What causes democratic waves? This dissertation argues that sudden shifts in the distribution of power among major states can help explain the wave-like spread of democracy over the past century. These hegemonic shocks lead to bursts of regime change by creating unique incentives and opportunities for domestic reforms, and do so through three sets of mechanisms - hegemonic coercion, influence, and emulation. Namely, shocks produce windows of opportunity for external regime imposition, enable rising great powers to expand networks of trade and patronage, and inspire imitators by credibly revealing hidden information about regime effectiveness to foreign audiences. I find strong statistical support for the idea that shifts in hegemonic power have shaped waves of democracy, fascism, and communism in the twentieth century. The statistical analysis is supplemented by case studies of three hegemonic shocks: World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. Departing from theories that focus on the internal determinants of domestic reforms, this dissertation argues that regime success in the twentieth century is deeply tied to rapid changes in the global distribution of power, a relationship often obscured by the vivid particularities of local transformations.

Globalizing is a key dynamic that is both impacting and reshaping the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries. Evolving with the twentieth century technological advances such as information technology, AEC firms are now capable of collaborating in a dispersed manner both on the projects and among participants. Because of the global outlook of firms, particularly to remain competitive and to reach new markets, project network participants, are becoming increasingly multi-cultural and multi-lingual. This participant diversity, both individually and organizationally, can lead to boundary formation. Though past research has explored the boundary spanning capabilities within organizations, little is known about the roles and impacts of boundary spanning, both as individuals and as objects, in global project networks. I investigate global project networks in order to assess the emergence, roles and impacts of various boundary spanning capabilities using both quantitative and qualitative research techniques. Data was collected from three different global project networks: 1) two project networks collaborating face-to-face, one was comprised of Indians and Americans, the other was identical but also contained an Indian national who had studied and worked in the U.S.; 2) an experimental setting comparing multi-cultural, cultural-boundary spanned and mono-cultural project networks; and 3) three days of design review meetings within a project network of U.S. and Indian engineers. Firstly, network analysis and grounded theory are applied in order to observe the emergence and role of cultural boundary spanners. In the second, quantitative statistical analysis is applied in order to observe the impact of cultural boundary spanners on performance. Finally in the third, network analysis and grounded theory is used to observe the role of boundary objects in negotiating knowledge. The findings have significant implications in improving the effectiveness of global project network collaborations.

This dissertation focuses on the role of non-state actors in international lawmaking and institutions. People increasingly participate in international governance through a range of organizations and institutions yet their access remains contested and tentative; often described as an accommodation but not a right. Citizens may be sovereign at home, but they lack standing at international law. I examined multiple cases where participation has become part of the machinery of international lawmaking - from regional agreements in Europe and the Americas to global accords addressing climate change. Each case shows the assertion of popular will within a governance framework constructed and managed by states. My findings thus reveal a paradigm of state architects and executors that accommodates non-state actors as collaborators and animators. This paradigm challenges the idea that state sovereignty is absolute and impervious without rejecting state dominion outright. Within a broader scholarly discourse that often presents a binary choice - either states are sovereign (leaving people with no real place in international lawmaking) or people are sovereign (leaving the international system assailable for its conspicuous democracy deficit) - my findings suggest a hybrid approach that reinforces the authority of states while making meaningful space for non-state actors. International governance thus gains some of the value of democratic, participatory models in a way that enhances rather than disrupts the existing international legal system.

This dissertation examines the United States's elite news media's hegemony in a global media landscape, and how it can come to stand for the entire American nation in the imagination of outsiders. In this transnational, instantaneous digital media arena, what is created for an American audience can fairly easily be accessed, interpreted and relayed to another. How, then, is U.S. international news, which is traditionally ethnocentric and security-focused, absorbed in Afghanistan and Pakistan, two countries where the United States has acute foreign policy interests? This study draws from two bodies of scholarship that are analogous, yet rarely linked together. The first is on hegemony and the U.S. news media's relationship with American society and the government. This includes scholarship on indexing and cascading; agenda building and agenda setting; framing; and reporting during conflict. The second is on the American news media's relationship with the world, and nationalism as a fixed phenomenon in international news. This includes examining the different kinds of press systems that exist globally, and how they interact with each other. Afghanistan and Pakistan's media systems have expanded dramatically since being freed in 2002 and they struggle daily with making sense of the volatility that comes with the U.S.-led Afghanistan war. Through 64 qualitative, in-depth interviews with Afghan, American and Pakistani journalists, this study explores the sociology of news inside Afghanistan and Pakistan and how the American news narrative is received there. There is a widespread, long-standing perception in Afghanistan and Pakistan that American journalists stain the reputation of their nations as failed states. Just as the U.S. exercises global hegemony in a material sense, the U.S. media is powerful in shaping how American and international publics see the world. Yet, while American foreign correspondents are U.S.-centric in their reportage on the Afghan, American and Pakistani entanglement, so too are Afghan journalists Afghan-centric and Pakistani journalists Pakistani-centric. Nationalism is how journalists organize chaos and complexity. While their news stories can represent an entire nation, they are more likely to harden national identities than to broker understanding between nations.

This dissertation analyzes patterns of power and influence in the context of proxy alliances between states and armed, non-state groups. In particular, I explore the following questions: Why do some states have leverage over their non-state proxies, while others find themselves at the behest of their far weaker allies? Put differently, why doesn't a state's enormous material advantage systematically translate into an ability to influence the behavior of proxy groups? Governments often find themselves stymied by belligerent proxies and drawn into unwanted conflict escalation with adversaries--precisely what states sought to avoid by relying on covert, indirect alliances in the first place. I argue that the very factors that make proxy warfare appealing to states--its clandestine, informal nature--threaten to undermine governments' abilities to exert leverage over their proxies. Governments seek out proxy alliances when the material or political costs of directly confronting an adversary are unappealingly high, driven by the logic that proxy groups can help states achieve their foreign policy objectives "on the cheap" and in a way that allows states to plausibly deny involvement in a conflict. However, the actions states must take to ensure plausible deniability, specifically the decisions political leaders make about how they will manage and oversee a proxy ally, can undermine their leverage. The decisions political leaders make about alliance design and management, which have negative effects on their bargaining power, are fundamentally driven by two related logics: the requirements of plausible deniability, and attempts to navigate the preferences of domestic political veto players and bureaucracies. Plausible deniability requires establishing as much distance as possible between a decision maker and a proxy and/or operating with a minimal footprint on the ground. To do so, political leaders often delegate authority for managing tasks pertaining to the proxy alliance to covert organizations with the security sector (e.g., intelligence organizations). However, this clandestine and informal delegation is problematic in two respects. First, the bureaucratic actor to whom the political leader delegates authority for carrying out tasks pertaining to the proxy alliance has a general incentive to ensure its organization is abundantly resourced. Therefore, it has a vested interest in the perpetuation of the proxy alliance. Second, bureaucratic leaders (as well as all of the other individuals to whom authority is delegated) may have personal, political, or ideological preferences that differ substantially from those of the political leadership. If the effects of delegating authority in this way are so perverse, why do leaders do it? And why don't they reign in wayward bureaucrats? At the most basic level, leaders have a high valuation for plausible deniability for international or domestic political reasons (to avoid retaliation from an adversary or keep things secret from domestic political actors), and powerful, entrenched bureaucracies are difficult to control. Digging deeper, however, there is a compelling domestic political story that existing accounts of proxy alliances have neglected to tell. Political leaders often abdicate authority to other bureaucratic actors or individuals--even when they may foresee the issues identified above--as a strategy for protecting themselves from domestic political veto players with strong policy preferences that diverge substantially from their own. To evaluate the explanatory scope of the theory, I explore patterns of influence in proxy alliance in a series of comparative case studies, in which I use process tracing and structured, focused comparison to assess whether and to what extent decisions about alliance management affect a state's leverage over its non-state proxy. Specifically, I analyze bargaining power in six different proxy alliances: the Syria-Fatah alliance in the 1960s-70s; the alliance between the FNLA and UNITA in Angola and the United States from 1975-76; the India-Mukti Bahini alliance in East Pakistan in 1971; the United States-UNITA alliance in Angola in the 1980s; the alliance between the United States, Iran, and Israel, and the KDP in Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1970s; and the alliance between India and Tamil insurgents in Sri Lanka in the 1980s. I compare the explanatory scope of my theory to the interstate alliance politics literature, and find that my theory not only accounts for the unexplained variation in the universe of cases, but also offers a more complete understanding of the dynamics of state-proxy relationships.

Terrorist and insurgent groups sometimes give pre-attack warnings, informing governments of the time and place of attacks before they occur. This dissertation explains why militant groups give these warnings. It also explains why governments believe these warnings and respond to them, mobilizing emergency resources and carrying out economically disruptive evacuations. Based on interviews and other historical research on the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), the Tamil Tigers, Shining Path, and Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), this dissertation argues that pre-attack warnings serve a casualty-limiting function. Militant groups give warnings when civilian casualties are politically costly for the group. Civilian casualties are especially costly for groups that depend on local populations for shelter, funding and other critical resources. These conclusions are confirmed by logit analyses of a new database of more than 3,000 bombing events. A game theoretic signaling model also predicts when governments will believe and respond to warnings. Governments respond to warnings when militants are known to warn only when attacking and the frequency of prank warnings is low. The model's predictions are confirmed by interviews of police in Northern Ireland and Spain. A novel finding is that a high frequency of pranks (false warnings emanating from individuals outside the militant group) may force militants to warn truthfully. Militants may also work with governments to create clear channels for communication, using third party intermediaries, codes, and redundant messages to set militants' warnings apart from the ``noise'' of pranks. This finding substantiates a game theoretic prediction that experimental methods have so far failed to validate: that increased noise may induce separating equilibria, increasing rather than decreasing the information in a signal.

Great power patrons frequently reassure allies of their protection, whether by stationing troops abroad, visiting allied countries, or making public statements. In the case of the United States, observers and practitioners alike have emphasized the need to instill confidence in U.S. allies. However, allied reassurance is fundamentally puzzling because it gives away a key source of bargaining leverage: the threat of abandonment. Patrons should ideally strive to limit the extent to which they are perceived as committed to allies, lest they encourage allies to free-ride on their protection and contribute little to the common defense. Existing literature tends to either treat reassurance as a secondary effect of deterrence, or to focus on understanding how patrons can reassure their allies rather than why. Studies that do provide explanations for reassurance, for their part, often regard reassurance as strategically suboptimal, and emphasize domestic political factors that drive reassurance. The causes of reassurance are thus poorly understood. I argue that although reassurance can have adverse consequences, patrons have incentives to reassure to the extent that allies have the capacity to exit the alliance. The more credible an ally’s threat to pursue outside options, and the more costs that doing so would impose on the patron, the more reassurance it will receive. Patrons thus face a dilemma, trading off between withholding reassurance to drive hard bargains with allies and reassuring allies to dissuade them from exiting the alliance. This dilemma may be mitigated, however, if a patron can make its assurances conditional on allied burden-sharing by combining its assurances with threats of abandonment. These threats are more potent to the extent that a patron faces domestic pressure to retrench from its foreign commitments, and that allies face severe threat environments. I test the theory using a mixed-method approach that combines statistical analysis of an original dataset on American reassurance and allied burden-sharing between 1950 and 2010 with qualitative historical case studies. In Chapters 1 and 2, I introduce the concepts of alliance reassurance and burden-sharing and review the literature on both concepts. I argue that reassurance is puzzling in light of existing theories of alliance bargaining which stress the threat of abandonment as a source of leverage. The “reassurance dilemma” that patrons face, however, is that withholding reassurance may encourage allies to distance themselves from the alliance and seek outside options. In Chapter 3, I present a theory of bargaining leverage in asymmetric alliances in order to identify the conditions under which this dilemma is most severe—and thus to explain variation in patron reassurance and allied burden-sharing. I posit that reassurance serves the purpose of discouraging allies from leaving the alliance; the more credible allies’ threats of exit, the more reassurance they will receive. However, patrons can make their assurances conditional on allies’ burden-sharing efforts if their own threat of exiting the alliance is credible as well. I present a simple formal model illustrating both the tradeoffs between reassurance and burden-sharing, as well as the conditions under which patrons are more likely to reassure and allies are more likely to increase their contributions to the alliance. I then introduce hypotheses for testing the theory’s observable implications. Chapter 4 presents the quantitative analysis on the determinants of patron reassurance and allied burden-sharing. First, using an original dataset of U.S. reassurance collected and analyzed with automated text analysis, I use statistical models to identify correlates of U.S. willingness to offer reassurances. Second, I study allied burden-sharing using data on allies’ military spending, support for U.S. military bases, and participation in U.S. foreign military interventions. The quantitative findings strongly support the theory; the United States reassures allies that are at greater risk of exiting the alliance more, while allies more dependent on U.S. protection also spend more on defense, provide more compensation for the costs of U.S. military bases, and participate in U.S. foreign military interventions at a greater rate. In Chapters 5-8, I conduct case studies on U.S. reassurance and burden-sharing pressure toward West Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom during the 1960s and 1970s. Process-tracing of these cases shows that the United States saw reassurance as a way of discouraging its allies from pursuing outside options—in particular nuclear weapons and rapprochement with the Soviet Union. However, the United States was simultaneously able to extract significant burden-sharing efforts, especially from West Germany and South Korea owing to their geographic vulnerability, and during the early 1970s due to doubts about U.S. reliability in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Finally, Chapter 9 concludes with a summary of the analysis, as well as a discussion of implications and avenues for future research. My findings suggest that by withholding reassurance and deliberately casting doubt on its protection, a patron makes its allies prone to reconsidering their reliance on it and to instead pursue outside options.

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