Contemporary international politics embody a tension between formal equality and de facto inequality. States recognize each other as sovereign equals, yet the strong still push around the weak. Among the structures that reflect this tension are informal empires. The dominant assumptions in mainstream international relations theory, materialism and rationalism, privilege the formal equality of states in informal empires a priori: materialism by assuming that authority relations cannot exist between sovereign states; rationalism by assuming that states are sovereign over their own interests. A constructivist approach allows one to explore the hypothesis that transnational authority structures construct state identities and interests. An empirical analysis of the Soviet-East German relationship supports this hypothesis, which raises questions about the emerging study of international governance.

Why are citizens in advanced industrialized countries willing to accept high prices for agricultural products? Conventional wisdom suggests that agricultural interests secure government protection because producers are concentrated and better politically organized than diffused consumers. Due to its focus on producer capacity for collective action, however, the literature fails to account for the high levels of mass support for agricultural protectionism in advanced industrialized nations. This article presents new evidence from a survey experiment in Japan conducted during the recent global recession (December 2008) that accounts for this puzzle. Using randomly assigned visual stimuli, the experiment activates respondents' identification with either producer or consumer interests and proceeds to ask attitudinal questions regarding food imports. The results suggest that consumer priming has no reductive or additive effects on the respondents' support for liberalizing food imports. Surprisingly, producer priming increases respondents' opposition to food import, particularly among those who fear future job insecurity. We further disentangle the puzzling finding that consumers think like producers on the issue of food import along two mechanisms: “sympathy” for farmers and “projection” of their own job insecurity. The results lend strong support to the projection hypothesis.

The liberal approach to international regimes is attractive in the development of thatconcept because it deploys a well-developed and rigorous set of analytic devices in the form of rational actor models. However, it also assumes that regimes are benevolent, voluntary, cooperative, and legitimate associations of actors, which unnecessarily limits theregime concept and encourages an ideological and apologetic position with respect to regimes. Following a critique of the liberal approach, this article suggests an alternative based on a fundamental assumption of contestability in regimes. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault which culminates in the concept of “power/knowledge,” it regards international regimes as attempts to define, order, and act within international public spaces. It also regards international regimes as loci and foci of struggle. Some aspects of this conceptualization are sketched in preliminary form, and a brief illustration in the area of nuclear nonproliferation is provided.

The large-scale international migrations of the past decade are of increasing relevance to the formulation of foreign policy. The nature of such migrations has undergone dramatic transformations from those of the quite recent past, and the last five years have seen a series of migration “crises” with powerful foreign-policy implications. Foreign policies have had dramatic effects upon international migration trends. Usually these effects have been unintended and unanticipated, though mass migration has sometimes been employed as a tool of foreign policy. At the same time, international migration has had significant impact upon the formulation and content of foreign policy, especially in the United States. These relationships now present complex policy choices, involving deeply entwined concerns of foreign, domestic, and humanitarian complexion. There are important lessons to be learned from recent experiences, lessons that challenge longstanding perspectives. Indeed, real peril now attends the failure to deal coherently and humanely with international migrations as they relate to foreign policy.

This article traces and explains how U.S. policy officials and IR scholars have conceived of the relationship between economics and security over the past half-century. During the interwar years, economics and security were integrated in both scholarship and statecraft. During the Cold War, scholars treated the two issues as separate areas of inquiry. U.S. policymakers integrated economics and security during the early Cold War, but by the 1970s the two components of U.S. foreign policy had drifted apart. After the Cold War, a renewed emphasis has emerged in both U.S. statecraft and IR scholarship on the integration of economics and security. Three factors explain these patterns: (1) the international distribution of material capabilities, (2) perceptions of the strategic environment, and (3) perceptions of the position of the United States in international economic competition.

International relations has often been treated as a separate discipline distinct from the other major fields in political science, namely American and comparative politics. A main reason for this distinction has been the claim that politics in the international system is radically different from politics domestically. The degree of divergence between international relations (IR) and the rest of political science has waxed and waned over the years; however, in the past decade it seems to have lessened. This process has occurred mainly in the “rationalist research paradigm,” and there it has both substantive and methodological components. Scholars in this paradigm have increasingly appreciated that politics in the international realm is not so different from that internal to states, and vice versa. This rationalist institutionalist research agenda thus challenges two of the main assumptions in IR theory. Moreover, scholars across the three fields now tend to employ the same methods. The last decade has seen increasing cross-fertilization of the fields around the importance of institutional analysis. Such analysis implies a particular concern with the mechanisms of collective choice in situations of strategic interaction. Some of the new tools in American and comparative politics allow the complex, strategic interactions among domestic and international agents to be understood in a more systematic and cumulative way.

Despite widespread agreement that status matters, there is relatively little in the way of focused research on how and when it matters. Relying on the assumption that it “matters” has provided few extant theories of variation in states’ concern for status and little understanding of its specific implications for international conflict. I introduce a theory of status dissatisfaction (SD) that clarifies who forms the basis for status comparisons in world politics, when status concerns should be paramount, and how they are linked to international conflict. I demonstrate the viability of conflict as a strategy for status enhancement: both initiation and victory bring substantial status benefits over both five- and ten-year periods. Using a new, network-based measure of international status, I demonstrate that status deficits are significantly associated with an increased probability of war and militarized interstate dispute (MID) initiation. Even internationally, status is local: I use “community detection” algorithms to recover status communities and show that deficits within those communities are particularly salient for states and leaders.

This research note examines whether trade competition abets regulatory races in the environmental area. To analyze trade competition, we develop a new measure, structural equivalence, which assesses competitive threats that a country faces from other countries whose firms export the same products to the same destination countries. Employing this new measure, we analyze air pollution intensity (sulfur dioxide or SO2) and water pollution intensity (biochemical oxygen demand or BOD) for a panel of 140 countries for the time period 1980–2003. We find that trade competition is a significant predictor of water pollution intensity among structurally equivalent countries. We then test separately whether trade competition abets upward and downward regulatory races. We find that in the case of water pollution, countries respond symmetrically to downward and upward races, that is, they follow their structurally equivalent competitor countries both when they ratchet down their regulations and when they ratchet up regulations. In the case of air pollution, however, countries are responsive to downward policy changes only in competitor countries.

Since 1980 almost half of all armed conflicts have been fought between governments and ethnic minority groups over self-determination, yet surprisingly little is known about when and why these conflicts occur. The few studies that do exist focus on the deep injustices and structural conditions that may cause some groups to seek greater autonomy or independence and others not. I argue that ethnic groups are much more strategic than current theories allow. Ethnic groups decide whether to challenge based in part on whether the government has made concessions in the past, and whether the government can be expected to do so again in the future. Data on all ethnic groups for the years 1940 to 2000 reveal that ethnic groups are significantly more likely to seek self-determination if the government has acquiesced to an earlier group of separatists, and if the government is unlikely to encounter additional ethnic challengers in the future. Grievances and opportunity matter, but so does the larger strategic environment in which the government and its ethnic groups operate.I thank Jon Caverley, Rui de Figueiredo Jr., Tanisha Fazal, Zoltan Hajnal, Oliver Kaplan, Jack Snyder, and participants at the Program on International Politics, Economics and Security at the University of Chicago for their very helpful comments and suggestions; Ted Gurr and David Quinn for their detailed information about the CIDCM data set; and Kathleen Cunningham and Idean Salehyan for excellent research assistance. Finally, I wish to thank the National Science Foundation for their support in funding this research.

States experiencing negative externalities caused by other states' behaviors have incentives to devise international institutions to change those behaviors. The institutions states create to counter incentives to defect vary in whether and how they expand institutional scope to accomplish that goal. When facing symmetric externalities, states tend to devise narrow institutions based on issue-specific reciprocity. When facing asymmetric externalities, or upstream/downstream problems, states tend to broaden institutional scope using linkage strategies. When victims of an externality are stronger than its perpetrators, the resulting institutions, if any are devised, are likely to incorporate the negative linkage of sanctions or coercion. When victims are weaker, exchange institutions relying on the positive linkage of rewards are more likely. We illustrate the influence of situation structure on institutional design with three cases: international whaling, ozone-layer depletion, and Rhine River pollution.

Scholars have long debated the causal impact of international institutions such as the World Trade Organization or the International Monetary Fund. This study investigates Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), an organization that purports to have significant influence over the market for the world's most important commodity–petroleum. Using four empirical tests, I find that OPEC has little or no impact on its members' production levels. These findings prompt the question of why so many people, including scholars, believe in OPEC's influence over the world's oil supply. The idea of OPEC as a cartel is a “rational myth” that supports the organization's true principal function, which is to generate political benefits for its members. One benefit it generates is international prestige. I test this idea using data on diplomatic representation and find that OPEC membership is associated with increased international recognition by other states. Overall, these findings help one to better understand international regimes and the process of ideational change in world politics.

Cross-border cooperation among domestic regulators and public officials has become a defining feature of global governance. While a number of studies have tracked the emergence and institutionalization of such transgovernmental networks, less is known about their effect on domestic policy. This study explores this link for the important case of insider-trading regulation in original data for 116 countries between 1977 and 2006. It offers quantitative evidence that transgovernmental cooperation is related to domestic policy convergence but that the relationship is more complex than often assumed. Direct ties to powerful regulators increases a jurisdiction's likelihood of adopting internationally promoted policies such as insider-trading rules. Separately, membership in the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO), a forum designed to diffuse best practices among regulators, increases a jurisdiction's likelihood of subsequently enforcing newly adopted policies. The findings in this study suggest that different network components are associated with distinct aspects of domestic policy convergence. The results are directly relevant for current public policy debates about the reregulation of global financial markets as transgovernmental networks among domestic regulators have assumed a critical role.

In comparative research on industrial policy strategies, attention has shifted from national-level variables to sectoral variables in both the description and the explanation of policy. The sectoral literature, however, lacks analytic focus and has provided little systematic insight into the causes of cross-sectoral variance in governance structures and policy strategies. Based on recent contributions to the economics and sociology of formal organizations, this article attempts to sharpen the concept of “industrial sector” and to provide a rationale for why sectoral structures and strategies vary. Next, it develops a synthetic explanatory framework that combines sectoral analysis and national domestic structuralism in order to account for industrial innovation strategies in advanced capitalist countries. In the final section, the fruitfulness of this approach is illustrated by developing a new account of Japan's success and failure in industrial innovation, an account that overcomes the contradictions among the main alternatives offered in the past. The key objective of the article, however, is to develop a new set of theoretical hypotheses for cross-national research, not a rigorous empirical test of its main propositions.

Since the beginning of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) Uruguay Round the European Community (EC) has twice attempted to reform the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), resulting in the February 1988 stabilizers reform package and the May 1992 MacSharry reform package. Curiously, these two attempts at reform resulted in vastly different outcomes. The 1988 reform was incremental in nature and functioned mainly as a stopgap measure. The 1992 reform, however, called for a shift from nontransparent consumer subsidies to transparent taxpayer subsidies. This shift represented a fundamental change in the philosophy underlying the CAP and laid the groundwork for an agreement in the Uruguay Round. This article examines the conditions under which this important policy shift occurred. It employs an interpretative case study method that demonstrates the empirical value of Robert Putnam's two-level game model when it is expanded to consider the simultaneous interaction of negotiations at three levels: the domestic level, the EC level, and the international level. The study concludes that the power and heterogeneity of interest groups at various levels of the game matter, that the real and perceived costs of no agreement affect the degree of substantive reform, and, finally, that a three-level interactive strategy is important in achieving an acceptable agreement at each level of the game.

One likely effect of the COVID-19 pandemic will be an increased focus on health diplomacy, a topic that has rarely been taken up by international relations scholars. After reviewing existing literature on health diplomacy, I argue for the utility of distinguishing states’ aims from their practices of health diplomacy in advancing our understanding of when states engage in health diplomacy with a bilateral, regional, or global scope. The recent history of twenty-first century infectious disease outbreaks suggests a possible move away from health diplomacy with global participation. COVID-19 provides numerous examples, from widespread criticism of the World Health Organization to increased bilateral health aid and the creation of a regional vaccine initiative. As pandemics become more frequent, however, more localized health diplomacy is likely to be less effective, given the necessity of global mitigation and containment.

This article explores the strategic problems that arise when a state seeks to use military force to compel changes in another state's policies. Although the costs associated with military action mean that there generally exist compromises that both sides prefer to conflict, bargaining may fail if such deals are not enforceable in the face of temptations to renege on policy concessions. This study develops a model that shows that inefficient conflict can occur when states bargain over policies that one of them can change unilaterally and covertly. I then show that this theory is useful for understanding a common source of international conflict: conflicts that arise when one state supports rebel groups engaged in a civil war with another state. Episodes of rebel support are associated with a substantial increase in the risk of interstate militarized disputes, the lethality of these disputes, and the likelihood of repeated violence. Agreements to limit rebel support are unlikely to reduce interstate violence unless they are coupled with concessions by the target state and/or monitoring mechanisms, both of which are shown theoretically to mitigate the enforcement problem.

Propelled by the oil boom of the mid-1970s the Middle East emerged as the world's fastest growing region. Hopes and expectations were high for Arab political consolidation, economic advancement, and cultural efflorescence. With falling oil prices and a devastating war between Iran and Iraq, these hopes had dimmed somewhat by the early 1980s. In 1985, however, the spectacular image of an Arab great power was still tantalizing. A Pan-Arab state, wrote two experts on the region, would include a total area of 13.7 million square kilometers,

Much of the contemporary literature on the utility of international sanctions approaches the apparent riddle of why sanctions are embraced so eagerly when they are supposedly such an “ineffective” tool of statecraft by focusing on the instrumental and rational purposes of sanctions. As a result, one purpose that does not always lend itself to a rational means-end calculus—the purpose of punishment—tends to be overlooked or, more commonly, dismissed outright. This article explores punishment as both a useful and an effective purpose of international sanctions. It argues not only that sanctions should be distinguished from other forms of hurtful statecraft but also that they are a form of “international punishment” for wrongdoing, despite the difficulties of applying the term “punishment” in the context of international relations. The article then examines the purposes of punishment and reveals that only some are understandable when a model of means-end rationality is used, suggesting that the element of the nonrational also plays an important role in international sanctions. The argument is then applied to the case of U.S. sanctions imposed after the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan to demonstrate the different purposes of punishment at work in this case. The article concludes that just as we cannot understand punishment as a purposive human activity solely by reference to a rational model of a means to a clearly delineated end, so too we cannot entirely understand sanctions as a form of international punishment by an attachment to a rational model of policy behavior. However, some forms of punishment are exceedingly effective, and this may explain why sanctions continue to be a popular instrument of statecraft.

States frequently disagree on the importance of cooperation in different issue areas. Under these conditions, when do states prefer to integrate regimes instead of keeping them separated? We develop a strategic theory of regime integration and separation. The theory highlights the nature of spillovers between issues. Positive spillovers exist when cooperation in one issue area aids the pursuit of objectives in another issue area; negative spillovers exist when cooperation in one issue area impedes this pursuit in another issue area. Conventional wisdom suggests that both positive and negative spillovers foster greater integration. We argue that negative spillovers encourage integration while positive spillovers do not. States integrate not to exploit positive spillovers between issues but to mitigate negative spillovers. To test our theory, we examine the degree of integration or separation among environmental regimes.