This study investigates the rise of legislative restrictions on foreign funding to NGOs, focusing on the influence of neighbourhood effects of countries within the same region adopting similar legislation. Legislative restrictions on foreign funding to NGOs are most likely to occur in hybrid and authoritarian regimes, which are most prevalent in the developing world. Drawing from a dataset of sixty-five countries implementing foreign-funding restrictions to NGOs between 1993 and 2016, this study uses comparative historical analysis to examine neighbourhood effects of foreign funding restrictions in Eurasia and East Africa. In a final step, it uses preliminary social network analysis based on Twitter API to examine counter-mobilization in the only two countries that have successfully resisted foreign funding restrictions: Kyrgyzstan and Kenya. In a departure from previous scholars, the study finds strong support for neighbourhood effects, evidenced by Russia's 2012 foreign agent law in Eurasia, as well as Ethiopia's 2009 legislation in East Africa. These neighbourhood effects are often due to historical and economic ties (Russia and Central Asia), including regional economic organizations, migration ties, or the experience of regional conflict spillover due to recent democratization revolt or terrorist attack in a neighbouring country. Finally, transnational linkages to international NGOs, particularly in terms of human rights and environmental organizations, are evident in social media networks of civil society organizations contesting foreign funding restrictions in Kenya and Kyrgyzstan. This provides support for the importance of interorganizational linkages with international organizations in countries where restrictive legislation is being contested.

To what extent does voluntary association participation correlate with reduced Ebola duration in districts of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone during the epidemic in West Africa in 2013-16? This study, the first cross-national quantitative analysis of Ebola outcomes across these countries, answers this question by investigating how social capital influences epidemic outcomes. Ebola virus disease struck along the borders of three countries with similar levels of human development as well as cultural practices, yet resulted in different outcomes. This study examines the role of social trust, political trust, voluntary association participation, religious organisation membership, and community meeting attendance in explaining international policy failure to reduce Ebola outcomes. Overall, in districts with a culture of raising issues and participating in voluntary and religious organisations, Ebola duration rates were lower. These findings have implications not only for health crisis response, but also for disaster response and the provision of international aid to civil society.

Mass inflows of immigrants are believed to create moral panic which impacts attitudes and votes. However, few scholars systematically explore the discursive construction of migration as a crisis in relation to actual migration flows. When and how does migration become a crisis? To answer this question, we draw on mixed methods harnessing automated text analysis, linear regression, as well as qualitative analysis, to analyze “migration crisis” discourses in a corpus extracted from French newspapers between 2008 and 2020. We locate the emergence of “migration crisis” discourses in the summer of 2015, absent massive inflows of migrants or refugees in France contrary to other European countries. We show that conservative newspapers overwhelmingly contribute to framing the crisis as one of “migration or migrant” rather than one of asylum or refugees despite the humanitarian nature of inflows. Furthermore, conservative newspapers do not only mention the migration crisis more than liberal ones, but they also create a sense of slow-burning or creeping migration crisis, as an undercurrent in media topics. Our fine-grained analysis of the case of the migration crisis in the French media offers theoretical and methodological inputs for an empirically grounded and constructivist theory of political crises.