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Today religious concerns stand at the center of international politics, yet key paradigms in international relations, namely realism, liberalism, and constructivism, barely consider religion in their analysis of political subjects. Whether the issue is Islamic terrorism, the Christian Right's foreign policy predilections toward Israel and Southern Sudan, the complications of faith-based Western activism abroad, the potential destabilization of atheist China by the Dalai Lama and Falun Gong, or the threat Burmese monks pose to Myanmar's military regime, the rising prominence of religion challen

In the post—cold war period, civil wars are increasingly likely to end with peace settlements brokered by international actors who press for early elections. However, elections held soon after wars end, when political institutions remain weak, are associated with an increased likelihood of a return to violence. International actors have a double-edged influence over election timing and the risk of war, often promoting precarious military stalemates and early elections but sometimes also working to prevent a return to war through peacekeeping, institution building, and powersharing. In this article, we develop and test quantitatively a model of the causes of early elections as a building block in evaluating the larger effect of election timing on the return to war.

In "Does Chain-Ganging Cause the Outbreak of War," Dominic Tierney critiques our work on alliance politics in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Tierney incorrectly ascribes to us a theory about the outbreak of conflict based on a "chain-ganging theory" in which war occurs because states become so tightly tied to their allies that they lose volition and find themselves in conflicts not of their own choosing. In fact, we do not try to explain the origins of war, but instead explain why wars in Europe escalated to a continent-wide scale. Here we briefly restate our argument and demonstrate how Tierney misconstrues it. We also show how some of the factors that we discuss in our original work are useful for assessing Tierney's claim that the causes of conflict and alliance dynamics hinge on whether states are hawks or doves. Adapted from the source document.