Internationalized territories are cases in which multiple external actors cooperatively govern a territory through novel institutions which displace the indigenous state.  While traditional sovereignty is conceived of as exclusive authority within a bounded territory, these cases present exceptional cases in which territoriality is maintained but exclusivity is abandoned.  Distinct from delegation arrangements such as trusteeship, internationalization has led to 23 cases, 275 case-years, and 75 million people subjected to direct international rule since 1815.  This paper explains why some disputed territories are internationalized, rather than partitioned or placed under an internationally-mandated trusteeship. I use comparative case studies to examine variation between territories that were internationalized and those for which internationalization was seriously considered but ultimately rejected. My first pair of cases focuses on territorial settlements for the cities of Constantinople and Jerusalem in the late Ottoman Empire, specifically focusing on the 1915 Constantinople Agreement, which ultimately granted Constantinople to the Russian Empire, and UNGA Resolution 194, adopted in 1948 to place Jerusalem under a “permanent international regime.” My second pair of cases examines divergent outcomes in post-WWII Vienna and Berlin, examining the geopolitical tensions that led to Berlin being partitioned despite serious proposals to internationalize the city, while the Vienna City Center was placed under a four-power international regime from 1945 until its formal neutralization in 1955. This project contributes to literatures in international order, intervention and state-building, and imperial history by explaining where, why, and how cooperative territorial settlements succeed or fail.

When does the state cede power to private actors and what characterizes different forms of “private sovereignty”? Adopting a functional definition of the state, this paper examines cases in which state functions are voluntarily abdicated to private authorities. Using three cases centered around the city of London, I propose a typology of the relationship between state authority and contracted authority. The first type is that of “corporate imperialism,” exemplified by the charter granted to the East India Company (EIC) and the subsequent outsourcing of colonial sovereignty to the corporation. The EIC’s authority involved extraterritorial governing powers in British colonies and a state-sanctioned monopoly on the spoils of imperialism. The second case study examines the mass privatization under Margaret Thatcher. This type of private sovereignty involves the cession of functions within the state to private actors. Prior to Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister, the British Government held state authority over public services such as airways, railways, steel, gas, electricity, telecoms, and water. These industries were privatized, ceding the governance of these functions to private actors. My third type involves the rollback of state authority within territorial bounds inside of existing states. My case study for this type is the Isle of Dogs in London. In 1981 the British Government created the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC), a quasi-NGO or “quango” intended to facilitate economic development in London’s dilapidated docklands. The LDDC was complemented by the establishment of an urban enterprise zone, removing economic oversight within territorial bounds.

The three examples listed above are then used to develop a theory that disaggregates state authority along territorial and functional dimensions. Today, private or corporate actors are claiming authority over critical infrastructure such as satellites, expanding claims of private property into space and the high seas, and increasingly involved in territorial secession projects. Disentangling the ways in which the state voluntarily gives pieces of public authority to private actors leads to a range of questions concerning when, why, how, and to whom the state cedes this power, how this process is crafted in both legal and normative terms, and how the state is able to reclaim the power it has abdicated. By distilling these dynamics down into a typology to disentangle common motives and mechanisms of private power, this paper provides tools to examine other cases of private actors claiming authority over the functions or territory of the state. This analysis can then be extended to the American cases of private prisons, universities, and religious actors, as well as emerging concerns in technological governance and the global commons. Synthesizing theoretical analyses of corporate empire, privatization, and deregulation provides a new perspective of analyzing the constitutive relationship between state and private authority.

When do voters with non-interventionist preferences support war? Do historical legacies matter in voters’ minds? In this paper, we examine how framing military intervention in terms of historical legacies can have geographically heterogeneous effects on voting behavior depending on the local remnants and memory of these legacies. To do so, we analyze changes in support for the German Green Party following the party’s support of the first German military intervention since World War II: the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, a member of the previously pacifist Green Party, explicitly invoked narratives of responsibility and genocide prevention in support of his endorsement of the NATO bombing campaign. Using municipality-level electoral results from local and European elections, we exploit that the decision became public just weeks before the European and local elections in 1999 allowing us to examine the effects of historical legacies on changes in support for the Green Party following their abrupt adoption of a pro-interventionist policy. To examine the effects of historical legacies on voter’s foreign policy preferences, we focus on subnational variation in exposure to Holocaust commemoration. We operationalize this aspect of collective memory with fine-grained data on proximity to concentration camps, the establishment of Holocaust memorials, and other forms of public commemoration. In doing so, we are able to measure how past atrocities shape considerations of the exercise of military power. Our findings contribute to literatures on preferences in foreign policy, the impact of historical legacies on political behavior, and the accountability of political parties.

Presented at EPSA 2023.

The international order constructed by the United States in the post-war period is facing challenges from actors within and without: rising revisionists seek to erode the global influence of the U.S., while alliance partners are demanding increased autonomy from American strategic interests.  In this paper, I identify a dilemma in which the US must balance between the responsibilities it has claimed as a liberal hegemon and the concerns of a traditional great power.  Having built an international order upon a bargain of providing security to regional partners in return for hegemonic influence, rising challengers create an incentive to renege on that bargain: the U.S. may use its asymmetric relationships to impose security costs on allies in the pursuit of an advantage in relative power over revisionist states.  In doing so, the US sacrifices the long-run maintenance of the liberal international order in favor of its immediate interests as a great power.  I demonstrate the logic of this tradeoff using U.S. relations with Germany in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine and compare the dilemma faced by the U.S. with other historical configurations of international order.  In doing so I attempt to recover conceptual precision regarding the exercise of power in global affairs and demonstrate the range of instruments available to hegemonic actors responding to crises of international order.

Presented at the University of Tokyo, 2023.