Search

Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, the European Union has attempted to reinforce its existing nascent capabilities to combat terrorism. The European Council adopted a comprehensive Plan of Action and reached political agreement on a number of important counterterrorism initiatives, including strengthening of Europol and Eurojust; and the introduction of a European Arrest Warrant. This paper provides a critical analysis of these key operational measures and reveals that the EU counterterrorism policy suffers from an implementation deficit, in large part due to the absence of genuine pro-integration thinking in the area of Justice and Home Affairs. A multitude of political, legal, and cultural challenges still need to be overcome in order to make the EU counterterrorism policy less of a paper tiger and more of an effective counterterrorism device. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about U.S.-China conflict due to Taiwan is presented which was discussed at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, from August 30-September 2, 2012. The paper discusses topics including China's emerging global influence in the post-Cold War era and the U.S. involvement in the Taiwan Strait conflict.

A conference paper about militarized conflict in the cross-strait relations is presented which was prepared for presentation at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, from August 30-September 2, 2012. The paper discusses topics including the U.S.-China-Taiwan triangular relationships and the alliance-like arrangement between Taiwan and the U.S.

This paper introduces a theory explaining the circumstances under which the United States takes advantage of its defense industrial market power and globalization's efficiency gains to collect economic rents and under which it will instead forgo these rents to achieve geopolitical gains. In this bargain, the United States distributes much of the financial gains from collaboration to its partners in exchange for their joining an American-dominated global arms network, giving up ambitions to act autonomously in defense, and foregoing sales to regimes that threaten American security. The second contribution is to test, for the first time, the many competing theories on defense globalization using statistical analysis of a large time series cross-sectional data set, which measures the financial premium paid (or subsidy received) by US arms customers from 1970-2007. While the paper finds support for its theory, it also shows that large US budgets lead to inflated export prices, and that US market power appears to be eroding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few leaders worry about the status of their honor; they do worry, at times obsessively, about their credibility. The "credibility imperative" has occupied a central position in every major U.S. foreign policy debate in the last fifty years. It affects discourse and decisions in predictable - and deeply pathological - ways. This paper examines the continuing importance of honor in modern U.S. foreign policy. It first discusses the traditional importance of honor in international and interpersonal politics, and explains of the central role it plays in the construction of security in any system that lacks a central authority. Second, it describes the predictable, consistent effects that honor has on state behavior in general, and U.S. foreign policy in particular. Third, it argues that the lingering concern for honor is pathological, for a couple of reasons: There is no evidence that it helps states attain their goals, and it certainly has no relevance in those systems (like today's international) where no existential threats to member security exist. The paper then speculates about the genesis of the honor pathology, and why it continues to have such salience in the new century. Honor as a motivation for action seems as anachronistic today as horse-drawn carriages, alchemy and the duel. But it persists, if under different guises; and to the extent that it persists, it pathologizes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"American Public Opinion and the Palestinian State" examines the role of public opinion on US foreign policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Specifically, it looks at the evolution of public opinion towards Palestinian statehood and the influences of pro-Arab and pro-Israel lobbying groups on the two-state solution. To do that, the paper focuses on four distinct periods in the history of American foreign policymaking: 1. during the late 1970s after the signing of the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel through the 1980s "strategic alliance" between the Jewish state and the US; 2. the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, roughly the period of George H. W. Bush's presidency, the height of the Intifada, and the end of the Cold War; 3. in the 1990s after the Madrid and Oslo peace talks; and 4. after the "end of the peace process" and 9/11/2001. This paper concludes that while public opinion is important to American foreign policy thinking, change took place only gradually while pro-Arab and pro-Israel pressure groups had important parts to play in elite decision-making and at the level of popular sentiment concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will historically and theoretically study conditions under which states develop bilateral versus multilateral security alliances. Specifically, the paper will discuss a question on why the United States built mainly bilateral alliances in the Asia-Pacific region while it established a multilateral alliance, namely the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the early Cold War period.Understanding security alliances have been the subject of major research in international relations studies. However, there has been so far insufficient scholarly attention and rigorous archival research focusing on the question I proposed above. The findings of the proposed paper will not only be historical and theoretical, but will also attempt to provide insights on how future Asia-Pacific alliance policy can be managed.This paper argues that the difference between the German rearmament and the Japanese rearmament is a key for solving the puzzle. The nature of the German rearmament is very much different from that of the Japanese counterpart, because the Japanese rearmament was far modest and limited in its nature and scope. The large-scale German rearmament generated more complex interdependent interactions among the United States and its European allies, while the limited Japanese rearmament created less interdependent relations in the Asia-Pacific region. Therefore, the Atlantic alliance developed into NATO with multilateralism, while alliances in the Asia-Pacific remained bilateral in nature. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will examine several of the actions of President George W. Bush and argue that in his assertions of presidential authority he has pushed the boundaries of presidential power further than the Constitution allows. Four instances of President Bush's claims to extraordinary presidential authority will be examined: his suspension of the Geneva Agreements in 2002, his denial of the writ of habeas corpus for detainees in the war on terror, his order that the National Security Agency monitor messages to or from domestic parties in the United States without a warrant, and his use of signing statements. The paper will conclude that the principles of constitutionalism and the rule of law are basic to the United States polity. Insofar as President Bush, in cases such as these, has refused to acknowledge the constitutional limits on his executive authority, he has undermined both of these fundamental principles. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the process of gaining public consent about a security threat, or threat legitimation. Threats require legitimation because they are 'social facts' and not objective truths or subjective perceptions. Threat legitimation occurs in the public discourse through rhetoric. Political and social actors deploy rhetorical resources and strategies to construct, reproduce, and change narratives about a threat. Unlike previous rhetorical studies, this paper also argues that the influence and power of rhetoric depends on the media environment. The first section of the paper outlines threat legitimation and the role of rhetoric and the media environment. The second section investigates four cases within two different media environments, radio and television. Through these four cases, the paper demonstrates the importance of rhetorical strategies for threat legitimation in US foreign policy, and how the media environment affects the use of rhetoric. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Project is the largest, most extensive data-collection effort to date on the field of international relations. It systematically and empirically analyzes relationships among pedagogy, scholarship, and international policy. In this paper we draw from two of the three major TRIP data sources to describe trends in the discipline of international relations over the past 27 years (1980-2006). First, we employ a new journal article database that covers every article published in the 12 leading journals in the field. The article is the unit of analysis and we categorize each article in terms of 26 distinct variables,including methodology, epistemology, issue area, substantive focus, author's gender, paradigm advanced, region under study, and many others. We include the codebook for the TRIP journal article database in the Appendix to this paper. Second, we analyze results from two surveys of international relations faculty. The first survey was conducted in 2004 and covered all faculty at U.S. colleges and universities who teach or do research in the field of international relations. The second survey was conducted in 2006 and covered both U.S. and Canadian IR faculty members, although we report only U.S. responses in this paper. The journal article database allows us to track changes in the type of research published in the field,2 while the surveys are primarily useful as contemporary snapshots that document the opinions and practices of IR scholars in terms of their views of the discipline, their research, their teaching practices, and their opinions on contemporary policy issues. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strategies to counter nuclear proliferation are one of the fundamental cornerstones of American foreign policy. Efforts to curtail North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs are but a few recent examples of American counter-proliferation activities. While American policy-makers have always been strongly committed to denying nuclear technology and expertise to US's enemies, a much less explored problem of international relations is how Washington has dealt with the prospect of its allies acquiring nuclear capability, either within or outside the confines of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. A perfect case for exploring such a question is Israel. While Israel has remained an important strategic ally for the US since the early days of its independence, American policy toward the Israeli nuclear program has undergone tremendous change, ranging from outright opposition to eventual acceptance and tacit support. Thus the Israeli case offers an important opportunity to explore the conditions under which American nuclear policy vis-à-vis an ally can transform. The paper will investigate how the dynamic of US-Israeli interactions during the critical years from the late 1950s to the early 1970s shaped and influenced the American perception of and response to the maturing Israeli nuclear program. The paper will argue that the key to understanding the varying nature of the American response lies in 'proportional leverage' that the two sides understood to possess vis-à-vis each other at various points during the critical period of Israeli nuclear development. Based on original archival research, the paper will supplement and expand on the few existing works that have investigated the nature of the American response to the emerging Israeli program (Cohen & Burr, 2006; Cohen, 1998). It will also contribute to the ever-growing American foreign relations literature and will help to improve our understanding of the nature of American response to various nuclear challenges around the world, especially the under-studied problems emanating from the US's allies rather than its adversaries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human Trafficking, Human Security and the BalkansHuman trafficking in the Western Balkan region has been addressed in numerous multilateral and regional forums, reflecting, in part, the concerns of the United States and the European Union with the spillover effects of instability and organized crime. The paper argues that despite efforts at greater exploration and dialogue between governments, nongovernmental organizations, and international organizations, the region continues to reveal deep seated challenges to resolving the problem. Anti-trafficking efforts have lost sight of broader issues of human security, focusing on narrow rule-of-law approaches of criminalization and enhanced border control while downplaying the socioeconomic dynamics that place vulnerable populations at risk for trafficking. The paper also reveals how the absence of consensus on trafficking definitions and how best to address the trafficking problem has resulted in steps geared more towards the goal of EU accession and policy practice mired in contradictions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global agenda setting (also described as issue emergence) has largely been overlooked by researchers in international politics, contrary to the vast amount of research into domestic agenda setting by scholars studying U.S. politics. One of the reasons global agenda setting has been neglected stems from a lack of a standard approach to agenda setting that can be used in the international arena. This paper identifies a way to study international agenda setting through the use of framing. Using the framing perspective allows us to examine change and continuity in frames over time as opposed to the rather idiosyncratic way global agenda setting research has been examined in the past. The paper proposes understanding issue emergence by looking at the moral, analytical, and temporal aspects of a frame and their dominance in international discourse. In addition, the paper describes the most likely influences on frame dominance as sources for hypotheses to guide future research on international issue emergence. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American foreign policy has long been viewed by scholars as an "invitation to struggle" between the executive and legislative branches. During periods of international tension the advantage in this struggle goes to the president as commander in chief, especially during times of war. Although publicly voicing dissent at such times often carries great political risks, some members of Congress see going public as the only means they have to challenge the president in his conduct of the war. Through content analysis of the New York Times for selected periods of unified government during the Vietnam and Iraq wars (1965 and 2005), this preliminary study examines who in Congress went public to try to influence the content and direction of the president's war policy. The paper finds that despite the shift in Congress from institutionalized to individualized pluralism that followed the Vietnam war, the "experts-cum-insiders" of the congressional committees most responsible for foreign policy continue to dominate the public debate on questions of war and peace. The study also finds that members of Congress who are not in the president's party have been much more likely to go public during the Iraq war than was the case during Vietnam. At the same time, the paper provides evidence of a highly organized media strategy on the part of the minority Republican leadership in 1965 to influence President Johnson's Vietnam policy. The data also show evidence of a widening partisan gap in foreign policy in Congress. Whereas in 1965, President Johnson received similar levels of support and opposition from Democrats and Republicans, in 2005, very few Democrats were willing to support President Bush, reflecting the ideological polarization of the party system. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a theoretical framework that simultaneously addresses two deficiencies in current international relations scholarship. First, the paper seeks to enhance understanding of international leadership by introducing a set of indicators designed to facilitate accurate assessments of when leadership is effectively exercised. Second, the paper advances a model to increase understanding of how ideational factors actuate shifting levels of U.S. authority. Building on a more comprehensive definition of leadership developed here, I propose that domestic politics infiltrate decision-making processes consistent with normative concerns that course through the body politic. By constraining political choice and imparting excessive caution, declining domestic approval ratings of the U.S. president contribute to eroded U.S. leadership at the international level. This paper advances the theory that one source of leadership decline may reside in domestic politics with which U.S. presidents must contend. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how presidents were constrained by their predecessors in developing national security strategies during the Cold War. It focuses on the Eisenhower-Kennedy transition and the Carter-Reagan transition, given the change in political party and subsequent desire to craft a new foreign-affairs legacy in each case. The paper finds that although national security policies do create a general framework within which consecutive administrations operate, new presidents still have a window of opportunity to mark a new direction in foreign policy from their immediate predecessor. Perhaps the greatest consistency in foreign policy across these cases was in policy making at the United Nations, where differences in the role of the president's chief adviser at the U.N. were more stylistic than substantive. In conclusion, while the "inherited presidency" does present constraints for new presidents, the Cold War era illustrates that they nevertheless have the political flexibility to move beyond those constraints, at least in foreign affairs. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While analysts agree that the policies of the United States may have a predominant impact on the success or failure of U.S. public diplomacy activities in the Middle East, recent polls indicate that the packaging of the U.S. message can matter as well. Middle Eastern governments have learned to wrap their foreign policies in the religious and cultural contexts of their region; applying similar contexts may significantly advance U.S. outreach efforts there. However, for any such change to be more than momentarily tenable, the realist foundations of U.S. foreign policy and public diplomacy first must be reconciled with the very real power of religion in the Middle East. This paper investigates the possibility of reaching an accommodation between realism and religion through the political psychology perspectives provided by Marc Howard Ross' concept of the culture of conflict and its associated narratives. It considers plausible links to several related concepts that have been applied previously in realist research, including perception and misperception, images, analogies, and nationalism. The paper then identifies possible connections between Ross' findings regarding narratives and the culture of conflict and concepts found in balance-of-threat and hegemonic stability theories. Finally, it briefly addresses initial conclusions and proposes additional topics for follow-on research. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because power defines relations among individuals and political communities, it is an important concept in the social sciences. If we accept Max Weber's suggestion that politics is essentially about allocation and distribution of power, then power is the concept of Political Science and International Relations discipline. But is power found in resources or in relationships? Is it located in structure or agency? In discussing the social nature of power, the paper will advance a conception of power based on the writings of Hannah Arendt. Understanding the nature of power in contemporary world affairs is crucially important both for the U.S. and the future of international order. The development of post-Cold War international relations, the process of European integration, and the inability of the United States to translate its material strength into desired political outcomes have put into question any conception of power based entirely on quantifiable material resources, whether military, economic, or technological. Although power is a 'contested concept', it had been absent from scholarly debate in International Relations for some time. This paper is a critical reflection of the paradox of American power and its implications for American security and global order. It focuses on the neo-conservative conception of American power that informs the foreign and defense policies of George W. Bush's Administration. According to this conception, U.S.' material preponderance coupled with America's universal values, give Washington the means and right to reshape world order. The paper argues that this view of power is deeply mistaken and can only lead to dysfunctional policies and practices. Material resources are not irrelevant to power but do not automatically produce political influence. Effective influence depends on more than military coercion. It depends on the degree to which a state's policies and practices are accepted as legitimate by other states and by international public opinion. The failure of neo-conservative policy-makers to grasp the social nature of power threatens to undermine the effective pursuit of American interests and national security, while gradually weakens the international society. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has demonstrated that attachments and enmities to salient social groupings in society shape political understanding and behavior on domestic issues. In this paper, I argue that beliefs about those groups to which individuals feel loyalty or hostility also structure their attitudes in the realm of foreign policy. The effects of group loyalties differ from the effects of partisanship because long-standing group attachments lead to sizable, but stable differences in opinion on war. As I demonstrate, these differences are resistant to alternations in political messages and persist even in the face of massive changes within the political environment, such as the attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Group attachments therefore give individuals the agency to form their own opinions independent of political leadership. In these ways, group-based differences provide a bedrock structure to public opinion. In this paper, I draw primarily on data from World War II – a time when internal ethnic divisions were a highly visible part of the social sphere in the United States. However, though the power of groups was especially strong in World War II, group-based differences can provide structure to citizens’ understanding of foreign policy more generally. Thus, to demonstrate the generality of the group-based perspective, I look to other cases involving group-based thinking – namely a recent controversy involving foreign trade – to demonstrate that feelings toward domestic groups can structure opinion on foreign policy more generally. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After involvement in terrorism and the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction for most of the period following Qaddafi's arrival in power in 1969, Libya has renounced terrorism and in December 2003 it abandoned its WMD programs. This paper proposes an analytical framework for understanding the role that United States coercive diplomacy played in leading to this dramatic change. The paper argues that American coercive diplomacy was most successful when it combined the qualities of proportionality, coercive credibility and reciprocity. The paper also examines how political and economic developments inside Libya made it more sensitive to the coercive pressure exerted by the United States. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a crucial yet unexamined aspect of nuclear proliferation: why do states and non-state actors share nuclear weapons technology? This question, which has profound implications for U.S. nonproliferation policy, has gone virtually unasked by scholars and remains largely unanswered by the literature on nuclear proliferation. Nuclear sharing also poses an unheralded puzzle in international relations. The anarchic nature of international relations and the destructive power of nuclear weapons implies that this type of nuclear cooperation should be rare indeed. In fact, there have been 11 cases of states sharing nuclear weapons technology with other states. These gaps in our theoretical and empirical understanding of nuclear proliferation are distressing since the current wave of proliferation is driven largely by this phenomenon. The question of why states would share nuclear weapons technology, the conditions under which this is likely to occur, and the security implications of such transfers has been examined only on a case-by-case basis. This paper applies three models of decision-making that have been used profitably to analyze other aspects of nuclear proliferation to examine the motivations behind nuclear sharing. This analytical framework provides the foundation for a systematic, comparative analysis of state-sponsored nuclear proliferation and its implications for international relations theory and nonproliferation strategy. Evidence of security concerns, parochial interests, and cultural influences as motivating factors can be found in several known cases of nuclear cooperation. Further research is required to weigh the relative importance of each of these factors in decisions to engage in nuclear cooperation. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of anti-Americanism in the Arab world has been stymied by an unproductive standoff between arguments which assume that it is essentially rational and those which insist on its fundamental irrationality. This paper argues that Arab anti-Americanism should be analyzed as an analytical schema characterized by extreme levels of distrust, but not yet as an irrational "bias" which resists new information. It traces the evolution of different types of Arab anti-Americanisms in light of the vastly increased American presence in the region, which - interpreted through a distrustful schema - generates fear that American power will be used not only to harm Arab interests but also to fundamentally alter core aspects of identity. The paper looks at a number of issue areas to determine the extent of distrust/bias - reaction to American relief efforts during the 2005 tsunami, coverage of the 2004 Presidential election, response to American reform promotion efforts - and uses an extensive set of al-Jazeera talk show transcripts as a kind of focus group to demonstrate patterns of anti-American discourse in Arab public argument. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars interested in the link between economic and military interests have asked whether trade follows the flag. Studies in this vein tend to examine the causal relationship between trade flows and diplomatic relations as measured through conflict or alliances. While informative, this formulation of economic interests neglects a vital--and extremely significant--aspect of US economic power: financial capital. In this paper we analyze the relationship between overseas asset flows and diplomatic relations, as estimated through US troop deployment. As both US financial flows and US military presence spread throughout the world, it is quite timely to untangle the causal arrow and illuminate whether economics guides politics or vice versa. In this paper, we explore the nature of the relationship between troop deployment and asset flows. Are financial flows and US military presence substitutes, as both serve to protect and expand the US national interest? Or, in contrast, does the US military ?stand guard? over vital economic interests, ensuring both economic and political stability within a state? This paper tests each hypothesis, utilizing both granger causality as well as an instrumental variable technique to determine not only the direction of causality between these economic and political variables, but also whether or not diverse financial flows similarly impact US troop deployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about the foreign policy thinking of neoconservatives, a group that distinguishes itself from others with its pessimistic outlook about world affairs and its belief that the U.S. should spread its values and ideals to the rest of the world, by unilateral force if necessary. This paper argues that the neocons? imperial project of imposing American values (especially democracy) on the world in general, and the Middle East in particular, has certain limits. The most important limits are related to the nature and character of American society, politics, and government. Moreover, people on the receiving end of U.S. power may be ambivalent towards American values and ideals. In order to illustrate these points, I draw on the example of post-war Iraq. It has become clear in Iraq that the neocons overestimated the capacity of the U.S. for nation-building which is a necessary condition for building an empire and establishing a decent democracy. Neocons also underestimated the cultural difficulties involved in transforming the political landscape of Iraq and the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the real structure of substantive conflict in American politics during the postwar years? Is it even possible to talk about an ‘issue structure’, about ongoing policy conflict within continuing policy alignments, at the mass and not just the elite level? If so, what is the structure of substantive conflict characterizing the mass politics of our time? How do policy issues cluster, and nest, in the practical environment for mass politics? And how does such an issue structure relate to (and shape) electoral conflict? Has this relationship remained essentially constant over the last half-century, the period when public opinion data are most widely available, or are there major break-points, and when did these occur? The search for a continuing structure characterizing public preferences on policy conflicts across the postwar period is the principal challenge of this paper. To that end, consistent measures of public preference in four major issue domains–welfare policy, foreign policy, race policy, and social policy–are sought, developed, and analyzed. A theoretical grounding is derived from the literature on postwar political history. An exploratory analysis applies this theoretical grounding to the American National Elections Studies, 1948-2000. A confirmatory analysis is applied to these exploratory findings, as informed by the literature on public opinion in specific issue domains, which provides a further set of independently testable propositions. And the result is an ongoing issue structure. The application of this structure to voting behavior in presidential elections is then the main secondary task of the paper, yielding what is in effect a pure politics of public policy. In this, social welfare proves to have been the leading policy concern of American voters across the postwar period. But international relations was normally present and often important, while civil rights and cultural values made occasional but still noteworthy contributions. From one side, social welfare also had the most consistent impact. From the other, it was nevertheless international relations that divided the postwar years into coherent periods. By contrast, the domain of civil rights and the domain of cultural values, along with one of the two key aspects of foreign policy–foreign engagement, the continuum from isolationism to internationalism–all changed the actual direction of their partisan impact from the immediate postwar period to the modern era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many American foreign policy experts have spoken out against the Bush doctrine–and against its first application, the war on Iraq. But at the same time they have overwhelmingly refrained from criticizing its assessment of the new dangers that face America today. Why have even most American critics of the Bush doctrine accepted the threat assessment upon which it rests? This is the primary puzzle addressed in this paper. The paper argues that the absence of significant debate about the nature of the threat neither reflects "obvious" world realities, nor is it a "natural" reaction to the events of September 11. Rather, the Bush doctrine’s mainstream critics have endorsed its threat assessment because in fact they had long since arrived at the very same assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the preferences of major political factions are likely to influence policy choice on security issues, the origins of these preferences remains unclear compared to those on foreign economic policy. This paper examines efforts to explain preferences on security issues using data on congressional roll call voting. A large body of quantitative research in this area concludes that ideology drives these preferences, and that constituency economic interests have little or no effect. Unfortunately, this literature conceives of economic interests in an unrealistically narrow way, and does not consider the possibility that these interests may shape the ideology of members of congress. Using data on Senate voting on foreign policy from 1947 through 2000, this paper presents evidence that Senators’ home states’ stake in the international economic order, as well as their stake in military spending, played an important role in shaping foreign and defense policy. Although liberal-conservative "ideology" also matters, its effects are more consistent with an interest-based vote trading arrangement than with a coherent set of ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the theory-building portion of a larger project inquiring into the effects of war on the tendency of international rivalries to persist or terminate. The research design of the larger project, a comparative cases design focusing on the rivalry profiles of three different states (Germany, the United States, and Argentina) is discussed. Selected preliminary findings from the Argentine case are utilized in an effort to refine extant hypotheses regarding war and rivalry termination in an effort to build more nuanced theory in this area. The paper concludes with a discussion of one possible direction: a new categorization of rivalries, where different hypotheses regarding war and termination are expected to apply to different rivalry types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the foreign policy agenda of the Christian Right in the wake of September 11th. The paper takes a historical approach, arguing that the foreign policy agenda of the Christian Right and its precursors are defined by the pursuit of four relatively constant values: unilateralist nationalism, the promotion of world evangelism, social conservatism, and a set of orientations derived from Biblical prophecy. However, the contexts in which those values have been pursued have varied over time. This has led to different foreign policy agendas and alliances in the Cold War era, the era of globalization (1989-2001), and now the era defined by the war on terrorism. Each era has been marked by a distinct set of threats to the Christian Right’s underlying values. Looking at the context provided by the war on terrorism and at the Christian Right’s early responses to that war, I argue that the war on terrorism has brought to the fore contradictions in the Christian Right’s agenda latent in the previous era. Given the Christian Right’s contradictory position, support for the war on terrorism is predicted to be less enthusiastic than that for the war on communism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how presidents work with the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (U.N.) to build support at the U.N. for American foreign policy. Despite the clear importance of personality and individual relationships in establishing the Ambassador’s power, an examination of the post’s evolution in the past fifty-plus years reveals some common features across administrations. This paper finds that a U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.’s influence on foreign policy making depends primarily on the president’s view of the Ambassador’s role in the policy-making process and the Ambassador’s own aspirations. To examine these factors systematically, the paper identifies four, sometimes overlapping, roles for U.S. Ambassadors to the U.N.: independent spokesperson, personal adviser to the president, professional diplomat, and policy maker. For Ambassadors who occupied the position long enough to become involved in the policy-making process, this classification is useful in identifying their role in the president’s foreign policy advisory team. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses how uncertainty sharply declined during the period of the missile gap fear (1957-1961), yet public fear of a possible "missile gap" remained high and greatly helped Senator Kennedy gain the White House in 1960. While insufficient information helped create great "uncertainty" at the beginning of this period (1957-1958), "uncertainty" does not adequately explain why the "misssile gap" fear remained strong. This paper discusses the mishandling of worst-case analyses during the later part of the period, and "smoking gun" evidence of intentional exaggeration of the threat by Senator Stuart Symington--a central figure in the promotion of the fear of the missile gap. Overall, this paper argues that insufficient information does not adequately explain the exaggerated public fears (national misperceptions) of this period. Further, popular explanations of "blowback" or "strategic culture" that argue leaders already believed exaggerated estimations of the threat, also do not adequately explain this large national misperception. Intentional elite exaggerations for electoral, bureaucratic and/or organizational purposes explain the widespread overestimations of the threat in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper systematically assesses the common claim that the United States is becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the world in multilateral institutions. It employs a new data set that includes post-Cold War roll-call votes in multilateral institution that are identified as important by the U.S. State Department. A multilevel item-response model is developed that allows for differentiation between trends in the preferences of states and trends in the agenda. The model is estimated using Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. The results reveal that states have indeed gradually shifted their preferences away from the U.S. from 1991 to 2001. But, these changes are independent from shifts in the agenda. During the first half of the 1990s the agenda became more positive for the U.S. thanks to its multilateral initiatives, whereas unilateralist tendencies led to an opposite shift since 1998. Changes in preferences, however, develop at a constant rate. This suggests that the unilateralist turn in U.S. foreign policy is not solely responsible for the increased gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world. The paper discusses the policy and theoretical implications of these findings as well as interesting deviations from the common trend by individual countries. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In pursuit of the issue evolution of postwar American politics, and especially of its influence on the presidential vote, this paper asks what that influence would have looked like in a ?pure policy world?, that is, an environment in which policy preferences were the only influences on voting behavior. The paper begins with an exploratory consideration of postwar NES surveys by way of principal component (factor) analysis, seeking consistent and continuing measures of public preferences in four great policy realms: social welfare, international relations, civil rights, and cultural values. It moves to confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of the resulting measures?AMOS is the specific program used here?testing them both within and across domains. And it constructs the vote itself in a parallel manner, so that vote analysis can proceed by means of structural equation modeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains variations in state compliance with the 1997 OECD "Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions."? In an initial phase of follow-up monitoring to evaluate each country's implementing legislation, this Convention's peer-review monitoring group found a surprising variation in the compliance records of the OECD's four largest members. While Germany and the United States 'satisfactorily' complied with the Convention, France only 'sufficiently' complied and the United Kingdom did not comply. Why did some states comply and others not? Given the Convention's optimal design, function, and normative basis from the point of view of compliance theory, this outcome is particularly surprising. Employing evidence from research in the fours countries, and focusing on the U.K. case in particular, the paper assesses three alternative explanations for the observed variations in compliance: unintentional non-compliance; strategic trade; and norms related to transnational bribery. The analysis finds that none of the explanations initially suggested by the evidence is complete, but that a combination of strategic trade interests and normative factors is at play. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this study for compliance theory in IR, and theories of international politics in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States frequently represents its foreign policy as a strategy of democratic renewal by focusing on the processes involved in creating popular sovereignty in other nation states. It has added rhetorical force and, in some cases, empirical reality to its claims of democratization by using the language of nonviolence and nonviolent resistance in its support for popular uprisings around the world (Chile, Indonesia, Philippines, Serbia, Iran, Tunisia, and Egypt to name a few). Yet, this language is relatively new. America overtly changed its policy of supporting dictatorships into a policy of supporting democratic regimes after the fall of the Shaw in Iran and the overthrow of the U.S. supported Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, according to William I. Robinson (1996). The so-called "Arab Spring" of 2011 offers an opportunity to further pay attention to this representational shift by comparing the U.S. treatment of Arab and African states in revolt. This paper devises three categories of nonviolence in order to better understand and evaluate the United States' policy of supporting those who struggle nonviolently. By interpreting and evaluating the Arab and African Uprisings in terms of both the literature on nonviolence and democracy promotion, and US foreign policy it is hoped that this essay will contribute to debate between mainstream scholars and those participating in more critical analysis. Ultimately this essay's focus on democracy and nonviolence seeks to bring people back into the discussion of international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extending government authority in weak states is a central foreign policy objective of the United States and other developed nations and has implications for international security and development. In weak states, governments face entrenched local elites with access to economic and military resources. This paper proposes a model of how govern- ments bargain with these elites, who are referred to as warlords. Three outcomes are possible: the warlord disarms and joins the government; the government and warlord divide up the spoils of a \con ict economy"; or the government and warlord fight for dominance over the state. The model implies that government corruption is a useful tool for negotiating disarmament and that international sanctions can spark fighting unless joined by promises of increased future assistance. Case studies of Medieval Europe, Post-Soviet Georgia, and Côte d'Ivoire illustrate the model's logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen a resurgence in scholarly interest in the domestic underpinnings of America's liberal-internationalist foreign policy. While many scholars have agreed that a bipartisan consensus has been one of the key domestic components to this approach to foreign policymaking, studies attempting to identify the existence of a bipartisan consensus have typically produced mixed results. However, there exists a substantial, and largely qualitative literature, that points to the presence of bipartisanship within the executive branch. Indeed, several authors have claimed that the bipartisan consensus manifested itself in part through the appointment of prominent opposition party members to high-ranking positions within the bureaucratic agencies responsible for crafting and implementing foreign policy. Using a new dataset, this paper examines the patterns in bipartisan appointments to dozens of high-ranking bureaucratic offices since the onset of the Cold War. Results provide the most robust support for the traditional narrative regarding increased partisanship in wake of the Vietnam War, but provide less support for claims regarding further increases in partisanship following more recent events such as the Cold War and the September 11 attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments have long been preoccupied with ownership of oil supplies as a means of increasing energy security. Debate about this practice has grown in recent years as Chinese national oil companies have increased their efforts to acquire overseas oil assets. While some "resource nationalists" praise this as a sound strategy, other scholars argue that countries are best served by relying on the free market for their oil imports. We make two arguments in this paper. First, the free market school is generally correct that in the conditions they examine (normal, functioning oil markets), strategies of resource nationalism confer little strategic gain (though more gain than those analysts acknowledge). But a strategy of resource nationalism can confer real strategic benefit during times of global supply shock, embargo, and blockade-times when price does not determine distribution of oil supplies. On China specifically, we offer a second set of arguments. (a) In the short term, China's policies of resource nationalism cannot confer upon it true energy security as long as the United States can sever its transportation routes by force. China remains vulnerable to energy cutoffs in times of extreme crisis. (b) However, even in the short term, China's strategy of resource nationalism pays off in various ways: it may win China better deals, and may secure supplies during oil shocks and embargoes. Furthermore, China's policies of resource nationalism have raised the bar for others who would wield the oil weapon against it. (c) Finally, China's resource nationalism strategy should be understood as part of a long-term effort. If its power continues to grow, China may someday field sufficient maritime power to protect its transport routes. China's resource nationalism is laying the foundation today for a future in which it will be as energy secure as any of the major importers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can scholars estimate the size of armed conflicts? Thorough research only goes so far in making such assessments - there will almost always be missing data, and thus a need to draw inferences about how comprehensively violence has been recorded. This paper addresses that challenge by developing an estimation strategy based on the observation that violent events are generally distributed according to power laws, a pattern which structures expectations about what event data on armed conflict would look like if those data were complete. This technique is applied to estimate the number of Native American and U.S. casualties in the American Indian Wars between 1776 and 1890, demonstrating how scholars can use power laws to estimate conflict size, even (and perhaps especially) in cases where previous literature has been unable to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

US states and governors have been involved in the foreign economic arena since the 1950s, primarily concerned with activities related to the attraction of foreign direct investment (FDI) and promotion of exports. As the globalized world developed in the 20th century, US states placed personnel overseas and increasingly sent governors abroad. These activities continue today as governors and US state leaders seek to build economic stability for their communities. This study examines the ability of US states' international representatives and governors to help attract foreign direct investment (FDI) and promote exports. Analyzing new data collected from all 50 states, the paper assesses governor-led trade and investment missions and US states' representatives abroad, the tools used most often in American economic paradiplomacy but not adequately measured and tested in the literature. Results show that US-state level and individual-level variables matter and governors' travels and US states' international offices help with FDI and exports, thereby informing US states' strategies for economic development. As glocalization increases due to the global economy, this topic has possibilities for better connecting domestic and international politics, especially since subnational leaders in Asia, Europe, North and South America now participate in paradiplomacy. This topic also reminds scholars of the avenues for research using qualitative and quantitative methodology to evaluate subnational governments' connections with foreign relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about the importance of diplomatic recognition in international relations and the history of the relationship between the administration of former U.S. President Bill Clinton and the Taliban government. It discusses the benefits that governments receive from international recognition. It examines the four major phases that characterized the relationship between the U.S. and Taliban government.

This paper examines how well the concept of "strategic culture" explains the tendency for India's foreign policy to lag behind its rapidly expanding economic interests. Realist analyses of Indian foreign policy and security strategy tend to find that the country is not living up to its potential. This leads to a consideration of strategic culture as an explanatory variable for India's suboptimal performance. The strategic culture aspects of political military culture (civil-military relations) and military culture (martial traditions of the armed forces) tend to point towards a strategic culture that has been shaped by civilian politicians and bureaucrats. The dominance of civilians and general exclusion of the military from decision-making has hindered India from becoming a power that regularly uses the military as an instrument of policy. The factor of domestic strategic culture (including attitudes towards the use of violence and the domestic political order) explains the short-term focus of Indian leaders and the lack of strategic vision. Structural factors, such as the entrenched foreign affairs and defense bureaucracy, produce a narrow and procedural focus and prevent the development of strategic analyses and planning. In conclusion, the strategic culture concept appears to play a significant role in explaining India's suboptimal foreign policy and security strategy. On the basis of those findings, one must expect the India-US relationship to move forward slowly on a number of issues and on future interactions. The possibility of an eventual alliance between the two powers is unlikely given India's strategic culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to understand how policy diffusion works. It reviews the literature and lays out the parameters of diffusion research. It documents studies published on policy diffusion and reports the results of a network analysis designed to determine the central papers and arguments in the field. It uses a qualitative exercise to provide a brief assessment of the diffusion literatures in U.S. politics, international relations and comparative politics.

A conference paper about the re-posturing of U.S. forward presence in Japan is presented. It asserts the possibility of mismatches between the U.S. global strategy and the local re-posturing process. It addresses existing theoretical works on U.S. forward presence. It discusses the Cold War origins of U.S. military bases in Japan. It examines the strategic implications of the re-posturing strategy for Japan.

Various writers have commented on the "global resurgence of religion" and the challenge that it presents to international relations. However, this idea is complicated by the difficulty of defining "religion." This problem becomes evident in this analysis the distinct understanding of religion that apparently informs US foreign policy in the form of the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) and the "War on Terror" (WOT) since 2001. These policies reflect a presumption of religion to be a set of privately held doctrines and beliefs existing outside of specific communities, rather than a view of religion as the virtues and practices of a belief system which are inseparable from the community in which they were embedded and which sustain them. As such, those implementing these policies privilege religion in their analysis of conflict, presuming religion to be the critical dimension of conflict, rather than one of many elements of identity that come into play when tensions develop between groups. This paper is concerned with how this has impacted the causes of the Montagnard ethnic minorities of Vietnam and Uighur ethnic minority in China. As a result of the emphasis on religion in the analysis of these conflicts, the impact of the IRFA and the WOT has been to distort and undermine the specific goals of the ethno-separatist movements in question and the problems facing these ethnic minorities generally. This study raises the question of whether, by characterizing such conflicts as religious in nature, these policies are self-fulfilling towards a "global resurgence of religion" by contributing to the generation of religious identities in place of ethnic ones which are simultaneously the targets of the assimilationist policies of the host states. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the question of how a weak ally can obtain leverage in the context of an asymmetrical alliance with a great power. I argue that alliance leverage depends above all on the "balance of need" between security partners and each party's ability to develop alternative security options. I contend further that changes in the international security environment have provided opportunities for many U.S. allies to increase their leverage vis-a-vis Washington in recent years. As an illustration, I then examine one important contemporary case: the informal pact between the United States and Pakistan. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we will argue that presidential foreign policy and security considerations—in the context of the federal system— have been a determinative factor in understanding the development of immigration policies in the United States. When presidents have pursued a geostrategic course of engagement, they have tried to work with congressional factions that have favored a more liberal immigration regime. On the other hand, when they have interpreted the security environment as threatening and necessitating closure, they have tended to side with congressional nativist factions.We argue that Presidents have frequently regarded immigration policy as an effective subset of security policy complicated by electoral considerations. On one hand, for electoral reasons, presidents have often favored a liberal immigration regime. Yet, when they consider that the security threat poses too great a risk, executives have been willing to converge with Congressional nativist and restrictionist impulses. As the perception of the threat therefore changes, so does the prominent orientation of immigration policy - with significant, and sometimes draconian, implications for nascent and existent (both legal and illegal) refugees and asylum seekers. Thus, presidential support for immigration restriction has largely been a subset of an isolationist (1920-38) or a unilateralist (post-9/11) vision of foreign policy. Periods of dread of the unregulated large scale influx of immigrants who are likely to stay in the US as a result of the collapse of their own states, saboteurs infiltrating its borders or terrorists plotting to exploit the opportunities afforded to them by 'the open society' has often found its way into the rhetoric and policy prescriptions of presidents sensing that threat. The notion of 'them' or 'the other' tends to predominate in these situations. Conversely, when presidents have had a broader vision of US global leadership and a corresponding definition of security built around engagement, they have tended towards a far more limited fear of the unregulated invasion of immigrants. As a consequence, they have tended to revert to what is regarded as a default position of favoring a less restrictive approach to immigration. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the Department of State is the lead foreign policy organization within the U.S. government, the Department of Defense plays an increasingly important role in diplomacy largely through its a long tradition of international engagement through shaping the security environment. With a forward presence, large planning staffs, and various engagement tools, geographic combatant commanders pursue regional-level engagement by hosting international security conferences, promoting transparency through military-to-military contacts, and providing American military training and equipment. Throughout history, officers, such as Commodore Matthew Perry, General Tony Zinni, and Admiral Joseph Prueher, have played critical roles in U.S. foreign policy formulation and implementation. Officers like these provide ready evidence that the military does much more than "fight the nation's wars." This paper considers military diplomatic engagement activities as a part of U.S. grand strategy and explores the legal and policy implications of an increasingly militarized foreign policy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses two levels at which the US military influences foreign policy: at the level of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and below where the Joint Staff interacts with other actors in the interagency process. Building on a year's experience on the Joint Staff, I consider the authority and influence of the Chairman briefly before delineating how the Joint Staff fits into the process. I then go on to show how the Joint Staff has greater relevance when NATO is involved. Next, I address the constraints facing the Chairman and the Joint Staff respectively, using examples from the Bush Administration. I conclude with some suggestions about future trends. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to examine the presidencies of the two presidents who opened up the 20th and 21st centuries. In doing so, we employ the Stewardship Theory set forth by Theodore Roosevelt and focus on four areas of the Roosevelt and Bush presidencies, namely, political leadership, political communication, environmental policy and foreign policy. We conclude with an assessment of the two presidents in terms of similarities, strengths and weaknesses, and key differences. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]