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The European state-building experience has led many scholars to argue that war forces states to increase their fiscal-administrative capacity, or what we might refer to as political development, in order to compete in the international system. War also requires states to generate wealth to support such competition, which should lead to progressively increased levels of economic development. Yet, in contemporary empirical studies, war is often studied as a dependent variable, with economic and political development modeled as affecting its origination. This reading of theory and empirical work suggests that war, economic development, and political development constitute an endogenous system. In this paper, we develop expectations about how these three processes interact and test them using a three-stage least squares regression model. The results show significant simultaneous relationships between the three processes. We conclude that war, economic development, and political development are mutually constitutive processes in the contemporary international system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the nature, background, and evolution of the 'Camp David consensus.' Under this consensus, Egyptian intellectuals and political movements broadly accept that the Egyptian regime must deal constructively and 'correctly' with Israel as a state, but insist that society has the right and responsibility to resist Zionism. The consensus rests on particular ways of understanding Israel, and the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict, that can be traced back to the formative years of the Egyptian republic under Nasser. This has served the interests of both regimes and opposition movements and in this sense represents a 'double instrumentalization' of foreign policy. The paper, which examines a range of regime and intellectual pronouncements during the Nasser and Sadat periods, as well as more recently, challenges the growing use within International Relations, particularly in the Middle East context, of the concept of 'identity' to explain state behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to advance our understanding of the development of English School thinking on international ethics by outlining three phases of ethical inquiry within the British Committee. The article argues that, throughout the life of the Committee, its outlook was conditioned by a pervading moral skepticism, which was reflected in the School’s commitment to a “middle-ground ethics”; however, at various times the Committee members’ views changed about how maximalist the “good” could be that oriented this ethical position. Awareness of this ebb and flow helps us better understand Hedley Bull’s characterization of the ethics of pluralism and solidarism within the School as well as the precise challenge contemporary English School theorists face if they are to move beyond the normative cul-de-sac that British Committee members encountered in each phase of their ethical discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent increase in interest in scientific realist foundations for international relations theory, spearheaded by Wendt in various works, most fully articulated in his Social Theory of International Politics, and supported by a number of other authors, has brought to the fore a set of related issues in the philosophy of the social sciences. The advocacy of scientific realism in the international relations literature has largely taken the form of attacks on various nonscientific realist foundational theories. Consequently, the success of the arguments for scientific realism depends in large measure on the accuracy of the characterizations of the competing views. This paper argues that Wendt and others have misrepresented the challengers and have thus overstated the superiority of scientific realism. The paper further considers the aims and purposes of providing meta-theoretical foundations for IR theories, and argues that when the alternative accounts are properly described, the purposes are better satisfied by the latter and, in particular, by a version of Duhemian conventionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do democracies and autocracies intervene militarily in different types of civil conflict? In contrast to the existing literature that makes no distinction between military interventions undertaken by democracies and those by autocracies, I argue that democracies and autocracies are likely to intervene in different types of civil conflict. Specifically, I find that an increase in the rebel capabilities and the existence of an ethnic tie between the rebel group and the third-party state will increase the probability of a military intervention favoring the rebel group only when a third-party state is democratic. The evidence also shows that an autocracy is more likely to intervene when there are lootable natural resources such as secondary diamonds in a civil conflict, but there is no effect of lootable resources on a democracy's intervention decision. The analytical framework in this paper can apply to other types of military behaviors and would provide a more accurate picture of the effect of regime type on foreign policy choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rising demand for water in water-scarce areas has led to frequent predictions of looming 'water wars,' although evidence suggests that water is also an important source of cooperation. This paper follows up on recent research suggesting that river disagreements are more likely to lead to both militarized conflict and peaceful negotiations when water demands and water scarcity are greatest, but that river treaties have generally prevented militarization while increasing negotiations. Here, we examine the effectiveness of these negotiations, in order to determine whether factors that promote negotiation onset have different effects on negotiation outcomes. Empirical analysis suggests that negotiations are most likely to succeed when they concern rivers with high value for the negotiating states (with many uses offering the possibility of negotiating tradeoffs), when they concern a current rather than future problem, and when the adversaries share closer overall relations, but less likely when water scarcity is more acute and when they involve a cross-border river with a stronger upstream state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While most existing theoretical and experimental literatures focus on how a high probability of repeated play can lead to more socially efficient outcomes (for instance, using the result that cooperation is possible in a repeated prisoner's dilemma), this paper focuses on the detrimental effects of repeated play-the ''dark side of the future.'' I study a resource division model with repeated interaction and changes in bargaining strength. The model predicts a negative relationship between the likelihood of repeated interaction and social efficiency. This is because the longer shadow of the future exacerbates commitment problems created by changes in bargaining strength. I test and find support for the model using incentivized laboratory experiments. Increases in the likelihood of repeated play lead to more socially inefficient outcomes in the laboratory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the structure and domestic political relevance of foreign policy beliefs in contemporary Britain. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) of data gathered in five national surveys conducted between May and September 2008 show that the British public's foreign policy beliefs are organized by two latent factors, which we label Liberal Internationalism and British Militarism. These factors closely resemble those reported in studies of the foreign policy beliefs of the American public. Analyses reveal significant covariation between the two foreign policy belief factors and voting intentions, as well as with partisanship and feelings about party leaders-key predictor variables in voting behavior models. These relationships remain significant in the presence of several controls, including measures of incumbent government performance in domestic and foreign policy domains. Demonstrating that foreign policy beliefs matter for the fates of political parties and their leaders helps to explain how public opinion in democratic politics affects the conduct of international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While almost a decade old, Ted Hopf’s observation that the democratic peace is an observation in search of a theory still holds validity. In particular, the mechanisms behind the democratic peace are poorly understood, making it difficult for scholars to provide a compelling explanation. Underappreciated in the existing work is the role of identity and the importance this has for driving the democratic peace. With a focus on developing a dyadic democratic peace mechanism and using a case study approach, this paper utilizes the Copenhagen School’s securitization framework to examine how identity plays out in the US response to the Indian and Iranian nuclear programs. It finds that in fact identity does play an important role in how security policy is constructed. In policy terms, if the democratic peace does rely on identity to trigger the constraining norms that limit the escalation of conflict to violence, it is unlikely the democratic peace can be spread by force and it is possible that states nominally democratic can be excluded from the community of democracies if their behavior or significant other aspects of their perceived identity are at variance with the accepted democratic identity standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on democratization and authoritarian survival has rightfully studied the role external forces play in such processes. These external actors and structural constraints are said to be especially substantial when dealing with small and poor authoritarian states. Although this literature acknowledges that small states are not entirely powerless when confronting hegemonic external forces, little effort has been made to refine and specify the role they play and the actions they undertake to engage international democratization pressures. This paper addresses this lacuna by using the framing approach and the concept of “extraversion” to analyze the process by which weak African authoritarian states draw on and change the representations that Western powers hold about them. These representations provide a specific lens through which Western governments and experts look at political dynamics in developing countries, and eventually shape policies toward these countries. This paper analyzes how two small authoritarian African regimes, Guinea and Mauritania, have enacted a series of performances such as the arrests of alleged “Islamists,”“warlords,” and other transnational “subversive threats,” thereby framing their domestic and foreign policies in ways that can resonate with hegemonic international discourses, seeking to obtain either more support from Western states or to lower their democratization pressure (or both). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the disputed consequences of global economic integration is the possible effect that foreign economic liberalization exerts on social cohesion. Proponents of commercial liberalism see stabilization as an indirect consequence of growing economic interdependence, while globalization critics are much more skeptical. They expect, at least during the liberalization process, destabilizing effects. We examine in this paper the contradictory claims in the light of what we call the distributional theory of civil war. This variant of commercial liberalism qualifies the peace-through-trade hypothesis and expects, based on political economy models of trade policy making, that the redistributive struggle associated with foreign economic liberalization can culminate in violent forms of protest. We demonstrate that a higher level of economic openness is indeed associated with a lower risk of civil war. At the same time, economic liberalization increases the chances of instability weakly. None of the following factors are found to exert any compensatory influence on instability: social spending, foreign aid, and financial flows from the International Monetary Fund. Discontent over the process of globalization is thus a destabilizing force despite the pacifying effect that the level of economic integration exerts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the complex relationship that exists between ideology, international relations theories, and the world of practice. It focuses on the role of theoretical concepts in forming foreign policy, asks whether theoreticians and theories act as agents in the political arena, and if so, what the consequences of this agency are. The paper attempts to show that theoretical concepts have a political role to play in the field of foreign affairs, and that to some degree they shape the reality that they try to study. As such, they blur the dichotomist distinction between subject and object, and should not be considered outside observers, which is a necessary precondition to objectivity. This agency and lack of objectivity, I claim, endow theoreticians with moral responsibility, and obligate the founding of research on morality. In order to demonstrate my claims I focus on U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America under the Kennedy administration, the influence of Walt W. Rostow regarding that policy, and what can be termed the rise and fall of modernization theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several policymakers argue against negotiating with transnational terrorists because of the inability of terrorist groups to form credible commitments. To succeed in negotiation, terrorists must convince target governments that they are credible bargaining partners. This paper explores how constraints from host states affect the ability of terrorists to form credible commitments. If facing sufficient threats, host states may have an incentive to broker peaceful agreements. Hosts that have the ability to monitor and impose moderate costs on terrorist groups can increase the likelihood of negotiated settlements. The paper concludes with an empirical test of the model's hypotheses using data on transnational terrorism in the pre-9/11 period from 1968 to 1991. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents two sets of arguments: one theoretical and one analytical. The theoretical arguments concern the relationship between regional ordering and systemic change. The paper questions the usefulness of the unipolar conception of the contemporary system arguing that the interaction of the Great Powers cannot be understood without reference to regional dynamics. Thus, a unipolar system implies considerable potential for U.S. hegemonic intervention at the regional level but in East Asia, we find an equilibrium constructed out of both material and normative forces, defined as a concert, which presents a considerable restraint on all powers, including the U.S. The paper then proceeds to examine these claims through an analysis of the foreign policies of the U.S., Russia, and China over the North Korean nuclear problem that emerged after 2002. It finds that China and Russia have substantive common interests arising from internal and external re-ordering in which they look to strategic partnerships, regional multilateralism, and systemic multipolarization as inter-locking processes. The paper finds that they have collaborated over the Korean crisis to prevent a U.S. unilateral solution but that this should not be construed as a success for an open counterhegemonic strategy as it was only under the constraining conditions of East Asian concert, including the dynamics within the U.S. alliance systems, that this collaboration was successful. Nevertheless, the paper concludes that regional multipolarity and systemic unipolarity are contradictory: a system that exhibits multipolarization at the regional level cannot be characterized as unipolar at the global level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research examining the effect of regime type on conflict has focused on the democracy/autocracy continuum expounded in the political philosophies of liberal thinkers such as Kant and Schumpeter. While this concentration has yielded impressive results (democratic peace), it seems plausible that other conceptions of regime type may yield similar success. This paper examines the philosophy of Machiavelli and develops a measure of his“imperial regimes.” These states, which can either be democratic or autocratic, should exhibit an increased propensity to initiate international conflict. Testing this contention in Renaissance Italy (1250–1494) and the modern international system (1920–1992), this paper finds strong empirical support. Machiavelli's views illuminate key differences between democracies and autocracies that have been previously overlooked. Thus, it deepens rather than replaces our conception of how domestic institutions affect international conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the relationship between International Relations theory and ethics. It poses the question of the complicity of the discipline in the events of September 11, 2001. The paper begins with a discussion of Weber's notion of science as a vocation, and links this to the commitment in the discipline to a value-free conception of social science, one that sharply separates facts from values. The paper then examines the role of ten core assumptions in International Relations theory in helping to construct a discipline that has a culturally and historically very specific notion of violence, one resting on distinctions between economics and politics, between the outside and the inside of states, and between the public and the private realms. Using the United Nations Human Development report, the paper summarizes a number of forms of violence in world politics, and questions why the discipline of International Relations only focuses on a small subset of these. The paper then refers to the art of Magritte, and specifically Velazquez's painting Las Meninas, to argue for a notion of representation relevant to the social world that stresses negotiation, perspective, and understanding rather than notions of an underlying Archimedean foundation to truth claims. In concluding, the paper asserts that the discipline helped to sing into existence the world of September 11 by reflecting the interests of the dominant in what were presented as being neutral, and universal theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract How does migration affect global patterns of political violence and protest? While political scientists have examined the links between trade and conflict, less attention has been paid to the links between migration and conflict. In this paper, we show that greater emigration reduces domestic political violence by providing exit opportunities for aggrieved citizens and economic benefits to those who remain. Emigration also reduces non-violent forms of political contestation, including protests and strikes, implying that high emigration rates can produce relatively quiescent populations. However, larger flows of emigrants to democracies can increase non-violent protest in autocracies, as exposure to freer countries spreads democratic norms and the tools of peaceful opposition. We use instrumental variables analysis to account for the endogeneity of migration flows and find robust results for a range of indicators of civil violence and protest from 1960 to 2010.

Abstract: This paper examines the transnational dimensions of low-level conflict and state repression. In this regard, special emphasis is placed on the role of political regimes. Drawing on a simple model, we argue that democracy has opposing effects on conflict intensity. On one hand, democracy satisfies demand for political participation and thus reduces conflict potential, while, on the other hand, we highlight that domestic democracy may spur dissatisfaction and conflict abroad, which, in turn, may induce conflict spillovers. As a result, the net effect of democracy on low-level conflict and state repression is ambiguous and depends on the level of democracy in the neighborhood: We predict that democracy is more pacifying in democratic environments and may spur conflict in autocratic environments. By the symmetry of the model, we also predict that democratic environments are more pacifying for democratic countries and may spur conflict in autocracies. Empirical evidence using panel data on different types of low-level conflict and state repression for 160 countries in the period from 1950 to 2011 supports these hypotheses. Additionally, two case studies illustrate the mechanisms of our model.

Most bargaining models of war suggest that the absence of ex-ante uncertainty about the outcome of fighting should lead to negotiated outcomes rather than military conflict. Nevertheless, relatively weak states still refuse demands from dominant powers in many cases. This paper tests several explanations for this phenomenon. James Fearon's account of rationalist explanations for war suggests two reasons states might resist militarized demands even if there is little or no chance of military victory. First, the weaker state might not concede if the stronger state's threat is not credible. Second, guerrilla resistance to enemy occupation might create a commitment problem for the stronger state if it could impose costs that exceed the value of the stronger state's objectives. Alternative explanations that do not assume the state behaves as a unitary rational actor focus on special features of state preferences, such as the importance attached to political sovereignty and territorial integrity, or on the difficulties state institutions might pose for making the policy changes necessary to concede the more powerful state's demands. Empirical analyses of MID and ICB data point to the importance of both rationalist claims about threat credibility and alternative arguments about state preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that during a crisis, unitary rational states have an incentive to misrepresent their true resolve and willingness to go to war. This theoretical result has been taken to imply that diplomacy, interpreted as pre-bargaining communication, can have no effect on the way crises play out. This paper shows an intuitive way that diplomatic cheap talk can matter in a single crisis between countries, especially when the bargaining game has multiple equilibria. In particular, if after 'diplomacy' states can choose to either fight a war directly or bargain in hopes of reaching a peaceful settlement, then it is possible to find an equilibrium, where diplomacy influences whether there is war or peace. Importantly, the cheap talk diplomacy does three things the standard model says it cannot: it coordinates actions, it reveals information, and it changes the ex ante probability of war. This result demonstrates an easy way of reconciling the discrepancy between the obvious empirical observation that diplomacy often does influence the path of a crisis with the rationalist model of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines if, when, and how states act to manage militarized disputes. I argue that the relationship between the third party and disputants, the management history, and the characteristics of the conflict help us understand when management occurs and the management techniques employed. I find substantial evidence that biased third parties are quick to offer management services and to employ economic and diplomatic techniques. Conditions that increase the perceived probability of conflict resolution, such as previous conflict management, and factors that lower the cost of conflict management, such as costly conflict, lead to the timely use of diplomatic and verbal techniques. The findings offer significant contributions to both the conflict management and alliance literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of some previous important experimental work in international relations. New substantive domains and methodological innovations for approaching innovative experimental work in international relations will each be discussed in turn. These areas of exploration include research into cross-cultural manifestations of basic psychological processes, investigations into the underlying dynamics of identity construction, transformation and rejection, and experimental explorations into such topics as regime type, coalitions and alliances, status competition, time horizons, and emotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the issue is presented that discusses experiments in international relations research.

This paper evaluates the effect of economic interests and security concerns on American intervention in civil and international conflict. Generalizations about the relative importance of these considerations have played critical role in the historiography of American foreign relations. Although statistical analysis is well suited for evaluating such generalizations, quantitative researchers have devoted relatively little attention to the issue. Existing large-n research has generally found that security concerns matter more, but has not considered how the economic and security concerns thought to affect intervention might also influence each other. These subsidiary relationships complicate efforts to assess the relative importance of these two influences on intervention. Evidence concerning intervention in international crises and civil wars indicates that, while alliance commitments and rival behavior have a greater immediate impact on American intervention, exports have an important indirect effect by shaping alliance commitments in the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By analyzing disputes between the United States and the EU under General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) respectively, the paper demonstrates that the judicialization (or legalization) of international dispute settlement procedures (IDSPs) can contribute to states’ compliance with (these) dispute settlement mechanisms. The article compares four sets of pairwise similar disputes which the United States had with the EU: the so-called Domestic International Sales Corporations case (which arose under GATT) and the Foreign Sales Corporations case (which was settled through WTO procedures), the Steel case (GATT) and the Patents case (WTO), the two Hormones cases under GATT and the WTO respectively, the Citrus case (GATT) and the Bananas case (WTO). In each of the four comparisons, the United States acted more in accordance with the judicial WTO dispute settlement procedures than with the diplomatic GATT procedures. We can therefore say that contrary to realist assumptions, the judicialization of IDSPs can contribute to their effectiveness. However, contrary to idealist assumptions the effectiveness of IDSPs does not automatically follow from their judicialization. Yet, as assumed by institutionalists, judicialized IDSPs are better than diplomatic IDSPs in sustaining states’ compliance with these procedures precisely because of their normative and strategic effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared with the realist tradition, relatively few students of international relations explore variations within liberalism. This paper introduces a particular interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s evolutionary liberalism and then compares it with Thomas Paine’s revolutionary liberalism. Paine was an ebullient optimist while Kant was more guarded and cautious. These different assumptions lead to distinct liberal views on voting rights, how trade fosters peace, and defense policies. The most striking disagreement, and one that endures in contemporary liberal circles, revolves around the question of military interventions to spread democratic rule. Kant advocated nonintervention while Paine actively pursued military intervention to spread democratic rule. Differences between Kant and Paine represent some enduring tensions still residing within the liberal tradition in international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between women’s status and economic globalization. The expectations of both proponents and skeptics of globalization are discussed with regard to women’s status, and a series of statistical examinations of this relationship are performed using data on 130 countries from 1982 to 2003. To control for the potential sensitivity of findings to the use of particular indicators of women’s status, we use five indicators of women’s status from two different data sources to represent the economic, political, and social spheres of women’s status. As well, four indicators of economic globalization are used. We find that the relationship between economic globalization and women’s status varies by type and era and, in the majority of instances, economic globalization is associated with improved women’s status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past century, crises have often driven shifts in U.S. foreign policy, as a liberal tradition has been permissive of varying tendencies to isolationism, pragmatism, or a crusading internationalism. While materialist analyses emphasize the impacts of crises on the capabilities of state and societal agents, they obscure the role of agents in interpreting crises. In this paper, I therefore offer a constructivist analysis, stressing the role of presidential rhetoric in the construction of crises as events which legitimate shifts between variants of the American liberal tradition and definitions of the national interest. I specifically examine interpretations of the Cold War and War on Terror offered in the March 1947 Truman Doctrine speech and September 2001 Bush Doctrine speech. Truman and Bush each reinterpreted international challenges as pertaining to “ways of life,” transforming security and partisan debates in ways that delegitimated isolationism. In sum, this analysis highlights the enduring traditions and mass understandings which can themselves constrain elite debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A proliferating literature in IR theory documents the impact of transnational advocacy networks on global public policy making. We know little, however, about the process by which advocacy networks select issues around which to mobilize in the first place. This paper aims to develop a framework for analyzing variation in issue emergence by comparing two prominent issues in the transnational network around children and armed conflict (child soldiers and girls in war) to an issue absent from this advocacy sphere (the protection needs of children born as a result of wartime rape). This variation is not easily explained by extant hypotheses about issue emergence, which suggests the need for rigorous research on both positive and negative outcomes in global agenda setting. I conclude with several suggestions toward that end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Zogby International polling data from seven different Arab nations (Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) this paper offers a societal-level quantitative analysis ( N=91 dyads) of the determinants of Arab public opinion toward 13 different non-Arab countries (Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States). We first explore whether Arab public opinion toward these countries is predicted by general “realist,”“liberal,”“Marxist,” and/or “cultural” hypotheses suggested in the IR/foreign policy literature. After finding few statistically significant relationships among these variables, we present evidence that Arab publics evaluate non-Arab countries on the basis of those countries' specific foreign policy behaviors throughout the wider Middle East (e.g., especially those behaviors affecting Palestine and Iraq). Noting that these evaluations occur in the context of competing identity frames, we provisionally link Arab publics' concerns with “regional” matters to the high salience of “Arabist” identity among respondents to the Zogby survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the principled content of 62 international river agreements for the period 1980–2000. We ask two questions: whether governments are converging on common principles for governing shared river basins and whether the effort to create a global normative framework for shared rivers has shaped the principled content of basin-level international accords. The data reveal a complex process of normative development. A few core principles emanating from global legal efforts have shown significant growth, diffusion and deepening at the basin-specific level. Others are common in basin agreements but show no diffusion or deepening. Still others are weakly represented in the data. If joint articulation of common principles is necessary for regime formation, then there is only weak evidence for a global rivers regime. But the data also reveal normative developments not captured by a regime-theoretic lens: a backlash reinforcing sovereign rights, the emergence of two seemingly conflicting clusters of principles, and an ambiguous relationship between some principles typically thought to be mutually reinforcing. The results show the need to treat principled content as an important dependent variable in the study of cooperation and to view institution building as a dynamic, multi-dimensional and multi-level process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes two main arguments about the relationship between Thucydides, modern realism, and the key conceptual ideas they introduce to situate and explain international politics. First, Thucydides refutes the central claim underlying modern realist scholarship, that the sources of state behavior can be located not in the character of the primary political units but in the decentralized system or structure created by their interaction. Second, however, analyses that discuss Thucydides exclusively with respect to this “third-image” realism do not take into account the most important emendation made to political realism in the last half of the twentieth century, Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics. Waltz reformulates the theory of how anarchic political structures affect the behavior of their constituent units and suggests that the question posed by realism—and to be asked of Thucydides—is not whether states behave according to the Athenian thesis or consistently observe the power-political laws of nature, but whether they suffer “costs” in terms of political autonomy, security, and cultural integrity if they do not. Many scholars are therefore incorrect to assume that demonstrating the importance of non-structural factors in The Peloponnesian War severs the connection between Thucydides and structural realism. Thucydides may in fact be a realist, but not for reasons conventionally assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peacekeeping has become an increasingly prominent tool for conflict management and there has been an accompanying explosion of scholarly studies on peacekeeping. Yet, such analyses typically ignore the process of getting a peace agreement itself, missing the potential impact that a peacekeeping force might have in facilitating a peace agreement between protagonists. In this paper, we explore among both enduring rivalries and civil wars whether the presence of a peacekeeping force enhances the prospects for gaining an agreement between protagonists. The academic literature suggests opposing logics: one suggesting the desirability of peacekeeping forces while the other implies that they may be counterproductive. We consider whether the presence of peacekeeping enhances or inhibits mediation and negotiation attempts. We also explore whether the success rates for international mediation and negotiation efforts in those conflicts are affected by the presence of peacekeeping forces. Our results suggest support for the pessimistic view of peacekeeping as it discourages diplomatic efforts and decreases the likelihood of achieving a settlement, although the results are clearer for interstate conflict than for civil wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides the most comprehensive and extensive analysis to date of the possibility of a“rally‘round the flag” effect—an increase in support for the government caused by involvement in international conflict—in Britain, for the years 1948–2001. We use a fractionally integrated time series model with an array of political and economic controls. Our primary dependent variable is intention to vote for the ruling party. The results confirm earlier studies that the Falklands War generated a rally effect, but they provide a more sophisticated understanding of the Gulf War rally. New results also include the findings that participation in international crises which stopped short of war did not engender rallies, and that there were no rallies for the Korean, Suez, or Kosovo Wars. The findings indicate that when they do occur rallies are heterogeneous in nature, that rallies are most likely when there is intense and direct threat to the national interest, that the relationship between multilateralism and rallies in the British case is tenuous, and that rallies for the ruling party are sometimes expressed through satisfaction with the prime minister. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we evaluate the liberal claim that democratic states devote fewer resources to their militaries. Low military spending is thought to avert conflict spirals and release more resources to fund domestic programs. While prominent in many liberal international relations theories, most notably in Immanuel Kant's, this proposition has received little empirical scrutiny. Using several indicators of military resource allocation and data on a wide range of states since 1816, we find empirical support for the liberal argument, although regime type is not necessarily the strongest influence on military resource allocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many statistical studies in international relations investigate the claim that democracies do not fight one another. Virtually all of these studies employ a single-equation design, where the dependent variable measures the presence or absence of a dyadic militarized interstate dispute (MID). A separate group of studies argues that conflict affects democracy and that its effect could be positive or negative. By and large, these two bodies of literature have not incorporated one another's insights. We argue that democracy and dyadic conflict affect each other significantly and that statistical models that ignore the reciprocal nature of these effects may make incorrect inferences. To test this argument, we develop a simultaneous equations model of democracy and dyadic conflict. Our sample includes all the politically relevant dyads from 1950 to 1992. We find that dyadic military disputes reduce joint democracy and joint democracy reduces the probability of MIDs. Compared with the single-equation estimates in the literature, the absolute effect of joint democracy in our paper is smaller while in relative terms, the effect is similar in size. The effect of joint democracy on MID involvement is considerably smaller for noncontiguous countries than for contiguous ones. The effects of a number of control variables in the MID equation are also found to differ from those reported previously in single- equation–based studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article illustrates the importance of testing empirical models in samples appropriate to the theories the models are intended to test. While social science appears to mandate that we prefer general theories to limited ones, the generality of a theory rests in its logical application to a set of observations, not solely to its statistical survival in a large data set. Theories in international relations, especially those linking domestic turmoil and international conflict, are advancing, but are sometimes applied to samples larger than the related theories indicate. This paper examines the statistical consequences of estimation in overexpansive samples with unmodeled treatment effects; we argue that samples containing cases that cannot experience the causal phenomenon in question produce unmodeled treatment effects, and we reexamine three published articles whose samples are perhaps broader than their theories suggest they should be. The empirical analyses demonstrate that overexpansive samples can produce somewhat misleading results: the new models produce interesting findings that emerge as treatment effects are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Current scholarship on the international relations of ethnic conflict holds that such domestic-level conflict can spread to become interstate conflict. Empirical research, theoretical discussions, and case studies have concluded that states suffering from violent ethnic conflict, specifically ethno-political rebellion, can be either the victims of aggression or themselves the aggressors when ethnic conflict spreads to the international level. From both a scholarly perspective and the standpoint of policymaking it is important to know which possibility is more likely. This paper examines the behavior of states involved in militarized interstate disputes to test two possibilities: first, that states contending with ethnic rebellion are more likely to be the victims of aggression by outside actors. Alternatively, that states contending with ethnic rebellion are more likely to take aggressive action against outside states. Statistical analysis of ethnic rebellion data and militarized interstate dispute data covering the period 1980–1992 finds that states suffering from ethnic rebellion are more likely to use force and use force first when involved in international disputes than states without similar insurgency problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper raises the issue of moral credibility in international relations and shows that considerations of preserving moral prestige can become crucial for armed humanitarian intervention. It contrasts realist and constructivist explanations about the causes of humanitarian intervention and demonstrates that traditional accounts do not provide a complete understanding of the phenomenon of intervention. In the case studied here, Britain engaged in a relatively costly humanitarian intervention against the Barbary pirates, slave trade in Christian Europeans due to her willingness to defy moral criticism and exhibit consistency with her professed moral principles. No material incentives and/or constraints influenced the British decision, and neither was it affected by a sense of felling, with regard to the Christian slaves. Instead, allegations that Britain urged Europe to abolish the black slave trade out of selfish interests, while at the same time turning a blind eye toward the Christian slave trade of the pirates, undermined British moral prestige and became the cause of the Barbary expedition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for a historical reinterpretation of the social bases of American global hegemony in this century. The first part builds a case for three related propositions: 1) prevailing theoretical traditions in international political economy embody inadequate conceptions of states, state powers, and state/society relations and are, as a consequence, largely unable to interpret the historically concrete processes by which the socio-political basis of American global power was constructed in the twentieth century; 2) recent scholarship in historical political economy suggests potentially fruitful alternatives to prevailing understandings of state powers and the core relations of American global hegemony in this century; and 3) in light of the first two propositions a historical reinterpretation of the socio-political core of American hegemony is warranted. As a step in this direction, the second part of the paper suggests one such alternative interpretation. It is argued that the extraordinary global powers of the United States were made possible by a reconstruction of state/society relations peculiar to the U.S., simultaneously creating the social infrastructure of mass production and consumption while maintaining the formal separation between the spheres of politics and economics, public and private, which is characteristic of liberal capitalist social formations. The distinctive neoliberal quality of American hegemony may be best understood as the historical outcome of the political struggles entailed in this process of socio-political restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

World system theory characterizes world politics as a three-tiered structure of inequality (core, semiperiphery, periphery) which manifests itself along three dimensions: an unequal distribution of global wealth, asymmetrical economic dependence, and political inequality. While this is a plausible description of the international system, world system theory cannot provide a behaviorally-based causal explanation of this core-periphery structure because the theory is wedded to a structuralist or methodological collectivist explanatory framework. As a result, world system theory treats the international system's core-periphery structure as an unproblematic assumption. In order to address this deficiency, this paper presents a rational choice theory in which wealthy and poor states choose core and peripheral positions respectively. Specifically, I argue that when wealthy states strategically interact with poorly endowed states by rendering economic exchanges contingent upon the acceptance of a subordinate status, then a core-periphery structure emerges as the rational outcome under certain conditions. Like world system theory, my analysis identifies an inegalitarian distribution of wealth as one of the necessary conditions for the existence of a core-periphery structure. But unlike world system theory's canonical model, this paper also identifies, as additional necessary conditions for core-periphery relations, attenuated competition within the core for control over the periphery and normal distributions of state preferences with respect to key economic and political values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the collective-goods approach to alliances to investigate how membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other American alliances affects the interaction between the United States and the other actors. The paper uses two models, differing in their assumption about the factors involved in the calculations member states make, to derive hypotheses regarding the dynamics of intra-alliance behavior. I conclude that a ‘beginning’ model, which assumes that allies are concerned more with maintaining long-term mutual commitment than with maximizing short-term utility, better explains how allies act. The implications for the study of group behavior and the contributions to the understanding of alliances are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that while we have adopted the language of decision-making in our theories of international relations, we have not adequately addressed the operational problems of studying cognitive variables. After I identify the empirical challenge, I try to direct our theoretical attention to the task of drawing inferences about a subject's perceptions and definitions. I advance a preliminary theory and strategy that might guide this inference process, and then apply the basic method to a case study of Soviet perspectives on change in the Third World. The paper tries to bridge three domains: international relations theory, the psychology of social cognition, and Soviet area studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines one method to measure the willingness of nations to take risks in international conflicts. Because war is inherently risky, the willingness to take risks is one of the most important predictors of escalation. This paper examines alliance behavior to find a measure for national risk attitudes. The willingness to take risks is identified with the trade-off between autonomy and security expressed in a nation's alliances. Two rational-choice models, one for alliance behavior and one for war decisions, are linked to create this identification. Formally, the odds of the break-even probability of success that a nation will accept for a given war equal its marginal rate of substitution between autonomy and security. Finally, the strengths and weaknesses of one existing measure of national risk attitudes are analyzed in light of the argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much recent commentary on the theory of international politics has focused on the analysis of change and the continuing vitality of political realism. This paper argues that the philosophical dilemmas posed by the concern with change and by the claim to political realism are intimately related. The argument is pursued in the context of contrasting traditions of political realism, of the antithesis between structuralism and historicism in contemporary social and political theory, and of recent tendencies and controversies in the literature on neorealist theories of international politics. The paper concludes that political realism ought to be understood less as a coherent theoretical position in its own right than as the site of a great many interesting claims and metaphysical disputes. As there is no single tradition of political realism, but rather a knot of historically constituted tensions and contradictions, these tensions and contradictions might be reconstituted in a more critical and creative manner. This involves an examination of the way the core categories of international political theory depend upon a particular formulation of the relationship between identity and difference—a formulation which must be refused. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explanations of interstate wars have emphasized a variety of factors contributing to their outbreak. Scholars of international relations have pointed to one or more aspects of the material, structural and/or cultural contexts of national decision-making and interstate relations in their analyses of war. This paper argues that by studying the converging effect of these many attributes within the framework of an analysis which attends to power configurations and political management systems in the international system, a more comprehensive understanding of the conditions leading to interstate wars may be obtained. It is further argued that these power configurations and management systems are shaped in large part by the constraints imposed by economic cycles, which have implications for both domestic and international political activities. This paper is intended to offer a theoretical account, showing how the maintenance and transformation of international power configurations and political management systems (and, thus, interstate wars) are related to economic cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2010.00626.x Byline: Faten Ghosn (*) Abstract: This paper analyzes the conditions that encourage (or hinder) conflicting states in coming to the negotiating table. It also explores the factors that influence the successfulness of such negotiation attempts. A main argument of the paper is that it is important to look at what brings states to the table, because this may have a direct or indirect impact on the outcome of such negotiations. While confirming some of the findings within the conflict management literature, this paper demonstrates that contextual factors seem to have different effects or a different impact on each stage, implying that while certain factors may bring states to the table, they may not be the same factors that make agreements possible. Author Affiliation: (*)University of Arizona

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2010.00611.x Byline: Xun Cao (1) Abstract: This paper studies policy changes in capital taxation by focusing on policy interdependence induced by network dynamics at the international level. The empirical findings indicate that the competition mechanism induced by network position similarity in the network of portfolio investment and that of exports causes policy diffusion in corporate taxation; the socialization mechanism (policy learning and emulation) induced by network position proximity in the IGO networks also drives policy changes, and the evidence is much stronger in the IGO networks that facilitate policy learning than in those that facilitate emulation. The paper also discusses explicitly empirical challenges to incorporate network characteristics into connectivity matrices in spatial lag models often used to study policy diffusion. It suggests that students of policy diffusion should discuss as explicitly as possible the assumptions and procedures to construct connectivity matrices and present results from alternative specifications: our conclusion on the strength of policy diffusion is often sensitive to the choice of connectivity matrices. Author Affiliation: (*)University of Essex