade tensions between today's most powerful economies. In this paper, we break new ground by first examining the role cooperation plays in explaining the relationship between trade and conflict across different theoretical frameworks (liberal, realist, and bargaining). Second, by exploring how both verbal and material forms of conflict and cooperation affect trade outcomes, we can further test at least one possible pathway through which trade and conflict affect one another. Finally, we present an updated version of the multilinear tensor regression model designed explicitly for analysing longitudinal coevolving networks. This enhanced model incorporates covariates and an imputation method to handle missing data, making it more suitable for capturing the complex dynamics of networks over time. We find evidence for a realist understanding of the relationship between trade and conflict: trade asymmetries and verbal and material conflict simultaneously affect each other.

Do state visits by United Nations Secretary Generals (UNSGs) catalyze more multilateral foreign assistance to the visited states? As one of the most important political figures in global politics, UNSGs travel quite frequently in any given year. These visits by UNSGs are often much-anticipated, advertised, and celebrated. However, skepticisms exist to the extent to which these visits create meaningful differences as UNSGs do not command material resources. In this paper, we theorize that UN agencies have incentives to provide more aid to countries where UNSGs visit: UN agencies can showcase that they cooperate with the UN headquarter there by raising their perceived legitimacy; UN agencies can also elevate their visibility in addressing issues of a global concern. We then present the first empirical study examining how UNSGs visits affect aid allocation decisions of foreign aid multilateral donors including various UN agencies, multilateral and regional development banks. We find that, after accounting for the factors associated with UNSGs’ visits, multilateral donors are largely willing to follow the lead of the UNSGs and increase their aid disbursement to those countries that received the UNSG.