The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reshaped international politics and the field of International Relations. But one question—“How should the atomic bomb be used?”—has been largely overlooked in political science. This article recovers American deliberations on alternative nuclear use options before August 1945, including the “noncombat demonstration,” targeting military installations, giving advance warning, and striking more symbolically valuable cities. We develop theoretical insights on the value of staging violent spectacles and the emotive power of visible destruction. We then use a wide range of sources to show that U.S. leaders selected an ostentatiously lethal means of atomic debut due to concerns about conventional military inferiority vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, the desire to instill a widespread view of the bomb’s revolutionary character, and the imperative of shaping the postwar international order. This study advances our understanding of the post-1945 international order and the performative dimensions of political violence.

How can governments in racially divided societies protect vulnerable populations from political violence after large-scale internal conflict? When the dominant majority is bent on perpetuating its power and privileges in the racial hierarchy, benevolence by government interveners is unlikely to curb oppressive violence against subordinate groups. There is thus no alternative to using military coercion to crush insurgents and their civilian supporters. However, failing to maintain this coercive apparatus can exacerbate violence over the long term by triggering racialized revenge dynamics, particularly in communities that were occupied by troops of the subordinate minority. To substantiate these claims, we show that different parts of the postbellum American South experienced uneven spikes in white supremacist violence following the end of federal military occupation in the 1870s: counties that had previously been occupied by Black troops witnessed higher incidences of anti-Black violence than other areas. This effect persisted for many decades, contributing to the dismal climate of violence that prevailed during the nadir of American race relations.

Why do some regional powers collectively threatened by a potential hegemon eagerly cooperate to ensure their security, while others appear reluctant to do so? I argue that robust security cooperation at the regional level is less likely when an unbalanced distribution of power exists between the prospective security partners. In such situations, regional security cooperation tends to be stunted by foot-dragging and obstructionism on the part of materially inferior states wary of facilitating the strategic expansion of neighbours with larger endowments of power resources, anticipating that much of the coalition's gains in military capabilities are likely to be achieved through an expansion of the materially superior neighbour's force levels and strategic flexibility. Evidence drawn from primary material and the latest historiography of France's postwar foreign policy towards West Germany provides considerable support for this argument. My findings offer important correctives to standard accounts of the origins of Western European security cooperation and suggest the need to rethink the difficulties the United States has encountered in promoting cooperation among local allies in key global regions.

Conventional wisdom treats politicization in the international human rights regime as invariant: for any given violation, states condemn adversaries while coddling friends. However, we find that politicization patterns vary markedly across human rights issues. Some norms are more politicized than others, and states are more likely to punish geopolitical partners on certain violations. We offer a novel theory of politicized enforcement wherein states punish human rights violations discriminatively based on their perceived “sensitivity” for the target state. Using data from the UN Universal Periodic Review, an elaborate human rights mechanism, we show that states tend to criticize their adversaries on sensitive issues that undermine the target regime’s power and legitimacy while addressing safer topics with friends. By uncovering a strategic logic of human rights enforcement, this research contributes new theoretical insights on the relationship between norms and power politics in global governance.