LEXINGTON, Va. Jan. 26, 2026 — Lt. Col. Tim Passmore, associate professor in the Department of International Studies and Political Science, recently published an article addressing the effect of populist government on international cooperation in International Studies Quarterly, a peer-reviewed academic journal of international studies and an official journal of the International Studies Association. The article was co-authored with Dr. Jared Oestman, assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Passmore has spent several years studying nations’ willingness to support multinational peacekeeping operations with personnel and funding.

“I have sought to understand why peacekeeping operations, which are overwhelmingly effective as shown in a body of literature, still struggle to acquire the resources necessary to carry out their mandates. In particular, the United Nations (U.N.) peacekeeping in recent years has been underfunded by up to 30%. This has a critical impact on peacekeepers’ ability to do their jobs and often results in scaling back mandates or performing tasks effectively,” he said. 

Passmore and Oestman collected data over a number of years to test the impact of populist governance on financial contributions to U.N. peacekeeping operations since 1991. They found a strong negative impact of right-wing populism, but no such effect for left-wing populism. They theorized that right-wing populist leaders are more averse to the costs of participating in multilateral operations, oppose interventions in distant foreign countries, and are more likely to view the U.N.’s bureaucracy as part of the global elite.

This research makes an important contribution to a growing body of literature on how shifts in the domestic political landscape, particularly among western democracies, has impacted and will continue to impact international order and cooperation. 

-VMI-