This book results from a sustained transatlantic cooperation over more than five years. It all began in 1993 when Thomas Risse and Steve Ropp were both teaching at the University of Wyoming and started developing some common research interests in the area of human rights and democratization. Thomas then left Wyoming and returned to Germany to teach at the University of Konstanz. But he and Steve kept in touch and held a first German–American workshop on international human rights norms and their domestic effects at Laramie, Wyoming, in the spring of 1994. At about the same time, Thomas ran into Kathryn Sikkink at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association and they started talking about transnational relations, principled issue networks, and the like. At this point, the three of us joined forces, with an extraordinary team of young German scholars gathered together by Thomas at the University of Konstanz: Sieglinde Granzer, Anja Jetschke, and Hans Peter Schmitz. We held a second workshop on how to study the domestic impact of international norms in the human rights area in June 1995, this time in Germany, at the Catholic Academy of the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, in the beautiful town of Weingarten. We then decided to work on an edited volume. Drafts of the chapters were presented at a third workshop in equally beautiful Jackson, Wyoming, in March 1997. We also presented the draft chapters at the 1997 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association in Toronto, Canada.