A series of studies has shown that civil wars are caused not only by factors inside countries, but also by effects operating across state borders. Whereas a first wave of quantitative studies demonstrated that such effects make the “closed-polity” assumption untenable, more recently researchers have identified particular causal mechanisms driving conflict. Despite these recent advances, a central puzzle remains unresolved, namely why ethnic groups that at least in theory could count on support from large transborder ethnic kin (TEK) groups often have remained surprisingly peaceful, such as the stranded Russian populations in the “near abroad.” We propose a theoretical framework that extends the analysis from the primary dyad between the incumbent and the challenger group by adding a secondary dyad that pits the incumbent against the TEK group. We postulate a curvilinear effect of the TEK group's relative size on conflict onset. Using a new data set on transnational ethnic links, we find that that the risk of conflict increases within the middle range of the size spectrum, consistent with our main hypothesis. This means that large TEK groups have a conflict-dampening effect, provided that they control their own state. Excluded TEK groups, however, are not associated with lower conflict probabilities.

In 1930, Congress approved the highly restrictive Smoot–Hawley tariff, the textbook case of pressure group politics run amok. Four years later, Congress passed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA), surrendering much of its tariff-making authority to a policy process in which internationalists had increasing influence. While the United States had used reciprocity to expand exports before, the stick of discriminatory treatment took precedence over the carrot of liberalizing concessions. With the transfer of tariff-making authority to the executive, the United States could make credible commitments and thus exploit its market power to liberalize international trade. Despite later modifications, the RTAA set the fundamental institutional framework for trade politics.

The impact of economic factors on colonial imperialism in the late nineteenth century has long been a topic of debate. This article examines the expected relationship between different forms of international investment and different patterns of political ties between developed and developing countries. Drawing on the literature on relational contracts and collective action, it argues that direct colonial control was likely to be associated with cross-border investments whose rents were particularly easy to seize or protect, and whose protection did not require multilateral action. Where such rents were difficult to seize or protect unilaterally, colonialism is expected to be less likely. The most common example of the former sort of investment is primary (raw-materials or agricultural) investment; of the latter, multinational manufacturing affiliates. The argument is weighed against both a survey of the qualitative evidence and some simple quantitative evaluations. The approach also has potential applications to more general problems of international conflict and cooperation.

Several prominent human rights treaties seek to minimize violations during emergencies by authorizing states to “derogate”—that is, to suspend certain civil and political liberties—in response to crises. The drafters of these treaties envisioned that international restrictions on derogations, together with international notification and monitoring mechanisms, would limit rights suspensions during emergencies. This article analyzes the behavior of derogating countries using new global data sets of derogations and states of emergency from 1976 to 2007. We argue that derogations are a rational response to domestic political uncertainty. They enable governments facing serious threats to buy time and legal breathing space from voters, courts, and interest groups to confront crises while signaling to these audiences that rights deviations are temporary and lawful. Our findings have implications for studies of treaty design and flexibility mechanisms, and compliance with international human rights agreements.

Why do some issues but not others galvanize transnational advocacy networks? To gain insight into this question, I studied how advocates in the human rights sector think and talk about an issue that has received little advocacy attention to date: stigma against children born of wartime rape. Focus groups with humanitarian practitioners were coded and analyzed for evidence of a variety of explanations for issue adoption drawn from the literature on advocacy networks. The analysis suggests that the conditions for issue adoption are constituted by dynamics across, rather than primarily within, issue networks.This project was supported by National Science Foundation Grant No. SES 0432488 and by a Hewlett Research Grant from University of Pittsburgh's University Center for International Studies. I am deeply indebted to Stuart Shulman and University of Pittsburgh's Qualitative Data Analysis Program for assistance with Atlas.ti software, and to Laurel Person, Abbie Zahler, Betcy Jose-Thota, Vanja Lundell, Rachel Helwig, and Justin Reed for assistance in coding and data analysis. Vera Achvarina, Lisa Alfredson, David Bearce, Clifford Bob, Daniel Chong, Jack Donnelly, Michael Goodhart, John Mendeloff, Joel Oestreich, Simon Reich, Stephen Rothman, Ben Rubin, Nita Rudra, Laura Sjoberg, Dan Thomas, and participants in Yale University's Genocide Studies Seminar Series provided helpful feedback on earlier drafts. I am solely responsible for any remaining errors.

This article explores the politics of risking international cooperation with a distrusted adversary. It develops a model in which two states attempt to learn over the course of two periods whether or not mutual cooperation is possible given their (initially unknown) preferences. In one of the states, the government is engaged in domestic political competition with an opposition party. One party is known to have more hawkish preferences than the other, on average, and voters must decide which party to elect after observing the international interaction in the first period. The model shows that, when trust is low but continued conflict is costly, cooperation is most likely to be initiated by a moderate hawk—a leader with moderate preferences from the more hawkish party. Moreover, while dovish leaders are better at eliciting cooperation in the short run, mutual cooperation is most likely to endure if it was initiated by a hawk. Some empirical implications and illustrations of the model are discussed.I gratefully acknowledge thoughtful comments received from Andrew Kydd, James Morrow, Brett Ashley Leeds, T. Clifton Morgan, Kenneth Scheve, Deborah Larson, Bruce Russett, Alex Mintz, and the anonymous reviewers. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 43rd annual meeting of the International Studies Association, March 2002.

During the past decade, a growing number of scholars have turned to cultural approaches to account for the foreign and security policies of states. Surprisingly, however, these scholars have devoted little attention to the concept that boasts the most venerable tradition in the field of political science, that of political culture, as a possible source of state behavior. This neglect is unjustified. Like other cultural variables, political culture promises to explain phenomena that are enigmatic from the perspective of leading noncultural theories, such as neorealism. Yet it applies to a broader range of cases than do the many alternative cultural concepts, such as strategic culture and organizational culture, that have been employed. I begin by describing an important puzzle in the international relations literature that suggests the need to consider culture as a variable: the failure of neorealism to predict German security policy after unification. I then assess the various cultural approaches used in recent years to explain state behavior. After noting the similarities in these approaches, I discuss the important differences that mark them and identify the reasons for the greater utility of political culture. Finally, I illustrate the explanatory power of the political culture approach by applying it to the case of German security policy since 1990.

Scholars have long debated the relative influence of domestic and international factors on the presidential use of force. On one matter, however, consensus reigns: the U.S. Congress is presumed irrelevant. This presumption, we demonstrate, does not hold up to empirical scrutiny. Using a variety of measures and models, we show a clear connection between the partisan composition of Congress and the quarterly frequency of major uses of force between 1945 and 2000; we do not find any congressional influence, however, on minor uses of force. We recommend that the quantitative use-of-force literature in international relations begin to take seriously theories of domestic political institutions, partisanship, and interbranch relations that have been developed within American politics.We thank the Center for American Political Studies, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation for financial support; and Doug Kriner, Matthew Scherbarth, and Kevin Warnke for research assistance. David Canon, Matt Dickinson, Ben Fordham, David Lewis, and Alastair Smith provided helpful feedback. We also benefited from seminars at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, Harvard University, Ohio State University, and Emory University. Two anonymous reviewers provided excellent feedback. Standard disclaimers apply.

The succession of mostly nonviolent revolutions that replaced Eastern European communist governments in 1989 and the lack of any action by the Soviet Union to stop these changes transformed the international political system. Since these changes were not driven by changes in relative capabilities, they did not follow the postulates of neorealist theory. Rather, the revolutions of 1989 changed the rules governing superpower conflict and, thereby, the norms underpinning the international system. This constructivist perspective systematically links domestic and international structures with political practice and shows that international systems consist of ensembles of social institutions. These institutions change in response not only to shifting distributions of capabilities but also to redefinition of actors' identities as well as changes in state-society relations. Transformations of the international system occur when political practices change and therefore fail to reproduce the familiar international “structures.”

This article reflects on three sets of issues raised by the research in this special issue. First it summarizes and critiques the core analytical claims and main scope conditions for socialization as developed by the authors. Then it examines how a critical socialization micro-process—persuasion—fits with a thin rationalist argument. I suggest that agents who are more deeply socialized may be more strategic in their behavior precisely because they are true believers. Thus the presence of strategic behavior does not undermine the possibility of persuasion. It may be an especially obvious consequence of persuasion. Finally, I examine how the authors understand socialization and identity change. Here I argue that the content of identity needs to be unpacked further into four dimensions—constitutive norms, social purpose, relational beliefs, and cognitive worldviews—in order to more fully test how much, and what type of, identity change occurs as a result of socialization. Finally, the article looks at how the findings in the European case might be extended to, and compared with, empirical evidence from other parts of the world, in particular Asia.Thanks to Jeff Checkel, Michael Glosny, and two anonymous referees for comments and criticisms.

The Liberal International Order (LIO) is currently being undermined not only by states such as Russia but also by voters in the West. We argue that both veins of discontent are driven by resentment toward the LIO's status hierarchy, rather than simply by economic grievances. Approaching discontent historically and sociologically, we show that there are two strains of recognition struggles against the LIO: one in the core of the West, driven by populist politicians and their voters, and one on the semiperiphery, fueled by competitively authoritarian governments and their supporters. At this particular moment in history, these struggles are digitally, ideologically, and organizationally interconnected in their criticism of LIO institutions, amplifying each other. The LIO is thus being hollowed out from within at a time when it is also facing some of its greatest external challenges.

This article provides a framework for the comparative study of international systems. By analyzing how international systems are framed, scripted, and performed, it is possible to understand how interstate relations are interpreted in different historical periods and parts of the world. But such an investigation also has general implications—inter alia for a study of the nature of power, the role of emotions in foreign policymaking, and public opinion formation. Case studies are provided by the Sino-centric, the Tokugawa, and the Westphalian systems. As this study shows, the two East Asian systems were in several respects better adapted than the Westphalian to the realities of international politics in the twenty-first century.

Little existing work has systematically examined the factors that help terrorist groups survive or contribute to their failure. State support for terrorist groups is commonly thought to be a factor that helps groups to survive. I demonstrate with newly collected data that state sponsorship is not always helpful to terrorist groups. The resources provided by sponsors increase a group's ability to maintain itself internally. However, when a group has a sponsor that provides it with safe haven, the risk of the group being forcefully eliminated by the target increases. I argue that sponsors that provide safe haven can have incentives to provide information to the target about the groups to avoid potential costs from target military operations within their territory. The key empirical findings suggest that state sponsorship is a less serious problem for target states than many previously thought.

What is the role of international organizations (IOs) in the formulation of domestic policy, and how much influence do citizens have in countries' negotiations with IOs? We examine these questions through a study of labor-related conditionality in International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans. Using new data from IMF loan documents for programs from 1980 to 2000, we test to see if citizens' economic interests influence IMF conditionality. We examine the substance of loan conditions and identify those that require liberalization in the country's domestic labor market or that have direct effects on employment, wages, and social benefits. We find evidence that democratic countries with stronger domestic labor receive less intrusive labor-related conditions in their IMF loan programs. We argue that governments concerned about workers' opposition to labor-related loan conditions negotiate with the IMF to minimize labor conditionality. We find that the IMF is responsive to domestic politics and citizens' interests.

Existing theories predict that the rise of China will trigger a hegemonic transition and the current debate centers on whether or not the transition will be violent or peaceful. This debate largely sidesteps two questions that are central to understanding the future of international order: how strong is the current Western hegemonic order and what is the likelihood that China can or will lead a successful counterhegemonic challenge? We argue that the future of international order is shaped not only by material power but also by the distribution of identity across the great powers. We develop a constructivist account of hegemonic transition and stability that theorizes the role of the distribution of identity in international order. In our account, hegemonic orders depend on a legitimating ideology that must be consistent with the distribution of identity at the level of both elites and masses. We map the distribution of identity across nine great powers and assess how this distribution supports the current Western neoliberal democratic hegemony. We conclude that China is unlikely to become the hegemon in the near term.

We argue that new international borders are rarely new. We propose that when states choose new borders they use previous administrative frontiers to solve a difficult short-term bargaining problem and a long-term coordination problem. With a unique new set of data collected specifically for this project, we systematically examine the new international borders of the twentieth century resulting from secession, partition, and the use of force. New international borders, we find, are drawn not according to principles of “nationalism” or defensible borders, but rather according to previous administrative frontiers. How borders are drawn has important consequences for international stability: borders drawn along previously existing internal or external administrative frontiers experience fewer future territorial disputes and have a much lower risk of militarized confrontation if a dispute emerges.

I present a model of interactions between voters, a government, and a terrorist organization. The model focuses on a previously unexplored conceptualization of counterterrorism as divided into tactic-specific observable and general unobservable tactics. When there is divergence between voters and government preferences, strategic substitution among different modes of attack by terrorists and agency problems between the voters and government create a situation in which the politically optimal counterterrorism strategy pursued by the government in response to electoral and institutional incentives is quite different from the security maximizing counterterrorism strategy. In particular, in response to electoral pressure, the government allocates resources to observable counterterror in excess of the social optimum. This problem is particularly severe when governments put great weight on rent-seeking or care less about counterterror than do voters and when terrorists have a large set of tactics from which to choose. Voters can decrease the magnitude of the agency problem by increasing the benefits of reelection by, for example, slackening requirements for nonsecurity related public goods.I have received valuable comments and advice from Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Randy Calvert, Martin Cripps, James Fearon, Amanda Friedenberg, Robert Powell, Matthew Stephenson, and Barbara Walter. I thank the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University for financial support.

In the early 1980s, when the debt crisis threatened to disrupt the pattern of trade and investment flows that had evolved since the end of World War II, central bankers faced the challenge of maintaining public confidence in the commercial banks that were at the heart of the international payments system. Although the central bankers agreed that a run on one international bank could lead to a global catastrophe requiring massive government intervention, they did not initially agree on a policy project to strengthen the international payments system. In analyzing central bank cooperation and the processes leading to the adoption of a single international capital adequacy standard, this article argues that agreement on a uniform standard was due to a combination of political power and shared purpose on the part of the United States and Britain. While the article does not argue that the central bankers were an epistemic community as defined in this issue, it further explores the conditions under which epistemic communities are likely to arise.

Recent articles conclude that foreign aid, like other nontax resources, inhibits political change in authoritarian regimes. This article challenges both the negative political effects of aid and the similarity of aid to other resources. It develops a model incorporating changing donor preferences and the heterogeneity of foreign aid. Consistent with the model's predictions, an empirical test for the period 1973–2010 shows that, on average, the negative relationship between aid and the likelihood of democratic change is confined to the Cold War period. However, in the post–Cold War period, nondemocratic recipients of particular strategic importance can still use aid to thwart change. The relationship between oil revenue and democratic change does not follow the same pattern over time or across recipients. This supports the conclusion that aid has different properties than other, fungible, resources.

This article argues that when democracy is not yet institutionalized, leaders have little incentive to push for clean elections, in part because they are likely to face accusations of fraud from domestic opposition groups regardless of their true behavior. Reputable international election observers can facilitate self-enforcing democracy by providing credible information about the quality of elections, thus increasing citizens’ ability to coordinate against the regime when election fraud occurs, and discrediting “sore loser” protests. Patterns of postelection protests are consistent with the argument, including that postelection protests are more likely and last longer following negative reports from international observers. International election observers help promote democracy by making postelection protest more accurate in the short term, thereby increasing incentives for leaders to hold democratic elections in the long term.