Political Science and International Relations

This white paper investigates practical remedies to increase voice in and access to AI governance and capabilities for the Global AI Majority, while addressing the security and commercial concerns of frontier AI states.

Stuart Russell has had a seminal influence on many people with his writings on aligning artificial intelligence with human values and regulating autonomous weapons systems. His work has highlighted the difficulties...

This web app is a tool for exploring the dynamics of risky AI competition: the safety-performance tradeoff. Will AI safety breakthroughs always lead to safer AI systems? Before long, we may be capable of creating AI systems...

The great powers appear to be entering an era of heightened competition to master security-relevant technologies in areas such as AI. This is concerning because deploying new technologies can create substantial...

In recent decades, governments have been ineffectual at regulating dangerous emerging technologies like lethal autonomous weapons and synthetic biology. In today’s era of great power competition...

The world appears to be entering an era of heightened great power technological competition in areas such as artificial intelligence. This is concerning because deploying new technologies often involves private benefits and...

We study how the information environment affects races to implement a powerful new technology such as advanced artificial intelligence. In particular, we analyse a model in which a potentially unsafe technology may cause...

The development of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) is no longer just a concept of science fiction. With the potential of these weapons to cause destruction, there is an urgent need for an international approach to...

The study of international races has focused almost exclusively on security motivations for competitive arming. But international races may also be motivated by prestige. This article defines a “prestige race” and outlines the...

What makes coercion succeed? For most international relations scholars, the answer is credible threats. Yet scholars have neglected a second key component of successful coercion: credible assurances. This article makes two...

Major theories of military innovation focus on relatively narrow technological developments, such as nuclear weapons or aircraft carriers. Arguably the most profound military implications of technological change, however, come...

What resources and technologies are strategic? Policy and theoretical debates often focus on this question, since the “strategic” designation yields valuable resources and elevated attention. The ambiguity of the very concept...

A large literature has argued that offensive advantage makes states worse off because it can induce a security dilemma, preemption, costly conflict, and arms races. We argue instead that state welfare is u-shaped under...

This essay examines the growing role of China in international standards-setting organizations as a window into its efforts to influence global digital governance institutions and highlights areas where the U.S. can preserve...

The invention of atomic energy posed a novel global challenge: could the technology be controlled to avoid destructive uses and an existentially dangerous arms race while permitting the broad shari...

Reputations for resolve are said to be one of the few things worth fighting for, yet they remain inadequately understood. Discussions of reputation focus almost exclusively on first-order belief change—A stands firm, B updates...

Threats and force, by increasing expected costs, should reduce the target’s resolve. However, they often seem to increase resolve. We label this phenomenon provocation. We review instances of apparent provocation in interstate...

Arguably, the success of the human species is rooted in our ability to cooperate. Since machines powered by artificial intelligence are playing an ever greater role in our lives, it will be importa...

Preferences for conflict and cooperation are systematically different for men and women: across a variety of contexts, women generally prefer more peaceful options and are less supportive of making threats and initiating...

Artificial Intelligence (AI)—like past general purpose technologies such as railways, the internet, and electricity—is likely to have significant effects on both national security and market struct...

In recent years, China’s ambitious development of artificial intelligence (AI) has attracted much attention in policymaking and academic circles. This syllabus aims to broadly cover the research la...

Governments across the globe have been quick to adapt developments in artificial intelligence to military technologies. Prominent among the many changes recently introduced, autonomous weapon systems pose important new...

We ask how the offense-defense balance scales, meaning how it changes as investments into a conflict increase. To do so we offer a general formalization of the offense-defense balance in terms of c...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a strategic general purpose technology (GPT) with the potential to deliver vast economic value and substantially affect national security. The central claim motivati...

Today, AI policy analysis tends to focus on national strategies, nascent international initiatives, and the policies of individual corporations. Yet, international standard produced by nongovernmen...

The idea of an artificial intelligence (AI) arms race between China and the United States is ubiquitous. Before 2016, there were fewer than 300 Google results for “AI arms race” and only a handful of articles that mentioned the...

This research agenda by Allan Dafoe proposes a framework for research on AI governance. It provides a foundation to introduce and orient researchers to the space of important problems in AI governa...

This syllabus covers material located at the intersection between artificial intelligence (AI) and international security. The syllabus can be used in structured self-study (or group-study) for tho...