Nikola Mirilovic

University of Central Florida | UCF · Department of Political Science

Some political parties adopt rhetoric and policy stances favorable to refugees, while others view refugees as a potential economic or security threat or a challenge to the asylum country's predominant identity and push for refugees’ rapid return. We argue that, despite material constraints in asylum countries, like those stemming from the level of...

This study examines whether discrimination against religious minorities and diaspora politics influences United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voting on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict between 1990 and 2014. We test discrimination against Jews, discrimination against Mus-lims, and general discrimination against all religious minorities...

Recognition of aspiring states from established countries is central to becoming a member state of the international system. Previous research suggests that great power recognition decisions regarding aspiring states rapidly converge toward either recognition or non-recognition, yet great power convergence has still not occurred in the case of Koso...

How do countries decide whether or not to recognize an aspiring state? We examine such decisions in the context of contested recognition, which we define as a claim to statehood that is recognized by a large number of countries, but remains unrecognized by many others. We suggest that religion—both at the domestic level via religious regulation and...

Objective This article examines the determinants of perceptions of the United States and of President Obama among global citizens. Methods The 2013 Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes surveys covering countries from Asia, Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, and Africa with diverse socioeconomic and religious backgrounds are analyzed by using...

Recognition from other recognized states is the key to becoming a fully-fledged member state of the international system. Although many new states are quickly and universally recognized, the recognition of other aspiring states remains highly contested. In these cases of contested sovereignty, some countries but not others extend recognition. Howev...

Why do some diaspora groups, but not others, play a prominent role in the formalization of cooperative political ties between their country of origin and their country of residence? This article adopts a novel dyadic approach to the study of diaspora politics by arguing that diaspora politics are simultaneously structured by regime type in the coun...

What determines threat perceptions in the context of potential interstate conflict? We argue that such perceptions are to an important extent driven by domestic political cleavages and ideological differences. The ideology effects are often surprising and are more complex than the conventional wisdom would indicate. We specify the conditions under...

Why do some countries tolerate dual citizenship while others do not? The answer concerns the interaction between regime type variation and international migration. Democracies with a relatively large migrant stock are more likely to tolerate dual citizenship than democracies with a low migrant stock. Meanwhile, democracies with relatively high emig...

How do states decide to extend or withhold international recognition in cases of contested sovereignty? We focus on how religion shapes the incentives of states in making this decision, both at the domestic level through religious institutions and at the international level through religious affinities. States with transnational religious ties to t...

The links between migration and security are understudied, and the empirical content of the immigration literature tends to be limited to case studies of western democracies. The conventional wisdom holds that democracies adopt liberal immigrant admissions policies. However, the opposite should be expected: dictatorship, along with economic develop...