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In the post-Cold War era, climate change, landmines, debt relief and a number of other issues emerged to re-shape the agenda of decision-makers in the advanced industrialized world. The primary advocates of these normative issues are motivated not by their own material self-interests but broader notions of right and wrong. What is the primary logic that contributes to the domestic acceptance of these moral commitments? International relations scholars identify persuasion as the primary way in which states are ‘convinced’ that a norm-based policy is worth accepting. How should we characterize this process of persuasion? Is this the right term to describe the actions of transnational protest movements? Through a case study of the Jubilee 2000 campaign for developing country debt relief, I offer an account of persuasion based on strategic framing by advocates to get the attention of decision-makers. This paper emphasizes the rhetorical and framing strategies that are used to try to tip the political balance in support of normative agendas but ultimately ascribes these a different character than either coercion or Habermasian communicative action. Such strategic but not narrowly self-interested activity allows weak actors to leverage existing value traditions to build broader coalitions of political support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper seeks answers to the puzzle, "How is that, in the face of an overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is real, the advanced industrialized countries cannot agree on measures to deal with the problem?" The paper is guided by two intuitions: (1) national-level decision-making processes may foreclose mutually acceptable bargains between countries and (2) the ways international norms get framed may make getting on the agenda more likely but success at the decision stage less likely and The study concludes that the international arena’s early commitments froze in preferences that were too distant from those of important players in U.S domestic politics, both Congressional and larger societal (i.e. corporate interests). At the same time, as depicted by a simple spatial model, the preferences of European polities restricted the range of acceptable compromises that could be made, thus leaving the U.S. and its European allies at odds. Through the example of global warming, the paper also seeks to ascertain the gravity and significance of the foreign policy differences between the U.S. and its allies. Here, the argument emphasized the proxy nature of global warming as part of a larger European concern about U.S. unilateralism and diffidence. Implicitly, the paper favored the notion that the character of American hegemony matters for cooperation, and that the conflict with Europe over global warming and other issues may significantly undermine the capacity for Europe to cooperate with the U.S. on issues of interest to the Americans. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why, and under what conditions, can weak actors influence the behavior of the strong? Traditional IR theory avers that capabilities dictate outcomes. Yet, despite the hypothesized, inevitable consequences of such power asymmetries, sometimes, to paraphrase Thucydides, the weak succeed in doing what they can, not simply suffering what they must (e.g., Mack 1978; Arreguin-Toft 2001, 2005; Greenhill 2002, forthcoming). One method whereby weak actors effectively exercise influence is by harnessing the power of norms (Keck and Sikkink 1998). Under certain conditions, weak actors can turn the virtues of the powerful against them, by exposing the distance between what they say and what they do and thereby imposing on them what one scholar has termed "hypocrisy costs" (Greenhill 2002, 2004, forthcoming). However, strong actors vary in the degree to which they make themselves vulnerable to rhetorical entrapment. Moreover, different constellations of interest group mobilization can make strong actors more or less susceptible to weak actor influence. One of our central claims is that strong actors are especially vulnerable to weak actor influence when the strong actor has made many statements in support of a norm ("high rhetorical entrapment") and both pro-norm and anti-norm advocates are mobilized to impose high political costs. In this paper, we use comparative case study analysis to demonstrate that different combinations of rhetorical entrapment and interest group mobilization can explain when weak actors have influence over the strong. The cases we study include NGO campaigns for the International Criminal Court, focusing on the policies of two hard cases, France and the United States. We also study two migration cases where weak actors (Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti and Erich Honecker of East Germany) successfully used pro-human rights norms and the strategic threat of migration to coerce stronger powers (the United States and West Germany, respectively). In the conclusion, we outline the further implications of the argument, including what it has to say about outcomes in additional norms-charged issue areas, such as funding of anti-retroviral drugs and the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay Naval Station. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]