Research

Public sentiment about a country’s position in the international system has long influenced state behavior and is becoming increasingly salient amid the rise of populist nationalism. Nonetheless, despite growing recognition of status and emotion as key concepts in international relations, the relationship between them remains underexplored. Building on theories from social psychology, I demonstrate how perceptions of international status generate collective emotions and shape foreign policy preferences. I use a mixed-methods approach that integrates a cross-national survey experiment with a qualitative case study. The survey, conducted in the United States, Australia, and Singapore, reveals how public perceptions of international status give rise to distinct patterns of emotion and foreign policy preferences. The case study employs process tracing and semi-structured interviews with key decision-makers to show how these dynamics shape real-world foreign policy outcomes. I find that public perceptions of status follow a coherent structure that elicits distinct emotional responses, which in turn strongly influence foreign policy preferences. I argue that accounting for status-based emotions is essential for understanding the structure of public opinion and for explaining foreign policy outcomes that may appear unexpected through material or strategic explanations alone.

Why do some human rights issues spark individual mobilization that generates social pressure, while others fail to do so? While existing research emphasizes the strategic deployment of information to shape narratives, it offers limited insight into the mechanisms through which these narratives lead to successful activism. This paper argues that empathy is the key mechanism that makes narratives personalized and shareable online, transforming individual reactions into collective action. I introduce the concept of the emotional loop, where narratives not only trigger empathy but also continuously reinforce it within the social media ecosystem. This ongoing reinforcement sustains emotional engagement and fuels mobilization, making empathy a driving force behind successful activism. To illustrate this process, I analyze the impact of the widely shared photographs of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy who washed ashore on a Turkish beach in September 2015. Additionally, I conduct an experiment in which participants share narratives on social media to test whether sharing increases empathy and, in turn, fuels participation and mobilization. This framework deepens our understanding of digital activism, providing a clearer model for why some human rights campaigns succeed while others do not.

States have been increasingly offering apologies to redress past human rights violations. However, states select specific human rights violations to apologize for. In other words, states apologize for certain types of human rights violations more frequently, while they do not apologize for specific types of human rights violations. We know much less about what explains this selectivity regarding the human rights violations that states apologize for. States rarely apologize for sexual slavery or sexual violence in armed conflicts. It is striking that even states do often apologize for other human rights violations and choose not to apologize for sexual violence that happened in the same period. What drives states’ selectivity of political apology across the types of human rights violations during armed conflicts? This paper advances a framework for analyzing variation in the targets of state apologies. We argue that collective guilt drives states to apologize for non-gendered war crimes, while collective shame makes states distance themselves from sexual war crimes, resulting in non-apology. The lens of gender enables us to distinguish between different moral emotions that are entangled with the types of human rights violations. Eventually, gender can explain why states do not apologize for certain types of human rights violations, whereas they do not apologize for specific human rights violations. We propose a survey experiment as one of the adequate methods to examine whether collective guilt leads to a political apology, whereas collective shame induces non-apology for sexual violence. The paper’s findings help broaden our understanding of conditions in which states apologize.

This paper investigates how national sentiments towards trading partners act as a determinant factor of trade policy. It has long been questioned why countries do not always engage in the level of free trade that is expected by their material interests. Political Scientists have pointed to various reasons within domestic politics that could alter the economic interest calculation associated with policy decisions. However, the recent surge of nationalism reflects that economic interests are not sufficient to explain international trade. I draw on social identity theory to argue that nationalistic protectionism can be an important factor that impedes free trade, as observed in the 2019 South Korea-Japan trade dispute. In this paper, I first examine how identity acted as a causal variable in the 2019 South Korea-Japan trade dispute context. Then I will draw general implications of how to understand the upcoming challenges of international cooperation in the wave of nationalism.