This article questions the usefulness of the concept of regimes on the grounds that it is a fad; ambiguous and imprecise; value-biased towards order rather than change or equity; essentially static in its interpretation of the kaleidoscopic reality of international cooperation and conflict; and, finally, rooted in a limiting, state-centric paradigm. Each of these objections represents a dragon that unwary young scholars should be warned to avoid—or at least to treat with caution. On the grounds that those who look for a tidy general theory encompassing all the variety of forces shaping world politics are chasing a will o' the wisp, the article suggests as an alternative that we should pay attention to the overlapping bargaining processes, economic and political, domestic as well as international, by which the outcomes of the interaction of states, of authorities with markets and their operators, and of political institutions and economic enterprises, determine between them the "who-gets-what" of the international political economy.

Informal agreements are the most common form of international cooperation and the least studied. Ranging from simple oral deals to detailed executive agreements, they permit states to conclude profitable bargains without the formality of treaties. They differ from treaties in more than just a procedural sense. Treaties are designed, by long-standing convention, to raise the credibility of promises by staking national reputation on their adherence. Informal agreements have a more ambiguous status and are useful for precisely that reason. They are chosen to avoid formal and visible national pledges, to avoid the political obstacles of ratification, to reach agreements quickly and quietly, and to provide flexibility for subsequent modification or even renunciation. They differ from formal agreements not because their substance is less important (the Cuban missile crisis was solved by informal agreement) but because the underlying promises are less visible and more equivocal. The prevalence of such informal devices thus reveals not only the possibilities of international cooperation but also the practical obstacles and the institutional limits to endogenous enforcement.

In recent years there have been numerous calls for making the operations of international organizations more “transparent.” One element in these demands involves the idea that international negotiations should be open to the same level of outside scrutiny that is presumed to prevail with bargaining in domestic contexts. While transparency of this sort may have clear benefits by facilitating attempts to hold officials accountable, scholars have made less effort to consider whether making international bargaining more public might also have detrimental effects. I develop a game-theoretic model that provides four hypotheses about the relative benefits of open-door versus closed-door bargaining, and about the preferences of different actors with regard to this type of transparency. This model, which can be applied to international and domestic contexts, helps extend positive theories about the design of institutions while also providing insights for the normative question of when transparency is desirable. I show that the hypotheses developed are supported both by historical evidence from eighteenth-century disputes about publicity in national parliaments, and by evidence from the more recent dispute about making European Council of Ministers deliberations public.I would like to thank Simon Hix, Bernard Manin, Lisa Martin, John Odell, Andrea Prat, Ken Scheve, Karen Smith, Andrew Walter, Peter Wilson, seminar participants at the LSE and at Sciences-Po in Paris, as well as two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions.

The international relations literature regularly embraces sovereignty as the primary constitutive rule of international organization. Theoretical traditions that agree on little else all seem to concur that the defining feature of the modern international system is the division of the world into sovereign states. Despite differences over the role of the state in international affairs, most scholars would accept John Ruggie's definition of sovereignty as “the institutionalization of public authority within mutually exclusive jurisdictional domains.” Regardless of the theoretical approach however, the concept tends to be viewed as a static, fixed concept: a set of ideas that underlies international relations but is not changed along with them. Moreover, the essence of sovereignty is rarely defined; while legitimate authority and territoriality are the key concepts in understanding sovereignty, international relations scholars rarely examine how definitions of populations and territories change through-out history and how this change alters the notion of legitimate authority.

Human rights practices have improved significantly throughout Latin America during the 1990s, but different degrees of legalization are not the main explanation for these changes. We examine state compliance with three primary norms of international human rights law: the prohibition against torture, the prohibition against disappearance, and the right to democratic governance. Although these norms vary in their degree of obligation, precision, and delegation, states have improved their practices in all three issue-areas. The least amount of change has occurred in the most highly legalized issue-area—the prohibition against torture. We argue that a broad regional norm shift—a “norms cascade”—has led to increased regional and international consensus with respect to an interconnected bundle of human rights norms, including the three discussed in this article. These norms are reinforced by diverse legal and political enforcement mechanisms that help to implement and ensure compliance with them.

Dispute settlement mechanisms in international trade vary dramatically from one agreement to another. Some mechanisms are highly legalistic, with standing tribunals that resemble national courts in their powers and procedures. Others are diplomatic, requiring only that the disputing countries make a good-faith effort to resolve their differences through consultations. In this article I seek to account for the tremendous variation in institutional design across a set of more than sixty post-1957 regional trade pacts. In contrast to accounts that emphasize the transaction costs of collective action or the functional requirements of deep integration, I find that the level of legalism in each agreement is strongly related to the level of economic asymmetry, in interaction with the proposed depth of liberalization, among member countries.

Policy-makers and the electorate assume political executives' life experiences affect their policy choices once in office. Recent international relations work on leaders focuses almost entirely on how political institutions shape leaders' choices rather than on leaders' personal attributes and how they influence policy choices. This article focuses the analytic lens on leaders and their personal backgrounds. We theorize that the prior military background of a leader is an important life experience with direct relevance for how leaders evaluate the utility of using military force. We test several propositions employing a new data set, building on Archigos, that encompasses the life background characteristics of more than 2,500 heads of state from 1875 to 2004. The results show that the leaders most likely to initiate militarized disputes and wars are those with prior military service but no combat experience, as well as former rebels.

Although some rebel groups work hard to foster collaborative ties with civilians, others engage in egregious abuses and war crimes. We argue that foreign state funding for rebel organizations greatly reduces incentives to “win the hearts and minds” of civilians because it diminishes the need to collect resources from the population. However, unlike other lucrative resources, foreign funding of rebel groups must be understood in principal-agent terms. Some external principals—namely, democracies and states with strong human rights lobbies—are more concerned with atrocities in the conflict zone than others. Multiple state principals also lead to abuse because no single state can effectively restrain the organization. We test these conjectures with new data on foreign support for rebel groups and data on one-sided violence against civilians. Most notably, we find strong evidence that principal characteristics help influence agent actions.

The relationship between democratization and war has recently sparked a lively debate. We find that transitions from autocracy that become stalled prior to the establishment of coherent democratic institutions are especially likely to precipitate the onset of war. This tendency is heightened in countries where political institutions are weak and national officials are vested with little authority. These results accord with our argument that elites often employ nationalist rhetoric to mobilize support in the populist rivalries of the poorly-institutionalized democratizing state but then get caught up in the belligerent politics that this process eventually unleashes. In contrast, we find that transitions that quickly culminate in a fully coherent democracy are much less perilous. Further, our results refute the view that transitional democracies are merely the targets of attack due to their temporary weakness: in fact, they tend to be the initiators of war. We also refute the view that any regime change is likely to precipitate the outbreak of war: transitions toward democracy are significantly more likely to generate hostilities than transitions toward autocracy.

Despite mixed empirical evidence, in the past two decades central bank independence (CBI) has been on the rise under the assumption that it ensures price stability. Using an encompassing theoretical approach and new yearly data for de jure CBI (seventy-eight countries, 1973–2008), we reexamine this relationship, distinguishing the role of printing less money (discipline) from the public's beliefs about the central bank's likely actions (credibility). Democracies differ from dictatorships in the likelihood of political interference and changes to the law because of the presence of political opposition and the freedom to expose government actions. CBI in democracies should be directly reflected in lower money supply growth. Besides being more disciplinarian, it also ensures a more robust money demand by reducing inflation expectations and, therefore, inflation. Empirical results are robust and support a discipline effect conditioned by political institutions, as well as a credibility effect.

Building on the empirical findings of the preceding articles, we advance three arguments. First, while socialization research has typically been construed as constructivism's home turf, this volume's emphasis on mechanisms and scope conditions reveals that rational choice has much to contribute here as well. We develop this claim by undertaking a “double interpretation” of each essay, which allows us to advance more fine-grained arguments connecting the two social theories. Second, while there are good conceptual reasons for expecting a predominance of international socialization in Europe, the empirical cases instead suggest that its effects are often weak and secondary to dynamics at the national level. We make sense of this puzzle by reasoning more explicitly in longitudinal terms, by drawing on work on European identity, and by noting that students of European socialization—as well as integration—have much to gain by “bringing the domestic back in.” Finally, while our collaborators have demonstrated the empirical and theoretical benefits of combining a social ontology with a positivist epistemology, this comes at a cost, with normative perspectives neglected. This matters—and all the more so in a Europe marked by supranational constitution- and polity building. Socialization dynamics may well take us beyond the nation-state, but their legitimacy and governance implications bring us back—forcefully—to it.We are grateful to the project participants and contributors to this volume for valuable discussions on the themes addressed here. For detailed comments on earlier versions of this essay, we thank two anonymous reviewers, the IO editors, Peter Katzenstein, and Ron Mitchell.

There has been considerable interest in recent years in the question of issue linkages in international negotiations. What is significant about discussions of linkages in the present era is the stress put on making trade-offs explicit among issues. Most of the highly publicized cases of proposed issue linkages appear to have been motivated by attempts of individual countries or groups of countries to extend their dominant bargaining or veto power in one particular issue area into other areas so as to achieve maximum advantage from their whole array of international interactions. The existence of an additional rationale for linkage that relies upon mutual interest has important implications. Drawing on the economic theory of exchange, the use of issue linkages to facilitate the completion of a greater number of mutually beneficial agreements among nations is considered.

Why do countries comply with international agreements? While scholars have done rigorous work to address compliance and enforcement in an international game, less analytical attention has been paid to domestic mechanisms of compliance. However, because international agreements have domestic distributional consequences, there exist domestic sources of enforcement. In this article, I develop an analytical framework of domestic accountability, where I identify specific channels of influence through which domestic constituencies can influence national compliance. Using a game theoretic model, I show that a government's compliance decision reflects the electoral leverage and the informational status of domestic constituencies. This framework further provides a theoretical rationale for why and how international institutions may influence states' compliance through domestic mechanisms. The European acid rain regime offers an empirical illustration of the domestic constituency argument.I have benefited from the generous help of many colleagues and friends in the course of this research. I would particularly like to thank the editor-in-chief of IO, anonymous reviewers of this article, as well as William Bernhard, Paul Diehl, Daniel Drezner, James Fearon, Robert Keohane, Charles Lipson, Ronald Mitchell, Robert Pahre, Duncan Snidal, Detlef Sprinz, Milan Svolik, and Pieter van Houten. Nazlı Avdan provided valuable research assistance. MacArthur Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace, Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, and the Research Board at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign sponsored various phases of this research.

I seek to explain the causes for the apparent commercialization of state sovereignty, and in particular the reasons for its association with tax havens. I argue that the conditions that gave rise to the commercial use of sovereignty as perfected by tax havens have little to do with surges in taxation and regulation in the postwar era. Instead, these conditions can be traced to jurists' and policymakers' attempts to resolve an inherent contradiction between insulated state law and the rapidly integrating world market.

The authors of “Legalization and World Politics” (International Organization, 54, 3, summer 2000) define “legalization” as the degree of obligation, precision, and delegation that international institutions possess. We argue that this definition is unnecessarily narrow. Law is a broad social phenomenon that is deeply embedded in the practices, beliefs, and traditions of societies. Understanding its role in politics requires attention to the legitimacy of law, to custom and law's congruence with social practice, to the role of legal rationality, and to adherence to legal processes, including participation in law's construction. We examine three applications of “legalization” offered in the volume and show how a fuller consideration of law's role in politics can produce concepts that are more robust intellectually and more helpful to empirical research.

International relations scholars have tended to focus on realism's common features rather than exploring potential differences. Realists do share certain assumptions and are often treated as a group, but such a broad grouping obscures systematic divisions within realist theory. Recently, some analysts have argued that it is necessary to differentiate within realism. This article builds on this line of argument. The potential, and need, to divide realism on the basis of divergent assumptions has so far been overlooked. In this article I argue that realism can be split into two competing branches by revealing latent divisions regarding a series of assumptions about state behavior. The first branch is Kenneth Waltz's well-known neorealist theory; a second branch, termed here “postclassical realism,” has yet to be delineated as a major alternative but corresponds with a number of realist analyses that cohere with one another and are incompatible with Waltzian neorealism.

International organizations (IOs) have become increasingly pervasive features of the global landscape. While the implications of this development have been studied extensively, relatively little research has examined the factors that prompt states to enter IOs. We argue that democratization is an especially potent impetus to IO membership. Democratizing countries are likely to enter IOs because leaders have difficulty credibly committing to sustain liberal reforms and the consolidation of democracy. Chief executives often have an incentive to solidify their position during democratic transitions by rolling back political liberalization. Entering an IO can help leaders in transitional states credibly commit to carry out democratic reforms, especially if the organization is composed primarily of democratic members. Tests of this hypothesis, based on a new data set of IOs covering the period from 1965 to 2000, confirm that democratization spurs states to join IOs.Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2004 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago; the 2004 annual convention of the International Studies Association, Montreal; and seminars at the State University of New York at Albany and Yale University. For helpful comments and suggestions, we are grateful to participants in these seminars and to Marc Busch, Benjamin Fordham, Yoram Haftel, Lisa Martin, Timothy McKeown, Helen Milner, Ronald Mitchell, Andrew Moravcsik, B. Peter Rosendorff, Bruce Russett, and two anonymous referees.

Why do some rebel groups provide governance inclusively while most others do not? Some insurgencies divert critical financial and personnel resources to provide benefits to anyone, including nonsupporters (Karen National Union, Eritrean People's Liberation Front). Other groups offer no services or limit their service provision to only those people who support, or are likely to support, the insurgency. The existing literature examines how insurgencies incentivize recruitment by offering selective social services, yet no research addresses why insurgencies provide goods inclusively. I argue that inclusive provision of services legitimates insurgents’ claim of sovereignty to domestic and international audiences, and thus is a strategic tool secessionist rebels use to achieve their long-term goal of independence. With new and original data, I use a large-N analysis to test this hypothesis. The results of the analysis support the hypothesis, underscoring the importance insurgent nonviolent behavior and addressing key issues such as sovereignty and governance.

Hardly anyone expects public institutions to die. Yet a census reveals that fully one-third of the international governmental organizations (IGOs) in existence in 1981 had in fact become defunct by 1992. Most Eastern bloc and many regional developing country organizations vanished or became inactive. During this period a slightly larger number of new organizations was born. Not governments but other IGOs spawned most of the new offspring. Wealthy democratic countries increased their IGO memberships while poor unstable countries increasingly dropped out. This bifurcation was accompanied by greater reliance by all on a set of core universal-membership institutions dominated by Western values. Functionalism, organizational ecology, and realism each partly help us to understand these trends but leave important dynamics unexplained.