The British Journal of Politics and International Relations

Autocratic leaders rely on intelligence machineries for regime and personal security. They often manage large, powerful, unaccountable organisations, which they hold close. But, despite their close relationship with - and reliance upon - intelligence, autocrats also frequently struggle to use it to enhance decision-making and foreign policy, and consequently suffer avoidable intelligence failures. This article argues that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is illustrative of this broader, though understudied, pattern of autocratic mismanagement of strategic intelligence. The invasion was both spurred and accompanied by a catastrophic intelligence failure, the responsibility for which rests with Vladimir Putin, the arbiter of a system with limited capacity to offer dispassionate strategic assessments. His failure is characteristic of autocratic regimes assessing foreign developments, including Putin’s Soviet predecessors. This article contributes to the emerging scholarship on intelligence in autocratic regimes by examining Putin’s use of intelligence in the Ukraine War in the context of the broader literature on intelligence and decision.

The Brexit campaign was based on the idea that newly gained British sovereignty and flexibility in global trade governance would facilitate the quick negotiation of preferential trade agreements. We explore how long it may take for a state to negotiate bilateral preferential trade agreements to offset potential losses from International Organizations withdrawals. We address the question of ‘timing’, and discuss several mechanisms that delay or speed up the implementation of bilateral trade deals after exiting International Organizations. The empirical findings are based on quantitative data and models accounting for the likely simultaneous relationship between International Organizations exits and preferential trade agreements’ formation. We show that leaving economic organisations significantly lowers the likelihood of subsequent preferential trade agreements ratification. This effect wears out after about 1 year. This research has crucial implications for our understanding of International Organizations, state benefits’ stemming from their membership therein, bilateral trade deals, and international cooperation.

This article analyses how and when institutional actors can shape overlap with other international organisations. Growing overlap either poses the threat of marginalisation to the incumbent organisation or offers opportunities for cooperation. Institutional actors should therefore be expected to try shape the relations with the overlapping organisation to protect their own. The article theorises that institutional actors can shape overlap if they possess sufficient institutional capacity and face a favourable opportunity structure. Whether institutional actors embrace or resist overlap, in turn, depends on their perception of the nature of the domain expansion of the other international organisation. Relying on 20 interviews with senior officials, the article probes the argument against the case of the growing overlap between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union resulting from the latter’s recent security and defence initiatives. Contrary to most expectations, it finds that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization actors played a consequential role in restructuring the relationship with the European Union.

Despite the growing literature on Brexit, specifically, and conflicts of sovereignty, more generally, there has been insufficient research on how the concept of sovereignty has been used in citizen campaigns and street protests across the United Kingdom – a form of ‘counter-democracy’ through which people attempted to oversee the post-referendum political process. Combining qualitative content analysis of campaign websites with a discourse-network analysis of media articles on Brexit protests, this article shows that claims to sovereignty were mobilised not only in conflicts between the United Kingdom and the European Union, but also in conflicts between different institutions within Britain itself. Both ‘Leavers’ and ‘Remainers’ appealed to popular and parliamentary sovereignty at different points in time, pragmatically adapting their framing according to changing circumstances but also as a result of a dynamic series of interactions with each other, including denying, keying and embracing their opponents’ frames. Crucially, conflicts around different institutionalisations of popular sovereignty did not demand system change, a rhetoric familiar from other protests of the 2010s such as Occupy Wall Street with its emphasis on ‘We are the 99%’. To the contrary, pro- and anti-Brexit mobilisations remained firmly focused on Brexit policy itself. They problematised the split between ‘Remainers’ and ‘Leavers’ within the United Kingdom, between 48% and 52%, and thus, on a deeper level, the tension between the political principle of popular sovereignty and the sociological reality of a split country. Finally, the more Leavers opposed Remainers, the more movements and parties on each of these two sides aligned. Politicians featured prominently in campaigns and as speakers at protest events, contributing to close cooperation between protesters and parties, and precluding anti-systemic discourses around popular sovereignty that would target parties and institutions altogether.

The Welsh Labour government occupies a unique position in UK territorial politics, favouring neither the status quo nor independence for Wales while advocating a new settlement for the whole state. This article provides a detailed examination of its policy, focusing on its position on the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. Drawing from a range of documentary sources, we analyse the Welsh government’s constitutional proposals and its decision-making in the wake of the 2016 referendum on European Union membership. We argue that Welsh policy is defined by ambiguity. While it advances an alternative constitutional vision, it refrains from rejecting Westminster’s sovereignty outright. In the aftermath of the referendum, it sought to accommodate that sovereignty with its own constitutional claims through enhanced intergovernmental collaboration. In light of the Johnson administration’s centralising reforms, the strategy appears to have failed. Caught in the fractious politics of the Union, Welsh constitutional policy now faces an uncertain future.

Given that South Korea is a reliant consumer of the United States’ ‘strategic intelligence’ concerning North Korea’s imminent threat, this article assumes an asymmetric market for trading such information between the two allied states. Based on the autonomy–security trade-off model, South Korea may purchase the United States’ strategic intelligence about North Korea’s threat at the cost of its political autonomy. When South Korea does not offer sufficient policy concessions, however, the United States has more incentive to transmit ‘low-quality information’ because the recipient cannot challenge its authenticity, and this information may bolster the opposition parties in South Korean politics by signalling the current Korean leadership’s poor performance in the national security arena. Given the United States’ control over strategic intelligence, South Korea faces the risk of being manipulated to make policy decisions that are at odds with its own interests, but may serve US interests.

Gaining an understanding of the concerns and aspirations of a country’s diaspora can help domestic politicians to better connect with this community and gain their support in elections. The United Kingdom’s diaspora is large and spread among many countries, and currently has the right to vote in UK general elections only for a limited time. However, there are proposals to abolish these time limits and this will make this community of increasing interest to politicians. This study uses signatories to the UK Parliaments e-petitions platform to gain an understanding of the foreign and domestic political concerns of this community. The analysis uses Latent Dirichlet allocation to identify common topics among the e-petitions and hierarchical clustering to identify commonalities among countries, territories and regions. It is found that there are five meaningful groups of such, and they are diverse in the topics that are of most concern.

This article introduces an analytical framework to trace and compare leaders’ different types of behaviours to the health crisis posed by COVID-19, following the analytical benefits of Leadership Trait Analysis. It examines Boris Johnson’s and Nicola Sturgeon’s diverging initial responses to the pandemic’s onset. We employ the Leadership Trait Analysis to shed light on three main differences in their respective leadership styles: risk-proneness versus risk-aversion; flexibility versus rigidity and rule advocacy versus rule ambivalence. Crises are one of the more fruitful situations in which to study leaders as their personal characteristics become central to the decision-making process. Thus, we employ an agent-centred and political psychology approach to analyse leaders’ behaviour and make sense of their divergent management styles. The results show that the differences between these leaders’ approaches to handling this global health crisis can be partly explained by their level of openness to information and their task versus relationship focus.

The equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines is one of the most important tests of global cooperation that the world has faced in recent decades. Collectively, global leaders failed that crucible abysmally, creating a ‘vaccine apartheid’ that divided the world according to income into countries with widespread access and those without. Why, given that leaders were fully aware of the risks and injustice of vaccine inequity, did governments of wealthy countries hoard doses, impede the expansion of vaccine manufacturing and otherwise prevent equitable access to vaccines? We argue that their decisions to act selfishly are best explained by governments’ accountability to domestic constituencies, their lack of leadership and commitment to multilateralism and their adoption of short-term perspectives, as well as their unwillingness to curb the influence of profit-oriented global pharmaceutical companies and, to a certain extent, of an additional private actor, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.