Calculating Bully – Explaining Chinese Coercion

Since 1990, China has used coercion for territorial disputes, foreign arms sales to Taiwan, and foreign leaders’ meetings with the Dalai Lama, despite adverse implications for its international image. China is also curiously selective in the timing, target, and tools of coercion: most cases of Chinese coercion are not military coercion, nor does China coerce all states that pose the same threats to its national security. My book manuscript, Calculating Bully – Explaining Chinese Coercion, examines when, why, and how China coerces states when faced with threats to its national security.

The Cyber Domain and Geopolitical Competition: Where To Next?

With much talk of a ‘splinternet’ and the emerging of technology ‘blocs’ of influence, the cyber domain is emerging more strongly as a domain of geopolitical competition. This competition features competing visions of the Internet: one, an American led Western model that is open, and another, a more state-controlled, authoritarian Chinese model. The competition between these and other models has had little structure so far and has seen a complex mix of economic, trade, security, technological and other strategic considerations.

In conversation: Eyck Freymann and Rana Mitter on the Imperial Echoes of One Belt One Road

In 1964, Mao Zedong wrote that history education should ‘make the past serve the present’ and ‘make the foreign serve China.’ Today, under President Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is radically reassessing several important periods of Chinese history, the better to serve the country’s new ambitions on the world stage.

Repeating past mistakes? The British withdrawal and return ‘East of Suez’

Why did Britain withdraw from its major military bases in the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia midway through the Cold War? Existing accounts tend to focus on Britain’s weak economic position, as well as the domestic political incentives of retrenchment for the ruling Labour Party. The speaker offers an alternative explanation: the strategic rationale for retaining a permanent presence ‘East of Suez’ dissolved during the 1960s, as policymakers realised that large military bases were consuming more security than they could generate.

Scandals and Preferences for Financial Regulation

We present results of a three-wave, six-country (Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States) survey project that investigates how media coverage influences people’s preferences for financial regulation. We test a variety of frames built around actual financial scandals, using language that appeared in the media to describe these scandals. In wave 2, we find that political frames of the scandal influence regulatory attitudes more than either non-political scandals or scandals that focus on the wrongs done to individual victims.

Sustainability of the energy sector in Jordan: challenges and opportunities

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The acceleration of economic development and rising standards of living have made energy security a top priority for policy makers worldwide. The issue of securing energy is particularly challenging for Jordan, which suffers from scarcity of natural resources, combined with the regional instability and conflicts. Based on desk research and on experts’ interviews, this study discusses the status quo of the energy sector in Jordan, its main challenges, and future aspirations.

Algorithmic content moderation: Technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance

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As government pressure on major technology companies builds, both firms and legislators are searching for technical solutions to difficult platform governance puzzles such as hate speech and misinformation. Automated hash-matching and predictive machine learning tools – what we define here as algorithmic moderation systems – are increasingly being deployed to conduct content moderation at scale by major platforms for user-generated content such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

"Someone has to be the First”: Tracing Uruguay’s Marijuana Legalisation Through Counterfactuals

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Why did Uruguay become the first country in the world to legalise marijuana in 2013? Based on extensive original research and unprecedented review of secondary sources, the article assesses alternative explanatory accounts through a unique combination of process tracing and counterfactual analysis. By tracing cannabis reform in Uruguay both as it was and was not but could have been in the absence of hypothesised explanatory factors, the article assesses the role of these factors in the causal story.

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