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A robust literature on climate change and security developed in the 2010s. Much of the literature attempts to chart how climate change could contribute directly or indirectly to conflict and instability through impacts on agriculture, migration, and disasters (Busby 2018; Koubi 2019; Theisen 2017).1 The methodological challenge is that climate change is an emergent problem, wherein the security consequences largely have yet to occur. However, the field's methods and expertise are primarily explanatory of past patterns. For scholars who want to make claims about future security risks, Gledistch (1998, 394) warned of potentially slipping into prophecy. If scholars want to write about climate change and retain academic rigor, what are they to do? This article reviews the challenges for scholars in this space and identifies potential research strategies that might be pursued going forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The politics of international finance for coal power plants have intensified since the 2015 Paris climate agreement was negotiated. Over the past few years, Japan and South Korea have signaled their intent not to fund new coal projects overseas, leaving China and its Belt and Road Initiative as the 'financier of last resort.' In September 2021, China too announced its intent to stop providing finance for overseas coal projects. What accounts for their decision to cease financing overseas coal projects despite prominent differences in political systems, degree of internationalization of their financial systems, and economic size? Drawing on datasets of coal projects and financing supplemented by case material and interviews, this paper explores the dynamics of coal export finance and how the combination of international reputational pressures and declining demand for coal finance diminished the domestic support for incumbent coal exporters in all three countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the state of the literature on the politics of global health governance and associated political dynamics of actors involved in this issue space. We identify seven eras in the field, beginning with the period of empire and colonialism and ending with the COVID-19 outbreak. The field of global health has long had a focus on infectious disease, often rooted within a state-centered approach to transnational global health problems with recurrent debates about whether and how restrictions on trade and travel should be imposed in the wake of disease outbreaks. This statist focus is in tension with more cosmopolitan visions of global health, which require broader health system strengthening. In the mid-2000s, a golden age emerged with the influx of new financing and political attention to addressing HIV/AIDS and malaria, as well as reducing the risk posed by infectious disease outbreaks to economies of the Global North. Despite increased awareness of noncommunicable diseases and the importance of health systems, events of recent years (including but not limited to the COVID-19 outbreak) reinforced the centrality of states to global health efforts and the primacy of infectious diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global coal use must be phased out if we are to minimize temperature increases associated with climate change. Most new coal plants are being built in the Asia Pacific and rely on overseas finance, with Indonesia and Vietnam the leading recipients. However, the politics of coal plant finance are changing, with many projects cancelled in recent years. This article explores the factors that led to coal plant cancellations in Vietnam and Indonesia. Based on new data of coal plant finance and elite interviews, we find fuel switching, public opposition, and national planning were the dominant reasons for cancellations in Vietnam, while Indonesia's reasons were more diverse. Vietnam also had a larger number of cancellations than Indonesia, which has a more entrenched domestic coal mining sector. These findings suggest that Vietnam is farther along the coal phaseout agenda than Indonesia. We further provide provisional explanations for these patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of climate and security has matured over the past 15 years, moving from the margins of academic research and policy discussion to become a more prominent concern for the international community. The practice of climate and security has a broad set of concerns extending beyond climate change and armed conflict. Different national governments, international organizations, and forums have sought to mainstream climate security concerns emphasizing a variety of challenges, including the risks to military bases, existential risks to low-lying island countries, resource competition, humanitarian emergencies, shocks to food security, migration, transboundary water management, and the risks of unintended consequences from climate policies. Despite greater awareness of these risks, the field still lacks good insights about what to do with these concerns, particularly in 'fragile' states with low capacity and exclusive political institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 outbreak is the most serious test of the international system since the 2008 global financial crisis. Rather than cooperate to contain and respond to a common threat, the world's leading powers--the United States and China--have increasingly blamed each other through wildly speculative theories about the origins of the virus. The World Health Organization sought to coordinate a global response, but it has been hamstrung and has come under attack. Given past cooperation between major powers to mobilize and eradicate smallpox and previous US leadership to fight HIV/AIDS and the 2014 West African Ebola crisis, the limited cooperation and lack of leadership are puzzling. What explains the anemic global response to date? This article draws from structural international relations theory to suggest a partial but somewhat dissatisfying answer. International organizations are inherently weak and now face opposition by major powers. The international system simultaneously incentivizes states to cooperate and address common threats, but it also encourages countries to take care of themselves, potentially at the expense of others. Which of these motives dominates cannot be explained by structural theory, thus requiring us to look to other factors such as the attributes of states and leaders themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Paris Agreement is in trouble.Herewe assess the potential for climate leaders to bring the global climate regime back on track by developing a strategic understanding of followership. In other words, leaders need to know how to encourage other actors to follow them. We develop a typology of follower types--Enthusiasts, Pliables, Reluctants, and Hard Nuts--distinguished based on motivation and capacity. We identify the scope for a participation cascade based on the distribution of follower types.We argue that achieving a participation cascade may be more likely if leaders appreciate three insights from theories of collective action. First, break down the climate mitigation problem into smaller, more manageable challenges, such as sectoral approaches. Second, prioritize major emitters and areas with high mitigation potential and politically feasible action. Finally, emphasize benefits to potential followers. Together, the strategies can help reduce the number of Hard Nut cases by making the cost/benefit calculus more attractive to prospective followers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International relations scholars have found that multilateral approval increases public support for the use of military force and have developed competing explanations for this phenomenon. However, this literature has given little attention to the attitudes of individuals who participate directly in the foreign policy process or shape foreign policy debates. In this research note, we administer a survey experiment to both a cross-section of US foreign policy elites and a nationally representative sample of the US public. We find that US foreign policy elites are more responsive to multilateral approval than the US public, with elites with direct foreign policy decision-making experience valuing it especially highly. These findings point to the importance of considering differences between elites and the public when investigating or theorizing about the impact of multilateral cooperation on domestic politics. Video Abstract Video Abstract Close [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the impact of fake news on political views, social medium as a platform for enhanced public engagement in political science and blogs as an important teaching tools for scholars.

Framing is a central mechanism in the social movements literature. Human rights frames are thought to be an especially potent form of rhetorical communication because human rights are thought to trump other objectives. However, the proliferation of rights-based claims could potentially be counter-productive if overused, as rights may come in to conflict or devalue the concept. Advocates have sought to frame a variety of global health concerns as human rights, but the rights discourse is more contested for social and economic rights than it is for civil and political rights. There has been some research suggesting that efforts to frame access to antiretroviral AIDS drugs as a human right were successful. However, it remains an open question the extent to which a human rights frame is more persuasive than normative, moral rhetoric and whether a human rights frame, when applied to global health issues, resonates equally in different national contexts. This article provides an overview of arguments for and against the potential utility of a human rights frame as an advocacy strategy in access to health campaigns. The article also provides some preliminary experimental evidence from several surveys from the United States and India, in which access to medicines campaigns framed in moral terms were equally compelling as a campaign framed in terms of health as a human right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]