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Over the last 30 years, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have increased tremendously in numbers and power. Yet this ?global associational revolution? has also sparked objection and resistance from groups whose interests, beliefs, or ideologies are threatened by NGO campaigns. These countermobilizations have opposed NGOs on such issues as the International Criminal Court, greenhouse gas controls, and family planning. Beyond such ad hoc countermobilizations, broader objections to the NGO form itself have recently emerged. In June 2003, for instance, participants in a widely publicized international conference attacked NGOs for being undemocratic, unaccountable, anti-capitalist, and a threat to the nation-state. Meanwhile, conservative think tanks in major countries have established a loose transnational network to counter NGO campaigns and curtail their influence in world politics. Spearheaded by the American Enterprise Institute and Australian Institute of Public Affairs, the network uses both NGO repertoires, such as websites and conferencing, and NGO framing, such as arguments grounded in norms of sovereignty and accountability--against NGOs. Together these developments signal the emergence of a transnational ?anti-NGO movement.? This paper examines this nascent countermovement to fill gaps in the literature on transnational politics. While numerous scholars have chronicled the rise of NGOs, there has been little research on growing international collaboration against this trend. My paper fills the gap while contributing to three strands of theory on international collaboration. First, I argue that anti-NGO mobilization requires constructivist theory to rethink the ?logic of appropriateness? and the ?logic of argument.? If NGO movements and countermovements marshal competing norms, ?appropriateness? is highly contested. Likewise, if a conservative countermovement questions the very legitimacy of NGO participation in world politics, a ?logic of argument? over substantive issues recedes in significance. Second, I introduce a new theory of ?transnational countermobilization.? In recent years, the literature on transnational contention has burgeoned, but countermobilizations have been neglected, despite their importance. For its part, the literature on countermovements has focused only on domestic examples and has ignored transnational countermobilizations. Third, I examine implications of anti-NGO mobilization for theories of global governance. In this literature, as Mary Kaldor has recently observed, conservative think tanks are ?rarely mentioned? despite being ?extremely powerful.? Thus, our perspectives on a postulated ?global civil society? are one-sided, and predictions about future prospects may be more optimistic than merited [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the implications of constructivism for the growing literature that investigates the relationship between ethnic diversity and economic growth. Accepting that ethnic identities are multidimensional and situation-dependent has three principal consequences for studies in this area: it raises concerns about how a country?s ethnic diversity is measured; it introduces the possibility that a country?s diversity may be endogenous to its growth rate; and it suggests the need to be on the lookout for variables that affect both a country?s fractionalization and its economic performance. The paper identifies these potential pitfalls and assesses the extent to which they undermine existing estimates of the effects of diversity on growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do revisionist states arise in world politics? Indeed, North Korea’s uncertain aims, the steady march of a rising China, and the fragile nature of a nuclear-armed Pakistan all underscore the pressing need to understand why and when states challenge an existing status quo. Surprisingly, there are few dedicated studies of such actors. Moreover, existing neorealist and rationalist arguments suffer from a number of important limitations, including a reluctance to explore the issue of actor motivation. This paper argues instead that the roots of revisionism lie in the path dependent properties of the collective identity that a regime uses to legitimate its rule. Leaders can become ‘entrapped’ by their own legitimating rhetoric and thus forced to engage in revisionist behavior as a means of ensuring continued rule. The paper details a set of generalizable propositions about when entrapment pressures are probable and tests the proposed explanation against rationalist and neorealist accounts of Napoleon III’s grand strategy (1848-71). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between France and Germany after World War II was transformed by the efforts of several influential leaders. These leaders - de Gaulle and Adenauer most prominent among them - engaged in symbolic acts that generated meaning and social purpose for the two states’ relationship. Overcoming their countries’ history of enmity and war, these leaders institutionalized the relationship as an end in itself. Subsequent leaders, and then many representatives of the French and German governments, continually reproduced this social meaning so that France and Germany became known as the ‘tandem,’ ‘couple,’ and ‘pair.’ Despite the importance of such symbolic practices, international relations scholarship lacks the conceptual tools to capture them and their meaning, and to grasp their effects. In this paper, I build upon existing constructivist thought to elaborate the concept of ‘predominantly symbolic acts and practices among states.’ This concept enables us to capture symbolic practices and to analyze their impact on international affairs. Symbols are a distinct type of international activity. The social meaning and purpose they contribute to international social structure is irreducible to the factors and practices on which scholars working in the constructivist, realist, and liberal traditions have so far focused. This paper shows how actors create and recreate the structures in which they are embedded. Analyzing a constitutive component of the relations among certain states, this paper contributes to formulating a richer systemic ontology, which allows for more spatial and historical variation. Thereby, it paves the way for new possibilities of causal theory building. With the concept of symbolic act and practices, I explore the specific meaning of the bilateral Franco-German post-war relationship, scrutinize the symbolic acts with which it initially emerged, analyze the practices that have reproduced and perpetuated it, and examine the effects that it has engendered. The conceptual addition that this paper offers provides the means to construct a coherent narrative out of the past half century’s manifold symbolic Franco-German acts, to comprehend the connectedness of these varied episodes and pieces, and to appreciate the social meaning and characteristic effects of these symbolic practices in their entirety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the end of the Cold War and the independence of the Central Asian Republics from the Soviet Union, two groups of non-state actors quickly entered post-Soviet Central Asia, each seeking to promote their own normative agendas. The first group consisted of western liberal NGOs and democracy assistance organizations, which were part of a larger U.S. and European-funding effort to promote democracy and the rule of law in the postcommunist world. The second group consisted of a variety of non-western Islamist organizations from countries as diverse as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. These organizations funded religious and educational institutions, and promoted the Islamicization of Central Asian societies and states. This paper examines the process of competitive norm mobilization that occurred in Central Asia between 1991-2001, by examining the relationship of different sets of norm entrepreneurs in the region to global structures of Liberalism and Political Islam. The paper proposes a framework for situating the norm promotion activities of individual agents within broader structures of meaning in the international system, as a way of overcoming the liberal bias that currently dominates the study of international norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that current IR analyses of identity insufficiently consider the domestic level of national identity in their attempts to employ identity as a variable. Indeed, while constructivist IR literature has made a significant push to a more "cultural" understanding of the state, this culture and the corresponding notion of state identity has remained primarily focused on states’ roles in the international system. The domestic publics within the state, purportedly represented and defended by the institution of the state, are absent from such depictions of political life. This paper argues that national identity, beyond the identity of the state, is important to understandings of international relations and foreign policy in particular. Because of the legitimating discourse of the nation, states continue to seek a union of nation and state. Where disagreement over the meaning of the nation exists, the leaders of states will seek to construct a unifying discourse of the nation-state. At the same time, based on my reading of social identity theory literature in psychology, individuals seek to increase their personal self-esteem through membership in a group and through comparison with other groups. Because of these two simultaneous imperatives ? the group identity needs of individuals and states’ requirement to maintain a national identity ? a public process of Othering will be expected between states, using a language of nations and national identity. Such Othering can (consciously or subconsciously) satisfy the group identity needs of individuals (citizens) while at the same time furthering the construction of national identity to overlap with the boundaries ? territorial, institutional, and cognitive ? of the existing state. The continuing need to reinforce the legitimacy of the state as a representation of the nation, combined with the underlying psychological drive to create boundaries and draw comparisons, will result in eternal dichotomization between states. These dichotomies can create the conditions under which other states perceive a threat, and can thus lead to conflicts at the international level. I hypothesize that a) states will by necessity engage in narratives that construct Others, and b) that these narratives are more likely to engender conflict when they challenge the self-esteem of the citizens of the state. On the assumption that the theorized relationship between domestic polities, the nation-state, and external states can indeed be demonstrated empirically, I deduce several implications for IR theory, including a potential reassessment of the divide between comparative politics and IR, as well as a questioning of the logic of the security dilemma itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the public choice school, which has dominated the debate on metropolitan governance since the 1980s, is facing new intellectual challenges. Like the reformers during the first half of the 20th Century, many urban scholars and practitioners are again demanding more integrated governance structures for sprawling metropolitan areas. There are also fundamental differences between the early reformers and the current advocates of a new regionalism in metropolitan areas. The new conceptions can be seen as the latest step in a dialectic development of governance paradigms. Whereas the early reformers adopted a technocratic, "steering" perspective and proposed a consolidated regional city, the public choice advocates relied on an individualistic "choice" approach to propose decentralized and (territorially or functionally) fragmented government structures. The latest turn of the debate goes beyond a pure instrumentalist view on political institutions which is embodied in both traditions. Social constructivists understand the attempts for "boundary (re)drawing", which is at the core of all metropolitan reform plans, primarily as a process of constructing/ constitutionalizing individual and collective identities. This paper presents an analysis of distinct definitions of fundamental governance goals and the corresponding proposals for institutional design. Very different understandings of "democracy" can be described in Abraham Lincoln’s terms: Early reformers based their plans on a top-down perspective on democracy as "government for the people", rational choice advocates stress the bottom-up concept of "government by the people" and social constructivists focus their attention on "government of the/of what people" - an aspect which is gaining center stage in a world where socio-economic and cultural spaces of flows are superposing traditional spaces of place. The formula for economic success has changed from focusing on effectiveness (a concept based on welfare theory) over efficiency (based on political economy) to competitiveness (based on trade theory). Dominant definitions of social justice have been transformed from equality over equivalence to equity/difference. The paper uses those different definitions of core values and the corresponding proposals for institutional design to analyze the discourse on institutional reform in metropolitan areas in the United States from the 1950s to the year 2000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of a sense of shared identity across the European Union has become an increasingly salient issue over the past decade, for analysts, participants, and policy-makers alike. However, we know relatively little about the determinants of a citizen’s sense of European identity. This paper uses agent-based modeling to study the role of different variables in the emergence of a European identity. Eurobarometer survey data are combined with basic sociological insights to generate a model of the European polity. By systematically varying different parameters of this model, we improve our understanding of the impact of different variables. Although this approach requires a considerable degree of abstraction, no other analytical tool offers the same combination of flexibility and power. The experiments reported in this paper investigate the impact of different types of domestic and international and social connectivity on the spread of a European identity, as well as the effect of introducing a foreign study scheme. The results illustrate how difficult it is for a European identity to become dominant within a nation, and how contingent its success is upon uncontrollable environmental factors. In particular, foreign study programs appear to contribute surprisingly little to the overall spread of a European identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural disasters have largely been absent from International Relations [IR] scholarship, despite the complex international interactions involved in the response to disasters. There has been little discussion of how natural disasters relate to security issues, even though they are exogenous shocks that disrupt the status quo, allowing sudden opportunities for displays of military strength and the exploitation of rivals' weaknesses during the crises. Natural disasters are arguably becoming more important as climate change, population growth, and rapid urbanization increase their potential consequences. This paper provides the platform for fresh debates about how natural disasters can be integrated into security studies. Natural disasters upset the status quo, allowing for the evaluation of the assumptions held by the prevailing theories of international politics when an exogenous crisis occurs in the international system. This paper identifies the scope within neorealism, neoclassical realism, neoliberalism, and constructivism for the integration of security studies and natural disasters. This discussion provides the theoretical foundation for future research into the implications of natural disasters for IR theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since shortly before the Cold War's end, the UN has undertaken an unprecedented set of tasks in complex peacekeeping and peacebuilding operations. A number of recent studies have examined the successes and failures of these efforts, the ability of the UN as an organization to learn, and the UN's capacity to use force. This paper explores the roots of the ideas within the UN Secretariat for the tasks the UN took on in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Namibia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Cambodia and for the drafting of An Agenda for Peace (1992) that influenced many subsequent peacebuilding operations. The paper aims to apply principle-agent theory and social constructivist approaches to expand understanding of the UN as an actor, of its capacity as an organization to innovate, and of the roles of particular individuals within the Secretariat in shaping the mandates and activities of path-breaking missions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three decades ago, most Western nations experienced a shift in health policy. While downplaying their belief in treatment technology, the potentials of preventive public health were suddenly viewed upon with unbridled optimism. As a Canadian report argued in 1974, this potential required governments to 'get into the business of modifying behavior', i.e. to counter lifestyle diseases by getting citizens to exercise more, but eat, drink, and smoke less than they used to.Despite the clear and early identification of goals and target groups, the experience of public health policy has been less than successful. Many citizens in the developed world already know what they are supposed to do and yet they almost never conform with the goals of policy makers in the field. What accounts for this gap? Is it because citizens never listen, or is the goal setting of public health policy to blame? This paper seeks to advance our understanding of policy failures in public health and other forms of preemptive action. The paper is motivated by the view that the interaction of knowledge and politics is currently an underdeveloped topic in the public policy literature, partly because knowledge is often reduced to a somewhat technical input factor. Undertheorized in public policy is both what knowledge is and what it does for the evaluation of policy success or failure. As the public health case illustrates, there is no linear relation between knowledge, governmental action, and successful changes to individual behavior.In order to improve policy theory on the topic of knowledge, this paper combines a more traditional style of public policy case comparison with ideas drawn from a Foucauldian perspective on knowledge, power and subjectivity. Clearly associated with discourse analysis, this latter perspective focuses on how various knowledge forms structure our conception of healthy citizens and the prospects of governmental action.Based on a larger study of public health documents in the United States and Denmark between 1975 and 2005, this paper demonstrates that two highly different systems of health care and welfare provision has experienced similar difficulties in putting knowledge into action. This similarity supports the claim that there is a proprietary logic of policy failure within this area, part of which has to do with governing through knowledge, and part of which is due to the preventive character of this policy area.The experience of policy failure generates new health promoting instruments, and in particular both countries have shifted its efforts from reporting statistical knowledge to focus much more on strategically designed forms of health communication. This result leaves public health policy in a normative dilemma, however, because while policy makers generally seek to give individuals more responsibility for their own health status, their communication is predesigned on the premise that people do not listen and are not able to meet the responsibility handed to them. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews how three Spanish firms in the public utility industry (Endesa, Iberdrola and Unión Fenosa) and an oil firm (Repsol-YPF) took advantage of the reforms implemented by the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean since the early 1990s to become large multinational enterprises (MNEs). The main thesis is that they made investments in Latin America because their managers believed their firms had an advantage there. To frame the debate, the paper takes the concept of advantage from multinational enterprise theory and develops a social constructivist model. The paper looks at the interactions between the firms and the home and host markets, paying special attention to the role of the Spanish government, to show how firms develop advantages. This paper provides a dynamic model in which the advantages are negotiated by the actors in a changing context. An analysis of two sectors shows similarities and differences across industries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I start the process of analyzing the rhetoric and discourse about Iraq's WMD program in the 1990s. I start from the premise that there are institutional and ideational factors which are jointly necessary for determining foreign policy choice. The fact of the matter -- that Iraq had a WMD program -- was not in dispute, either in the 1990s or even during the 2002 run-up to the March 2003 invasion. What was in dispute was the substantive meaning of Iraq's WMD program. In this paper I draw on the public policy literature on problem definition and on the constructivist and discursive literatures in international relations to analyze the way the "Iraq Problem" was defined and assessed and, therefore, the relationship of that assessment to the Bush administration's campaign in 2002 and 2003 to portray Iraq as a clear-and-present danger that required a military, as opposed to diplomatic, solution. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are four basic 'new institutionalisms' in political science: three older ones-rational choice, historical, and sociological institutionalism-plus a fourth newer 'new institutionalism'-discursive institutionalism. Although these all focus on institutions, they otherwise differ along a wide variety of continua, with debates among them often having the characteristics of war. In this paper, I suggest that rather than continuing with the methodological wars, we should declare peace and consider the four institutionalisms' complementaries, incompatibilities, and contributions to the explanation of politics. The paper focuses in particular on the fourth 'new institutionalism,' discursive institutionalism, which is concerned with both the substantive content of ideas and the interactive processes of discourse. It argues that although this is the newest and least developed of the 'new institutionalisms,' it has the greatest potential for reconciling approaches and providing insights into the dynamics of institutional change. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Judith Butler's work is usually read in terms of its contribution to poststructuralism. It is associated in particular with her application of radically constructivist and deconstructionist approaches to gender. As such, her arguments are typically situated within a narrative whereby older existentialist and phenomenological ways of thinking were displaced by new, anti-humanist arguments. In this paper it is argued that while Gender Trouble indeed fits well into such a narrative, Butler's earlier but also her later writings (Undoing Gender especially) evince strong existentialist and phenomenological sympathies, even though these are not explicitly acknowledged. The paper explores significant aspects of her texts where this is apparent and draws out their significance. There is a general lament that these approaches are not more explicitly advertised, given their importance for understanding gendered experience and Butler's influential position here, and a more specific claim that Gender Trouble moved too quickly to dismiss them in a way that did not in fact do justice to Butler's own analyses. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current social science holds that identities are socially constructed. Yet the insights of constructivism still have to be operationalized. Most political science studies have taken identities (whether ethnic, national, gendered, or otherwise) as independent variables, and used them to explain political outcomes. This paper reverses the causal arrow and contends that constructivism tells us that identities themselves require explanation. Accordingly, it takes identities and identity construction as dependent variables, and tries to explain how a given set of identities was constructed in one particular spatial and temporal context. Specifically, the paper examines how religious, gender, and national identities were discursively constructed in early postcolonial India, by examining legislative debates over the reform and codification of Hindu family law in the 1950s. Two key conclusions emerged from the analysis. First, the discursive construction of these different forms of identity was highly interconnected: the construction of religion and nationalism could not be understood without gender; nor could the impact of nationalism on religion and gender be captured by studying any of them in isolation. Both Hindu socio-religious tradition and secular Indian nationalism were gendered constructs: gender was constitutive of religious and national identity in this time period. Second, political factors were central to how these discursive identities were constructed, at least at three levels: the democratic political system; the state; and individual leadership. Accordingly, I suggest that identities are not just socially but politically constructed; and as such, unraveling and explaining these processes is a critical task for political science. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What US post-Cold War strategies towards potential nuclear proliferant countries have been most successful and why? Two answers to this question have been given: a realist answer in which the outcome of strategies is determined by the balance of expected material (military and economic) benefits and sanctions, and a constructivist answer that posits social (prestige, status, and role) benefits and sanctions as the determinants of success or failure. In this paper, through analysis of the two US-DPRK nuclear crises, I argue that neither of these answers is sufficient; both social and material tools must be used in concert and in the right way in order to provide the proper balance of incentives and disincentives to slow proliferation. I elaborate realist and constructivist frameworks, testing deterrent (negative-feedback) and spiral (positive-feedback) models of interaction. I break down interactions into individual events using both content and discourse analysis, then connect these interactions to nuclear moves by North Korea. I analyze events coded into the IDEA framework, enabling separation of the material and social implications of each event. I then use vector autoregression to uncover action-reaction cycles between the United States and North Korea. Furthermore, I analyze the discourse that surrounds these events qualitatively in order to uncover complex multiple-country causal patterns and domestic-international interactions. I connect these interaction patterns to nuclear outcomes and find that a combination of social benefits and clear, coherent, and credible material deterrence is effective in slowing nuclear proliferation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a first effort to broach a discussion of institutions and institutional change in the United States and the developing world. Facing the challenges of research on the politics of economic development in the US and local adaptations to centrally imposed development projects in Senegal, we noticed we were thinking about institutions and human agency in similar ways. In spite of the obvious differences in our subjects of study, we independently came to the idea that the very different institutions we puzzled over were complex bundles of elements that could be combined and recombined in unpredictable ways. We both called this process ?syncretism.? We also noticed that our subjects often manipulated institutional pieces in ways unexpected by conventional theories of human agency. Drawing upon structuralist anthropology, Galvan came to call this capacity ?bricolage??the ability of people to assemble available materials to solve pressing problems. Drawing upon pragmatist social theory, Berk called this capacity the ?creativity of action,? that is, the collective ability of people to reimagine parts of their world anew and experiment with means to alter it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The technicism of conventional welfare policy research is incapable of addressing major questions such as what is the role of race in welfare reform. The paper reviews the available research on racial disparities under welfare reform in a way that highlights how an alternative form of research, one that places race and welfare in historical context and highlights the role of race as a discursively constructed construct, enables us to see welfare reform as implicated in reproducing racial disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains the puzzling lack of interstate conflict in Africa? Most African states rank low on the Polity III democracy-autocracy index, are not party to as many international institutions as states in other regions, and trade less often with one another. What, then, explains peace among African States, particularly when compared with the higher rates of interstate conflict in other regions of the world? The paper finds that dyadic African pairs are significantly less likely to be engaged in conflict when they share a French colonial history. Despite the brutality and inhumanity of colonial rule, the fact that territories were treated as federations during this period contributed to supranational identity formation and lower instances of conflict among these dyads. The African Peace is driven by the existence of a Francophone African Security Community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How important is identity and discourse in determining foreign policy decisions? Synthesizing discursive theorizing used by constructivists with the account of self-identity put forth by Anthony Giddens, I propose an alternative framework for understanding the concept of security in hegemonic foreign policy decisions. This paper then uses this framework to assess the impact Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had upon the British decision to remain neutral during the American Civil War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political scientists, whether of a materialist or idealist bent, have usually treated rhetoric as epiphenomenal. More recently, constructivists have brought new attention to rhetoric as shaping political outcomes through the mechanism of persuasion. This paper suggests a new way of understanding the role of rhetoric in accounts of politics, as a form of coercion, and thus lays the groundwork for what we call ‘coercive constructivism’ in contrast to the Habermasian versions so popular today. We subsequently illustrate our model’s relevance through two ‘hard’ cases: (1) the efforts of Druse Arabs in Israel to garner full citizenship rights by framing them as the just desserts of their battlefield sacrifice, and (2) the campaign to forge an American commitment to the reconstruction of Europe after World War II by framing it as essential to the defense of ‘Western civilization.’ We maintain that these outcomes are not entirely explicable without close attention to the competing rhetorics put forward by the opposed parties and that our model of rhetorical coercion helps make sense of these puzzling and important cases. We contend that thinking about rhetoric in such terms avoids the naïveté of the Habermasian perspective, the crudeness of vulgar materialism, and the reductionism of ideational approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sovereignty is increasingly contested, both in the political realm and in International Relations theory. Political developments emanating from the end of the Cold War have prompted questions regarding the role of conventional rules of sovereignty in facilitating, if not shaping, the political, economic, security, or ideological objectives pursued by actors or agents (Krasner 1999; Krasner 2001). Treating sovereignty as a social construct allows for theoretical space to study how rules have evolved and consideration of transformation in the locus of authority (Biersteker and Weber 1996; Philpott 2001). A number of anomalous cases, such as Tibet, Hong Kong, Bosnia, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and Palestine, among others, point to scenarios where principles associated with sovereignty have affected choices. Although the ‘script of sovereignty’ envisions internationally independent legal sovereignty, the concept of juridical independence, and internationally recognized territorial entities, cases like these raise the question as to how and when rules are or are not bent. The island of Cyprus merits attention. Like other problematic cases, arrangements and de facto realities on Cyprus are inconsistent with some of the principles associated with sovereignty. This paper proposes to analyze the Cyprus problem within the context of contested rules and sovereignty. Cyprus is often treated as a case study by scholars of conflict resolution studies (Fisher 2001), but the question of problematic sovereignty would broaden the analytical focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper links research on the democratic peace and the impact of domestic political structures on foreign policy with constructivist insights about international norm dynamics and processes of state socialisation in international politics. The resultant theoretical synthesis suggests that the democratic peace may begin to generate powerful socialisation effects once a critical mass of liberal states has emerged in the international system. Reformulating liberal theory in this way opens up the possibility of fully exploiting the potential complementarities which exist between the literatures on constructivism and the democratic peace. Using constructivist insights to cast new light on the existing democratic peace proposition promises to link constructivist theory progressively to a major arena of empirical debate within the field. By the same token, recasting the democratic peace argument in more systemic terms yields a range of new hypotheses that are capable of extending research on this topic into a second generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is the military and economic rise of China a threat to powers such as Japan and the United States? This paper examines this question using the theoretical predictions of realist theories (classical realism, neo-realism, and power transition theory), liberal theories (classical liberalism and neo-liberalism), and constructivist theory. While the qualitative analysis of Chinese, American, and Japanese behavior indicates some support for each theory, classical liberalism and constructivism are most strongly supported by the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why did a number of emerging markets liberalize controls over capital movements in the late 1980s through the Asian financial crisis? While previous accounts of capital account liberalization highlight a number of key factors, they do so at the neglect of social factors such as norms and ideas. Relying on insights from constructivism, this paper proposes a new theory arguing that capital account policy decisions in emerging markets are shaped in part by the coherence and content of the norms and ideas that key decision-makers share. Emphasis is placed on the ability of a ‘critical mass’ of neoliberal knowledge-based experts to acquire power in domestic-level decision-making positions and promote norms and ideas proscribing capital controls. It is empirically shown using quantitative analysis of data on a sample of 37 emerging markets from 1970 - 1995 that these domestic-level knowledge-based experts significantly influenced the decision to liberalize in emerging markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes two literatures of IR theory--constructivism and political psychology. It suggests strengths and weaknesses of each and argues that they complement eachother as ideational allies against rationalist and materialist mainstream theories. I suggest how the two should work together to build better theories and explanations of world politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the impact of identity on American foreign policy in the Baltic region, specifically the Northern European Initiative. I argue that international institutions affect individual identities on the domestic level, which is then reflected on the state level. To illustrate this, I show that, while NEI skillfully addresses emerging issues in a post-Westphalian system, American policy makers must also address the tension between these new issues and institutionalized state structures. American foreign policy, then, seeks to instill uniquely American democratic norms to bolster state structures, while attempting to create policies that are capable of addressing post-Westphalian issues. In doing so, American foreign policy targets the identities of individuals within Baltic states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I begin the process of determining and explaining state death rates. Specifically, I present new data on conquest, union, disintegration, and collapse in Europe and the Middle East from 1800-1994 and test the ability of realist, liberal, and constructivist theories to explain historical trends in conquest rates. In doing so, I dispel two myths. First, contrary to the conventional wisdom, historical state death rates have been quite high. Second, contrary to liberal and constructivist claims, relative capabilities, polarity, great power decline, the offense-defense-deterrence balance, and prevailing economic technologies are better predictors of conquest than democratic, juridical, statist, or collective norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why did a number of emerging markets liberalize controls over capital movements in the late 1980s through the Asian financial crisis? While previous accounts of capital account liberalization highlight a number of key factors, they do so at the neglect of social factors such as norms and ideas. Relying on insights from constructivism and sociological institutionalism, this paper proposes a new theory that argues capital account liberalization should be understood as a product of a shift in what I call the systemic economic culture. Emphasis is placed on the emergence of a neoliberal systemic economic culture that prioritized capital account liberalization as a policy goal. It is empirically shown using quantitative analysis of data from a sample of 38 emerging markets that through two distinct mechanisms, suggested by both constructivists and rationalists, this systemic economic culture influenced the decision of policy makers in emerging markets to liberalize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we address the rationalist-constructivist debate head on. We start by discussing a significant empirical phenomenon in contemporary EU politics: the changing pattern of political competition in the European Parliament (EP), from a ‘grand coalition’ of the two main parties in the 1994-1999 parliament, to a new structure of left-right competition in the 1999-2004 parliament. We then illustrate how rational choice and constructivist assumptions offer competing explanations of this shift in the ‘culture of competition’ in the EP, which in turn generate competing empirically-testable hypotheses. These propositions are then tested using a logistic analysis of over 400 roll-call votes in a period from the 1994-1999 parliament (1996) and the 1999-2004 parliament (1999). We conclude that neither basic theoretical framework performs well, and that the best explanation needs to incorporate assumptions from both frameworks. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how advocates of religious norms interact with advocates of competing international norms by studying the case of the Quezon City Reproductive Health Ordinance, which promoted the use of artificial contraceptives and became a focal point for contestation in late 2007 between the Catholic Church and the city government. Drawing on interviews with Philippine clergy, activists and political figures, I show how representatives of the Catholic Church in the Philippines have sought to contest the promotion of artificial contraceptives, and how their efforts have collided with international organizations' attempts to advocate for increased contraceptive use for public health reasons, in particular, the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the lending behaviour of the International Monetary Fund (IMF or Fund). In contrast to the existing literature, which attributes IMF lending to powerful member state interests and various economic determinants, I argue that the emergence of interlocutors sympathetic to the staff's policy goals critically shapes the Fund's willingness to "supply" a loan of a particular size as well as a government's willingness to "demand" it. Similar professional training and work experience are critical factors, as they foster close ties between the Fund staff and their domestic interlocutors as well as shared understandings about the "appropriate" direction for policy. The Fund staff seek out sympathetic interlocutors due to normative biases and career advancement incentives, while sympathetic interlocutors seek out the Fund because they desire assistance in their domestic political struggles. I assess these arguments using a new dataset capturing the professional training background of IMF staff and emerging market and developing country officials. The evidence strongly suggests that sympathetic interlocutors matter: larger loans are extended to countries where government officials and the Fund staff share similar training. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1985, the final year of the UN Decade for Women, 20 countries ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. This was the second largest number of ratifications in the Convention's history. Was this trend evidence of a norm cascade, whereby norms of gender equality gained transnational legitimacy? Was international coercion involved? Did these states ratify the Convention with a view toward gaining some sort of carrot and/or avoiding some sort of stick from the international system? Or was this international result simply a matter of different domestic political contexts in each country setting the stage for ratification? In this paper we will examine two states' decisions to ratify the Convention: Japan and Turkey. These countries have important differences in terms of religion, level of democratization, and economic development, but they share ambivalence about whether their national identities are primarily western or eastern, and in both countries there are vigorous domestic debates about the relative merits of westernization and cultural preservation. We trace the process through which the decision to ratify the Convention was made in each country through an examination of newspapers, government documents, and secondary sources. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the heart of the security dilemma are two types of interactivity: the interactive nature of security action and reaction between two concerned parties; and the malicious interactivity between behavioral consequences and identity effects of security measures. While most scholars recognize the vicious cycle of security action and reaction as constituting the security dilemma, they fail to understand that the vicious cycle is created only when there is a malign interactivity between behavioral consequences and identity effects of security measures. In general terms, state actors transform uncertainty in international politics into a set of ordered possibilities by choosing among a repertoire of social devices, such as social rules, norms, identities, or institutions, in order to devise simple rules of behavior that enable them to make decision with regard to the future. While the transformation process can take a multitude of forms, reflecting the diversity in the social devices from which they can choose, the security dilemma is constituted by the type of interactions where antagonistic identity replaces or reduces uncertainty about behavior in such a way as to exacerbate enmity. Only when social interactions between countries are characterized by 1) truncated understanding of dynamic interactions, 2) antagonistic identity, and 3) identity blaming, do social effects and behavioral consequences multiply each other in a malign way, constituting the security dilemma. This paper analyzes the North Korean nuclear crisis as an empirical case that reveals the dimension of the security dilemma logic overlooked in IR theories and that illuminates the negative feedback between behavior and identity constituting the core mechanism of the security dilemma. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate between France and the U.S. leading up to the 2003 war in Iraq highlighted two very different interpretations of the same principle of international law: the use of anticipatory action in self-defense. This paper examines the question of how states arrive at different interpretations of international law, theorizing that the method of interpretation a state adopts is constituted by the legal tradition of that state. Legal tradition is the historical development of law within a state that results in socially constructed beliefs about the role of law in society, the proper creation of law, and the sources of law that are binding. A state's legal tradition not only shapes how state decision-makers view law generally, but also provides the framework for which international legal principles become internalized into the domestic law. Each of these attributes contributes to the perception state decision-makers have towards law, which in turn shapes how they interpret existing international law. To test this theory, I conduct four of case studies examining the way legal tradition shaped interpretation of the international law of anticipatory intervention in self-defense. I use the contemporary example of the debates over intervention in Iraq as a focal point for this examination. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers the first systematic analysis of the linkage between cultural worldviews, partisanship, and the making of U.S. foreign policy. Although partisan disagreement over foreign policy reflects the interplay of complex causes, ideological and cultural divergence has been at a minimum salient and at a maximum determinative of foreign policy differences in the post-Cold War era. Since the Cold War ended, America's political parties have demonstrated foreign policy preferences that differ in consistent and coherent ways that correspond to the distinctive cultural worldviews that underlie and differentiate them from each other. Embedded in this observation are three supporting claims that this study synthesizes and supports through a systematic overview of foreign policy "key votes" taken from the Congressional Quarterly Almanac between 1989 and 2004. First, partisanship exerts a discernible influence in foreign-policymaking. That is, the parties will choose different policy options under the same circumstances in at least some cases and do so in consistent ways. Second, the parties can be differentiated from each other by reference to their underlying cultural worldviews in a manner consistent with expectations identified in recent studies of partisan polarization. In other words, the parties look at the world from distinct cultural perspectives that yield different value judgments and policy preferences, including in the foreign policy realm. Third, cultural worldviews matter to the conceptualization of U.S. foreign policy and the definition of the national interest. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humanitarian intervention poses profound ethical dilemmas for policymakers and analysts. Both words in the phrase, "humanitarian" and "intervention," are at odds with the norm of self-determination which dominates the ethical fabric of contemporary world politics. Military action sits uneasily with humanitarianism because military action always involves human rights violations-civilian casualties, unintended abuses by soldiers, and the like. There is also some hypocrisy in current demands that countries "determine" themselves humanely (through peaceable elections) when the mostly Western states making those demands (whose histories are full of genocide and war) were incapable of doing this. Intervention also sits in tension with self-determination for some obvious reasons. Citizens in the West all profess to love self-determination but will go in with troops if they do not like the result of a state's self-determination process. Recall that Milosovic was elected. If we go in with troops and force people to self-determine only by processes we approve, and with results we happen to like, is it still self-determination?What can constructivism offer in such a situation? These are hard choices that cannot be constructed away by shifting identities or interests, as is the case in some other papers in this project. I argue that constructivism does three things for us here. First, it shows us how ethical choices, even the most intractable ones, are the result of social constructions. Both who is "human" and the practice of intervention are social constructions with particular histories. Without both sets of understandings, there is no dilemma. Second, constructivism alerts us that these are liberal dilemmas. Only in a world political fabric imbued with liberal values (such as self-determination and humanitarianism across borders) do these dilemmas exist. A realist orientation would be much less troubled by these normative conflicts. Third, a constructivist analysis of these dilemmas helps debunk any notion that moral progress (expanded humanitarian concern and protection) reduces ethical dilemmas. In this case, it creates them. By universalizing humanity (so that Africans, Asians and others "count" as human) and universalizing human rights (so more people can claim protection) we create new dilemmas for ourselves. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sanctions on Iraq (1990-2003) posed an excruciating moral and strategic political dilemma. The sanctions caused immense human suffering, while doing little to unseat Saddam Hussein from power. For some, this reality created an urgent moral imperative to lift the sanctions immediately, at whatever cost. But given the absolute brutality of Saddam's regime, lifting the sanctions - and awarding the tyrant a significant political victory - seemed at best a problematic moral stance. Saddam bore some responsibility for the horrific effects of the sanctions, both in his refusal to comply fully with UN disarmament resolutions and in his cynical manipulation of the flow of humanitarian relief for his own domestic and foreign political ends. The difficult moral decisions were compounded by perplexing strategic concerns. The sanctions succeeded in preventing Iraqi acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, and significantly weakened Iraqi military capabilities, but at the same time actually strengthened Saddam's domestic position, and by the late 1990s had evolved into a potent instrument of Iraqi foreign policy. Because sanctions are often presented as an 'ethical' or 'humane' alternative to war, they carry a particular moral burden which makes them an easy target for accusations of hypocrisy. This paper argues that the distinctively moral tone of the international argument about Iraq explains otherwise puzzling outcomes: the empowering of an otherwise quite weak transnational activist network; the rhetorical entrapment of the United States and the UK into backing the creation of an unprecedented humanitarian relief programme within the sanctions regime ("Oil for Food"); the sudden collapse of compliance with the sanctions in the late 1990s; and ultimately the failure of the United States to win international backing for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The strategic payoffs to moral argument generated great incentives for hypocrisy, which had the unfortunate result of stripping away the very possibility of generating legitimacy not only for the sanctions, but for virtually any policy towards Iraq. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Fear, honor and profit:" the triad of imperializing motives twicementioned by Thucydides' Athenians (1.75, 1.76) has acquired a lifeof its own in modern discussions of Thucydides, sometimes cast as atimeless set of imperatives or linked with "prestige or deference"and opposed to "practical utility"Restoring this phrase to the speakers who uttered it and to its rolein Thucydides' narrative complicates and deepens our understanding.The Athenian speech (1.73-78) turns out to be a slippery, evenseductive, effort at self-presentation that relies on ambiguity tomake imperialism palatable. In the speech, "honor" does notsupplant "practical utility" but relies on it and "profit" has asurprising alternative meaning of "benefit." The Athenian speech,like the others in this quartet of speeches from 1.68 - 1.84 (byCorinthians, Athenians, and two Spartans) characterizes the culturethat produced it.Subtly and dramatically, the four speeches reveal the dispositionsand strategic cultures that will drive Athens and Sparta for theremainder of the work, using language that eludes abstraction orcategorization as nomological or "realistic." The "dialogue" amongthese speakers tells us nothing about historical causation butprovides a rich case study in narrative explanation. This paper willconclude with comments on the importance of strategic culture,dialogue, and narrative understanding as keys to understandingThucydidean history. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A draft of conference paper about the international mobilization of human rights is presented. It examines health rights, as well as the emergence of patients' rights and the development of rights of AIDS patients. It compares the rights claims made by mentally and physically disabled people in international venues. It discusses the rise of indigenous rights and the rights of Dalits on the international community.

This paper provides a model of how foreign policy implementation produces rules of international security. It focuses on the Proliferation Security Initiative as an illustrative case study. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem-based critical incident technique, pioneered by Dr. John Flanagan, an industrial psychologist has been used since the early 1940s in a wide variety of situations. Typically, interviews or small groups were used to collect data, although more recently, the technique has been applied to classroom groups and small seminars in the form of writing exercises and debriefing sessions. Respondents are asked to provide possible solutions to posed events or problems and to provide feedback about their understanding of the class content, problem or event, text reading, or occupational experiences. Analysis and assessment of responses has helped to uncover the dynamics influencing successful performance, and can be used as direct evidence of what students are learning. Furthermore, this technique has the potential to be especially helpful in developing guidelines for learning outcomes and academic excellence. This study has developed three critical incidents that can be used in the political science classroom as a means to evaluate student learning (outcome assessments) as both direct evidence and indirect evidence. These assessments address issues of learning outcome in diverse classrooms with a focus upon inequity and diverse learning styles. These instruments can be used across the global sphere in on-line educational courses to gap the divide that a virtual classroom brings to the educational experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liberal democracies are likely to exercise a higher degree of restraint in air warfare than non-democracies due to the cosmopolitanism implicit in liberalism and the opportunities for citizen action available in democracies. Although narrower, nationalistic identities frequently dominate, especially in wartime, cosmopolitan liberalism nonetheless provides a contending set of values with which non-elites may challenge a state’s conduct of wars. Especially in the later twentieth century, as information has become increasingly accessible through news media and as education levels and organizational skills have increased, non-elites in liberal democracies are able to impose constraints on the number of civilian casualties that result from their states’ air wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments often us the promise of rewards or the threats of punishment to secure favorable international bargains. But they also draw on reasoned arguments to convince their bargaining partners to accept mutually beneficial agreements. Such attempts at persuasion have received less attention in the scholarly literature on international negotiations. I draw on rational choice theory of strategic communication to understand the conditions under which such attempts at persuasion succeed or fail, and demonstrate its explanatory power in a case study of how Britain persuaded the United States to agree to the North Atlantic Treaty in the late 1940s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I advocate an analytical shift in the way we think about international-political change and the dispute between the paradigms. I argue that both the structure of units and of international political systems can be understood in relational terms–as the consequence of underlying patterns of political networks and categorical identities. Actors positioned in particular locations within political networks have access to structural resources that provide different capacities and trajectories of collective mobilization, whether for economic activity, security, or conquest. Specific forms of political networks carry with them regular and identifiable proclivities for transformational and reproductive collective mobilization. Because the network structures of international systems are closely related to the network structures of the polities that inhabit them, the nature of unit organization profoundly shapes pathways and dispositions for collective mobilization and international political change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postwar officials in Japan, like their counterparts in Germany, faced the daunting task of rebuilding their country’s relationships with other states and of placing these relations on a new foundation to replace the discredited politics of their recent past. In these circumstances, Konrad Adenauer and the CDU in Germany moved quickly to cement alliance ties with the West, to pursue broader institutional arrangements in Europe, and to commit themselves in general to arrangements that limited rather than reasserted the power of the German state. Superficially, Japan appears to have followed a similar course through its defense pact with the U.S. and its constitutional renunciation of military forces. Yet Japan’s decisive postwar Prime Minister, Shigeru Yoshida, embraced none of these goals. Although he sought strict limits on the Japanese military establishment, he was eager to reassert the power and sovereign right of the Japanese state. Moreover, he embraced the international commitments of the Defense Treaty only with great reluctance. And, even so, he was roundly criticized for having gone too far. A constructivist analysis of language, rules, and order helps to account for Japan’s postwar choices. Trying to find its place in a new international order, Japan confronted a specific instance of a generic problem of order. Speech act theory identifies three strategic pathways for managing such problems, leading to three different cultures of order: Hobbesian (or directive), Lockean (or assertive), and Kantian (or commissive). Postwar circumstances ruled out one of these, the Hobbesian strategy, in Japan (and Germany). Despite their similar structural positions, Japan and Germany made different choices from among the remaining alternatives--choices that continue to reverberate in contemporary Japanese and German foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project combines social theories concerning communicative action and the influence of culture on states’ security policies to examine multinational crisis management in the Balkans through the 1990s. By examining how the United States, Russia, Great Britain, Germany, and France collaborated in response to the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo I have been able to isolate specific, security-related cultural incompatibilities that contributed to their inability to collaborate quickly and effectively. My central claim is that each state possesses a distinct ‘security-related culture? that provides state leaders with understandings about which actions are possible, appropriate, and favorable. How these understandings are articulated in different institutional settings account for whether collaboration will proceed effectively or contentiously.? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In re-examining the collapse of the Bretton Woods regime, I engage with two interconnected puzzles, one empirical and one theoretical. In tackling the first of these puzzles?the cause of the Bretton Woods regime’s collapse?I draw on the growing literature that emphasizes the role of norms and ideas. Yet that very literature is itself the source of the second, theoretical, puzzle: two influential studies of the regime’s collapse provide conflicting accounts of the role of embedded liberal norms, one pointing to a continuity and the other, a breach. In resolving these two puzzles, I will suggest that there was in fact a hollowing out of Keynesian norms, as the ideas that had informed the original agreement came to be replaced with the neoclassical synthesis, which ultimately inspired the failed attempts to reform the ailing regime [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That German foreign policy was constrained by Cold War bipolarity never precluded vigorous debate, among German policy makers, about the requirements of domestic and European political order. Party politics also contributed to such disputes, but an emergent pattern in the debates over East-West relations and unification is better explained by a constructivist approach that links public order to the way language functions to create rules (and thus rule). This perspective accords an independent role to ideas and to policymakers as political agents, but it also explores constraints on what it was possible to say, and to think, in postwar Germany. In each of three "rounds" of debate, exponents of a Kantian institutional approach to order squared off against Lockeans who emphasized rights and agency. In general, the Kantians (Adenauer, Brandt, and Kohl) have prevailed over the Lockeans (Schumacher, Kiesinger, and Lafontaine). The result, so far, has been a Germany that builds institutions first and asks questions about national rights later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]