Kyosuke Kikuta
Biographic Data
| ID | 2334047 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kyosuke Kikuta |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kyosuke |
| FAMILY NAME | Kikuta |
| SIGNATURE | KIKUTA K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Japan External Trade Organization |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6952-3569 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 118 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Claimability in International Relations
Interstate conflict is rare not primarily because states settle disputes peacefully but largely because they have no serious dispute. To address this simple but oft-neglected reality, I provide a comprehensive measurement of states’ claimable areas. Focusing on three international norms that emerged after the world wars (territorial integrity, minority protection, and maritime sovereignty), I code geographical extents of states’ claimable areas f…
More Equality for Women Does Mean Less War
Although the pacifying effect of gender equality is said to be a near-consensus, the causal mechanisms remain underspecified, and causal identification is weak. I address those shortcomings by providing the first causal evidence regarding the effects of women’s legislative representation on the state’s foreign military actions. I argue that women legislators affect foreign policies via legislative votes, and hence that the effect depends on wheth…
The Drowning-Out Effect
The Nobel Peace Prize Increased the Global Support for Women’s Organizations
We examine the effects of the Nobel Peace Prize on the support for women’s rights groups to highlight the roles of the positive symbolic action, “prize and praise,” in international relations. Based on psychological theories, we argue that the Nobel Peace Prize increases the support for women’s rights activists by reassuring, persuading, and pressuring people across the world. We substantiate the claim by exploiting the as-if random assignment of…
Environmental protection after civil war
Although civil war devastates the environment, we still do not understand the role of environmental policies in post-war countries and often have a pessimistic view without empirical evidence. This study challenges this view by arguing that the introduction of independent monitoring mechanisms can make environmental regulations effective even in post-war countries and also by exploiting analytical opportunities in the Democratic Republic of the C…
The Tyranny of Supply
The logic of territorial control is central to the study of internal conflict. Existing studies consider the consequences of territorial control without answering a critical question: what motivates rebel territorial control in the first place? Territorial control requires careful explanation. While it confers important benefits it is also costly to achieve and exposes rebels to state attack. This paper argues that benefits exceed costs when terr…
After a Storm Come Votes
The retrospective voting theory suggests that citizens vote for governing parties in response to distributive benefits. Knowing this, governments may reward voters by providing particularistic benefits—i.e., pork—prior to elections. Previous studies, however, do not account for the endogeneity. We address this problem by focusing on disaster relief and exploiting exogeneity of disaster. In particular, by using maximum hourly rainfall as an instru…
Rainy Friday
What are the effects of religious participation on collective action such as protests? Until recently, conflict scholars have focused on the macro-level characteristics of religion, while assuming, but rarely analyzing, individual-level mechanisms. I fill in this gap by incorporating insights from the field of American Politics, which has long emphasized the roles of individual-level mechanisms such as attendance at religious gatherings. I hypoth…
Do Politically Irrelevant Events Cause Conflict? The Cross-continental Effects of European Professional Football on Protests in Africa
We examine whether politically irrelevant events can cause conflicts, by analyzing the effects of professional football games in Europe on protests in Africa—an unintended spillover across the continents. By expanding psychological theories, we argue that the outcomes of the football games in Europe can affect African people's subjective evaluation of domestic politicians, which in turn can trigger protests. By exploiting as-if random variation i…
A typology of substitution
How do rebels choose among available tactics during civil war? How do they substitute one tactic for another? Although previous studies address these questions, they narrowly focus on the presence or absence of substitution. Differentiating the varieties of substitution, however, is critical. How rebels respond to their tactical environment—including weather conditions—depends on the type of substitution. I formally derive three types of substitu…
A new geography of civil war
Where do armed conflicts occur? In applied studies, we may take ad hoc approaches to answer this question. In some regression studies, for instance, a single conflict event can cause an entire province to be classified as a conflict zone. In this paper, I fill this void of knowledge by developing a machine learning method that is less dependent on the areal-unit assumptions and can flexibly estimate conflict zones. I apply the method to a conflic…
External Validity
External validity captures the extent to which inferences drawn from a given study's sample apply to a broader population or other target populations. Social scientists frequently invoke external validity as an ideal, but they rarely attempt to make rigorous, credible external validity inferences. In recent years, methodologically oriented scholars have advanced a flurry of work on various components of external validity, and this article reviews…
The Environmental Costs of Civil War
Despite the fact that, between 1950 and 2000, more than 80% of wars occurred within biodiversity hot spots, we do not fully understand the environmental costs of war. This study conducts one of the first systematic evaluations of the costs of civil war for forest environments. The analysis, however, requires a proper counterfactual: the forest coverage if it were not for civil war. Moreover, instead of estimating an average cost of diverse civil …
Why Monarchy? The Rise and Demise of a Regime Type
Monarchy was the dominant form of rule in the pre-modern era and it persists in a handful of countries. We propose a unified theoretical explanation for its rise and decline. Specifically, we argue that monarchy offers an efficient solution to the primordial problem of order where societies are large and citizens isolated from each other and hence have difficulty coordinating. Its efficiency is challenged by other methods of leadership selection …
Postdisaster Reconstruction as a Cause of Intrastate Violence
Despite growing concerns about the effects of environmental changes, we only have disparate and seemingly contradictory findings about the relationship between natural disasters and intrastate violence. This article addresses that problem by introducing postdisaster reconstruction as a primary explanatory variable for intrastate violence. I extend bargaining theory to predict that postdisaster reconstruction causes a commitment problem, which in …
An Ontology of Peace
International relations scholarship on intrastate peace and conflict largely conceptualizes peace as an absence of war and, to some extent, the presence of a minimal degree of democracy. Empirically, scholars treat peace as a non-event, identifying it as the absence of military battles rather than (or in addition to) the presence of conflict-mitigating institutions or activities. This approach hearkens back to a bygone debate about negative and p…
External Validity
External validity captures the extent to which inferences drawn from a given study's sample apply to a broader population or other target populations. Social scientists frequently invoke external validity as an ideal, but they rarely attempt to make rigorous, credible external validity inferences. In recent years, methodologically oriented scholars have advanced a flurry of work on various components of external validity, and this article reviews…
Postdisaster Reconstruction as a Cause of Intrastate Violence
Despite growing concerns about the effects of environmental changes, we only have disparate and seemingly contradictory findings about the relationship between natural disasters and intrastate violence. This article addresses that problem by introducing postdisaster reconstruction as a primary explanatory variable for intrastate violence. I extend bargaining theory to predict that postdisaster reconstruction causes a commitment problem, which in …
An Ontology of Peace
International relations scholarship on intrastate peace and conflict largely conceptualizes peace as an absence of war and, to some extent, the presence of a minimal degree of democracy. Empirically, scholars treat peace as a non-event, identifying it as the absence of military battles rather than (or in addition to) the presence of conflict-mitigating institutions or activities. This approach hearkens back to a bygone debate about negative and p…
A new geography of civil war
Where do armed conflicts occur? In applied studies, we may take ad hoc approaches to answer this question. In some regression studies, for instance, a single conflict event can cause an entire province to be classified as a conflict zone. In this paper, I fill this void of knowledge by developing a machine learning method that is less dependent on the areal-unit assumptions and can flexibly estimate conflict zones. I apply the method to a conflic…
Why Monarchy? The Rise and Demise of a Regime Type
Monarchy was the dominant form of rule in the pre-modern era and it persists in a handful of countries. We propose a unified theoretical explanation for its rise and decline. Specifically, we argue that monarchy offers an efficient solution to the primordial problem of order where societies are large and citizens isolated from each other and hence have difficulty coordinating. Its efficiency is challenged by other methods of leadership selection …
The Environmental Costs of Civil War
Despite the fact that, between 1950 and 2000, more than 80% of wars occurred within biodiversity hot spots, we do not fully understand the environmental costs of war. This study conducts one of the first systematic evaluations of the costs of civil war for forest environments. The analysis, however, requires a proper counterfactual: the forest coverage if it were not for civil war. Moreover, instead of estimating an average cost of diverse civil …
Do Politically Irrelevant Events Cause Conflict? The Cross-continental Effects of European Professional Football on Protests in Africa
We examine whether politically irrelevant events can cause conflicts, by analyzing the effects of professional football games in Europe on protests in Africa—an unintended spillover across the continents. By expanding psychological theories, we argue that the outcomes of the football games in Europe can affect African people's subjective evaluation of domestic politicians, which in turn can trigger protests. By exploiting as-if random variation i…
More Equality for Women Does Mean Less War
Although the pacifying effect of gender equality is said to be a near-consensus, the causal mechanisms remain underspecified, and causal identification is weak. I address those shortcomings by providing the first causal evidence regarding the effects of women’s legislative representation on the state’s foreign military actions. I argue that women legislators affect foreign policies via legislative votes, and hence that the effect depends on wheth…
The Drowning-Out Effect
The Tyranny of Supply
The logic of territorial control is central to the study of internal conflict. Existing studies consider the consequences of territorial control without answering a critical question: what motivates rebel territorial control in the first place? Territorial control requires careful explanation. While it confers important benefits it is also costly to achieve and exposes rebels to state attack. This paper argues that benefits exceed costs when terr…
After a Storm Come Votes
The retrospective voting theory suggests that citizens vote for governing parties in response to distributive benefits. Knowing this, governments may reward voters by providing particularistic benefits—i.e., pork—prior to elections. Previous studies, however, do not account for the endogeneity. We address this problem by focusing on disaster relief and exploiting exogeneity of disaster. In particular, by using maximum hourly rainfall as an instru…
An Ontology of Peace
International relations scholarship on intrastate peace and conflict largely conceptualizes peace as an absence of war and, to some extent, the presence of a minimal degree of democracy. Empirically, scholars treat peace as a non-event, identifying it as the absence of military battles rather than (or in addition to) the presence of conflict-mitigating institutions or activities. This approach hearkens back to a bygone debate about negative and p…
Postdisaster Reconstruction as a Cause of Intrastate Violence
Despite growing concerns about the effects of environmental changes, we only have disparate and seemingly contradictory findings about the relationship between natural disasters and intrastate violence. This article addresses that problem by introducing postdisaster reconstruction as a primary explanatory variable for intrastate violence. I extend bargaining theory to predict that postdisaster reconstruction causes a commitment problem, which in …
The Environmental Costs of Civil War
Despite the fact that, between 1950 and 2000, more than 80% of wars occurred within biodiversity hot spots, we do not fully understand the environmental costs of war. This study conducts one of the first systematic evaluations of the costs of civil war for forest environments. The analysis, however, requires a proper counterfactual: the forest coverage if it were not for civil war. Moreover, instead of estimating an average cost of diverse civil …
Why Monarchy? The Rise and Demise of a Regime Type
Monarchy was the dominant form of rule in the pre-modern era and it persists in a handful of countries. We propose a unified theoretical explanation for its rise and decline. Specifically, we argue that monarchy offers an efficient solution to the primordial problem of order where societies are large and citizens isolated from each other and hence have difficulty coordinating. Its efficiency is challenged by other methods of leadership selection …
External Validity
External validity captures the extent to which inferences drawn from a given study's sample apply to a broader population or other target populations. Social scientists frequently invoke external validity as an ideal, but they rarely attempt to make rigorous, credible external validity inferences. In recent years, methodologically oriented scholars have advanced a flurry of work on various components of external validity, and this article reviews…
A new geography of civil war
Where do armed conflicts occur? In applied studies, we may take ad hoc approaches to answer this question. In some regression studies, for instance, a single conflict event can cause an entire province to be classified as a conflict zone. In this paper, I fill this void of knowledge by developing a machine learning method that is less dependent on the areal-unit assumptions and can flexibly estimate conflict zones. I apply the method to a conflic…
Rainy Friday
What are the effects of religious participation on collective action such as protests? Until recently, conflict scholars have focused on the macro-level characteristics of religion, while assuming, but rarely analyzing, individual-level mechanisms. I fill in this gap by incorporating insights from the field of American Politics, which has long emphasized the roles of individual-level mechanisms such as attendance at religious gatherings. I hypoth…
Do Politically Irrelevant Events Cause Conflict? The Cross-continental Effects of European Professional Football on Protests in Africa
We examine whether politically irrelevant events can cause conflicts, by analyzing the effects of professional football games in Europe on protests in Africa—an unintended spillover across the continents. By expanding psychological theories, we argue that the outcomes of the football games in Europe can affect African people's subjective evaluation of domestic politicians, which in turn can trigger protests. By exploiting as-if random variation i…
A typology of substitution
How do rebels choose among available tactics during civil war? How do they substitute one tactic for another? Although previous studies address these questions, they narrowly focus on the presence or absence of substitution. Differentiating the varieties of substitution, however, is critical. How rebels respond to their tactical environment—including weather conditions—depends on the type of substitution. I formally derive three types of substitu…
The Nobel Peace Prize Increased the Global Support for Women’s Organizations
We examine the effects of the Nobel Peace Prize on the support for women’s rights groups to highlight the roles of the positive symbolic action, “prize and praise,” in international relations. Based on psychological theories, we argue that the Nobel Peace Prize increases the support for women’s rights activists by reassuring, persuading, and pressuring people across the world. We substantiate the claim by exploiting the as-if random assignment of…
Environmental protection after civil war
Although civil war devastates the environment, we still do not understand the role of environmental policies in post-war countries and often have a pessimistic view without empirical evidence. This study challenges this view by arguing that the introduction of independent monitoring mechanisms can make environmental regulations effective even in post-war countries and also by exploiting analytical opportunities in the Democratic Republic of the C…
The Tyranny of Supply
The logic of territorial control is central to the study of internal conflict. Existing studies consider the consequences of territorial control without answering a critical question: what motivates rebel territorial control in the first place? Territorial control requires careful explanation. While it confers important benefits it is also costly to achieve and exposes rebels to state attack. This paper argues that benefits exceed costs when terr…
After a Storm Come Votes
The retrospective voting theory suggests that citizens vote for governing parties in response to distributive benefits. Knowing this, governments may reward voters by providing particularistic benefits—i.e., pork—prior to elections. Previous studies, however, do not account for the endogeneity. We address this problem by focusing on disaster relief and exploiting exogeneity of disaster. In particular, by using maximum hourly rainfall as an instru…
The Drowning-Out Effect
Claimability in International Relations
Interstate conflict is rare not primarily because states settle disputes peacefully but largely because they have no serious dispute. To address this simple but oft-neglected reality, I provide a comprehensive measurement of states’ claimable areas. Focusing on three international norms that emerged after the world wars (territorial integrity, minority protection, and maritime sovereignty), I code geographical extents of states’ claimable areas f…
More Equality for Women Does Mean Less War
Although the pacifying effect of gender equality is said to be a near-consensus, the causal mechanisms remain underspecified, and causal identification is weak. I address those shortcomings by providing the first causal evidence regarding the effects of women’s legislative representation on the state’s foreign military actions. I argue that women legislators affect foreign policies via legislative votes, and hence that the effect depends on wheth…
Political science (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Economics (9 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Political economy (6 works)