Studying Leaders and Military Conflict Conceptual Framework and Research Agenda

This article introduces the special feature "Leaders, Crisis Behavior, and International Conflict." Individual leaders play a central role in world politics. Yet, for the last several decades, international relations scholarship has downplayed or ignored leaders, focusing instead on system-wide variables and domestic political institutions. A new wave of research, however, has helped to reintroduce the leader-level back into models of international politics. The papers that constitute this special feature represent some of the cutting-edge work in this area. This introductory paper traces the evolution of research on leaders in international relations and provides a conceptual framework that highlights different approaches to the study of leaders. It also distills several key themes that emerge from the papers, in addition to offering directions for future research.