According to the conventional wisdom, a great power engaging in international retrenchment regularly incurs tremendous costs. Following its withdrawal from a commitment abroad, the argument goes, windows of opportunity emerge that rivals exploit to their benefit, thus imposing significant costs on the retrenching great power. I argue that pundits and policymakers consistently overestimate the dangers associated with strategic withdrawals: great powers can—and in the past frequently have—successfully engaged in international retrenchment without creating opportunities for their rivals to gain significant strategic benefits. To make this case, I develop a new typology of international retrenchment strategies based on the kind and degree of disengagement they entail and demonstrate that most types do not regularly pave the way for rival gains. I support my argument through a series of plausibility probes: the Soviet retrenchment from Romania in the 1950s; the U.S. retrenchment from Korea in the 1970s; and the U.S. retrenchment from Western Europe in the 1990s.

The global commons have come to play an increasingly prominent role in the field of international security as scholars seek to better understand the causes and consequences of interstate cooperation, competition, and conflict in political spaces that lie beyond sovereign jurisdiction. In this piece, we make the case that by grouping all extraterritorial spaces into a single, not further differentiated conceptual category, the notion of the ‘global commons’ as it is presently employed obscures important variation in the way these spaces are governed. Specifically, we argue that there exist two distinct types of spaces that legally do not belong to any one state: those that all states are effectively able to freely use for their own strategic purposes; and those that are de facto dominated and thus defy the ideal of universal accessibility their status as a global common supposedly entails. The updated conceptual framework we develop in response – which explicitly distinguishes between two distinct types of extraterritorial spaces – promises to advance security studies research on the global commons in several ways: it helps security scholars avoid the issue of causal heterogeneity which current conceptual foundations introduce into causal analysis; it facilitates normative discussions about the global commons and their political future; and it produces novel insights into the governance problems policymakers will confront when seeking to maintain states’ access to extraterritorial spaces in the new age of great power competition.

Political methodologists have long sought to develop standards that can guide political scientists in the process of concept formation. Yet, the methodology literature has struggled to provide satisfactory solutions to the fundamental problem of conceptualization: for any given concept, there are a large number of attributes one could postulate as its defining characteristics, and it is unclear how to adjudicate between different possible definitions. We leverage the fact that the theory within which a concept appears places important restrictions on concept formation: conceptualizations entail ontological claims that need to be consistent with those of the theories in which they appear.

Policymakers and academics alike frequently invoke power vacuums as important phenomena in international politics, referring to them in a diverse array of contexts ranging from civil war to the decline and retrenchment of great powers. However, students of international relations (IR) have largely neglected to seriously engage ‘power vacuum’ as a social scientific concept. This renders it virtually impossible to undergird current policy debates on power vacuums with social scientific analysis, and more generally raises doubts about the concept’s analytic utility. In this piece, I argue that ‘power vacuum’ is not merely a popular buzzword but a concept with considerable theoretical promise. I develop a conceptualization of power vacuums as spaces that experience authority collapse. Since, in the context of international politics, organizations can claim authority on several political levels, I posit the existence of several types of power vacuums of which two appear particularly relevant to the study of IR: national and international vacuums. My conceptualization is able to reflect the diverse ways in which the term is currently utilized, paves the way for novel research on a subject of great concern to policymakers, and uncovers the potential for closer collaboration across traditionally rigid thematic boundaries within IR.

There seems to exist a general consensus on how to conceptualize cooperation in the field of international relations (IR). We argue that this impression is deceptive. In practice, scholars working on the causes of international cooperation have come to implicitly employ various understandings of what cooperation is. Yet, an explicit debate about the discipline’s conceptual foundations never materialized, and whatever discussion occurred did so only latently and without much dialog across theoretical traditions. In this paper, we develop an updated conceptual framework by exploring the nature of these differing understandings and situating them within broader theoretical conversations about the role of cooperation in IR. Drawing on an array of studies in IR and philosophy, our framework distinguishes between three distinct types of cooperative state interactions – cooperation through tacit policy coordination (‘minimal’ cooperation), cooperation through explicit policy coordination (‘thin’ cooperation), and cooperation based on joint action (‘thick’ cooperation). The framework contributes to better theorization about cooperation in two main ways: it allows scholars across theoretical traditions to identify important sources of disagreement and previously unnoticed theoretical common ground; and the conceptual disaggregation it provides grants scholars crucial theoretical leverage by enabling type-specific causal theorization.