Contrary to the general trend of trade liberalization, specific goods—such as small arms, drugs, and antiquities—have come under increasing international control in recent decades through a set of international regulatory agreements. This article offers a theoretical framework of government preferences on the international regulation of these goods. Departing from conventional models of trade policy, the theoretical framework introduces negative externalities, rather than protection, as the motivation for restricting trade; it also takes moral concerns into account. I test this framework empirically through an original survey of government views on international small-arms regulation. Based on interviewing officials from 118 countries, the survey reveals a large variation in government preferences that conforms to the theoretical expectations. I employ this variation to explain why the international regulation of small arms is weak, despite the fact that these are the deadliest weapons of all in terms of actual death toll.

What drives leaders’ decisions about whether to continue or end an ongoing war? The private information explanation for war holds that leaders fight because they believe that doing so will advance national interests, and they settle hostilities when new information reduces their optimism about the possibility of long-term success. Yet significant theoretical disagreement exists about both the extent to which and the manner in which new information, especially battlefield information, promotes settlement. This article unpacks the logic of the informational mechanism, arguing that settlement will be more likely when there has been more extensive fighting and that countries are more likely to make concessions to end wars when battlefield results have deteriorated; short-term spikes in war intensity by contrast do not promote settlement. Moreover, building on work on leadership turnover and settlement, I show that leader replacement is sometimes part of the information-updating process, especially in autocracies: new leaders without political ties to the person in power at the start of the war are more likely both to come to power when war is going poorly and to end wars once in office. Tests of these arguments make use of new participant-level data on the timing of battle deaths for all Correlates of War interstate wars, which allows me to examine the effects of changing battlefield developments across a wide range of cases in a manner that was previously impossible.

Greater theoretical consensus and cohesion could offer critical insights for the broader community of international relations scholars into the role that gender plays in spawning and sustaining processes of violence. This review essay examines the role of gender in generating and perpetuating violence and aggression, both in theory and practice. I make four central claims. First, in many studies involving the role of sex and gender in violence, specific causal models tend to remain underspecified. Second, a divergence in fundamental assumptions regarding the ontological basis of sex differences implicitly permeates and shatters this literature. Third, arguments that men and women are more or less likely to fight appear too simplistic; rather, it is worth considering that men and women may possess different motivations for fighting, and fight under different circumstances and for different reasons. Finally, systematic differences in the variant psychologies of men and women regarding the relative merit of offense and defense exert predictable consequences for public opinion surrounding the conduct of war in particular.

The “democratic peace”—the regularity that democracies rarely (if ever) fight with other democracies but do fight with nondemocracies—is one of the most famous findings in international relations scholarship. There is little agreement, however, about the mechanism that underpins the democratic peace. Recently, scholars have shown that mass publics in liberal democracies are less supportive of using military force against other democracies. This finding has been taken to support the idea that the content of public opinion may provide one mechanism that underpins the democratic peace. Using a large-scale survey experiment, we show that mass publics in an authoritarian regime—China—show the same reluctance to use force against democracies as is found in western democracies. Our findings expand the empirical scope of the claim that mass publics are reluctant to use force against democracies, but force us to rethink how public opinion operates as a causal mechanism underpinning the democratic peace.

What explains differential rates of ethnic violence in postcolonial Africa? I argue that ethnic groups organized as a precolonial state (PCS) exacerbated interethnic tensions in their postcolonial country. Insecure leaders in these countries traded off between inclusive coalitions that risked insider coups and excluding other ethnic groups at the possible expense of outsider rebellions. My main hypotheses posit that PCS groups should associate with coups because their historically rooted advantages often enabled accessing power at the center, whereas other ethnic groups in their countries—given strategic incentives for ethnopolitical exclusion—should fight civil wars more frequently than ethnic groups in countries without a PCS group. Analyzing originally compiled data on precolonial African states provides statistical evidence for these implications about civil wars and coups between independence and 2013 across various model specifications. Strikingly, through 1989, thirty of thirty-two ethnic group-level major civil war onsets occurred in countries with a PCS group.

The notion of the Roman Catholic church as a transnational actor is both intriguing and elusive. Its global empire, and thus its transnationality, ties it to many situations, no two of which are exactly alike. Its center in Rome coordinates and shapes the actions of the subsidiary field units by supplying them with general norms, symbolic leadership, and authoritative decisions. Each of the field units possesses, in turn, a certain autonomy vis-a-vis the center; the field units make demands on the center, may provide it with new ideas, and often generate key resources for the center, for example, loyalties, money, and skills.

During the twentieth century states negotiated and ratified formal treaties on the treatment of prisoners of war (POWs). These treaties have created a system for the treatment of POWs with universal and detailed standards and decentralized enforcement. I explain the form of the POW system as a rational institutional response to four strategic problems the issue of POWs poses: monitoring under noise, individual as opposed to state violations, variation in preferred treatment of POWs, and raising a mass army. In response to these four problems, neutral parties help address the problem of monitoring the standards. The ratification process screens out some states that do not intend to live up to the standards. The two-level problem of state and individual violations is addressed by making states responsible for punishing the actions of their own soldiers. By protecting POWs, the treaties help states raise armies during wartime. The POW case supports many, but not all, of the Rational Design conjectures. In particular, it suggests other strategic logics to explain variation in the membership and centralization of international institutions.

In recent years, the volume and intensity of attacks on globalization have been steadily rising. It is frequently argued that the antiglobalization backlash stems from strains that have been placed on the compromise of embedded liberalism. We argue that existing research underemphasizes how technological change and the digital revolution have contributed to these strains. Global value chains facilitated by the digital revolution have linked technology in advanced industrial countries to low-cost labor in developing countries, precipitating distributional losses for low-skilled labor in the industrial world. Further, the digital revolution has led to regulatory challenges involving both capital and labor. We argue that, as a result, governments face both mounting opposition to globalization and heightened difficulty in supporting the programs and policies necessary to buffer the adverse domestic effects of globalization and maintain support for embedded liberalism.

Economic policies in Britain after World War II, both domestic and international, were dominated by foreign policy goals. This provides the primary explanation for Britain's poor economic performance in the postwar years. Commitments made in the late 1940s and 1950s, particularly with regard to Britain's international position and responsibilities, and domestic economic policies devised to support these commitments, locked Britain into a low-growth situation. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the widespread consensus supporting these commitments began to disintegrate and efforts were made to develop new policies directed toward stimulating domestic economic growth. These efforts were unsuccessful–largely because of the unwillingness of government leaders to shift national priorities away from traditional international commitments. This failure made it impossible for the British economy to meet the rising expectations of the British population and contributed, after 1967, to a widespread increase in social conflict. Compared to other advanced industrial nations, Britain's economic performance since 1945 has been poor. Britain's poor economic performance is due, however, not to the weakness of British governments or to their inability to resist demands made by interests groups, but rather to a series of policy choices, especially in the international area, that were inappropriate for Britain's resources but to which successive governments adhered with remarkable stubbornness and rigidity.

This article argues that specific characteristics of the domestic legal institutions of Islamic law states shape these states' choices of peaceful resolution methods in territorial disputes. After providing original data on the characteristics of Islamic legal structures, I systematically compare pertinent rules of international dispute resolution methods and Islamic law. I demonstrate empirically that not all Islamic law states view international settlement venues in the same way. Secular legal features, such as constitutional mentions of education, supreme court, or peaceful settlement of disputes have the power to attract these states to the most formal international venues—arbitration and adjudication. On the other hand, Islamic law states whose legal system is infused with Islamic religious precepts are attracted to less-formalized venues.

When and where do states coercively alter their internal demography? We build a theory that predicts under what conditions states alter the demographic “facts on the ground” by resettling and expelling ethno-national populations. We predict that, under particular scope conditions, states will employ demographic engineering to shore up control over (1) nonnatural frontiers, and (2) areas populated by ethnic minorities who are co-ethnics with elites in a hostile power. We then substantiate our predictions using new subnational data from both China and the USSR. Causally identifying the spatially differential effect of international conflict on demographic engineering via a difference-in-differences design, we find that the Sino-Soviet split (1959–1982) led to a disproportionate increase in the expulsion of ethnic Russians and resettlement of ethnic Han in Chinese border areas lacking a natural border with the USSR, and that resettlement was targeted at areas populated by ethnic Russians. On the Soviet side, we similarly find that the Sino-Soviet split led to a significant increase in expulsion of Chinese and the resettlement of Russians in border areas, and that resettlement was targeted at areas populated by more Chinese. We develop the nascent field of political demography by advancing our theoretical and empirical understanding of when, where, and to whom states seek to effect demographic change. By demonstrating that both ethnic group concentration and dispersion across borders are endogenous to international conflict, our results complicate a large and influential literature linking ethnic demography to conflict.

The constituent influences on congressional voting patterns for trade policy have long been an important field of study. A central theoretical component (explicitly or implicitly) of all these studies is the level of factor mobility that defines which constituent coalitions will form and how they will be affected. Yet the recent literature offers contradictory evidence on the current level of factor mobility. Using an original data set of economic demographics of House districts and the roll call votes of U.S. House members on trade policies from 1963 to 1992, I argue that factor mobility was relatively low in the 1960s and 1970s but was rising. The relative level of factor mobility, then, reached a pivot point in the late 1970s and was subsequently relatively high in the 1980s and 1990s. I check the robustness of these results on the expected strength of the political parties in supplying these policies and the effects of divided government.I would like to thank Oksan Bayulgen, Sam Best, Mark Boyer, Stephen Bronars, Walter Dean Burnham, Virginia Hettinger, Alan Kessler, Peter Kingstone, Tse-Min Lin, Robert Moser, Phil Paolino, Dennis Plane, Howard Reiter, Brian Roberts, Ken Scheve, Lyle Scruggs, Mathieu Turgeon, the editor of IO, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. Any errors that remain are, of course, my own.

Research on mass opinion in international political economy overwhelmingly relies on survey data. This poses problems of external validity, especially for a frequently low-salience issue such as trade policy. To examine whether survey findings about attitudes toward economic openness apply outside of surveys, this note considers patterns of voting in the 2007 Costa Rican plebiscite about joining the Central American Free Trade Area. Several extant theories appear to explain voting patterns, but the results are less in line with traditional economic models based on locally important economic sectors.

The economic theory of international trade has changed dramatically over the last decade by admitting into its mainstream a body of literature that focuses on the implications of monopolistic and oligopolistic elements in international markets. By applying the tools of the “new” industrial organization in an international context, two new classes of models have emerged: models of intra-industry trade and models of strategic trade policy. The policy implications of models of strategic trade policy were quite disturbing for the economics profession, since these models demonstrated that the classical harmony between national and cosmopolitan welfare maximization does not exist if one assumes opportunities for strategic manipulation of oligopolistic international industries. This article reviews two prominent models of strategic trade policy—the Brander-Spencer model and the Krugman model—and relates them to more familiar earlier concepts, such as Stackelberg's asymmetrical duopoly solution and the venerable infant-industry argument for government intervention. The primary purpose of this article, however, is to provide a synopsis of the large literature addressing the question of whether models of strategic trade policy can give guidance for government policy.

Behavioral IR faces a fundamental challenge. The actors in most IR models and theories are not individuals—they are aggregates like states, ministries, interest groups, political parties, and rebel factions. There are two broad approaches to attempting to integrate behavioral research about individuals. The first, a quasi-behavioral approach, makes nonstandard assumptions about the preferences, beliefs, or decision-making processes of aggregate actors. The second tries to build theories in which the key actors are individuals. Pursuing the former means that the assumptions about actors will be only weakly linked to the empirical findings propelling behavioral research. The second approach faces formidable obstacles that international relations theory has confronted for a long time and for the most part has not overcome.

The nations of the modern world community have been working together on international health problems for a century and a half. They have collaborated because they have realized that disease does not respect national boundaries. In doing so, these states have learned that their selfinterests are best served by world-wide collective action to eradicate communicable disease and to promote positive health conditions everywhere.

The idea of liberal international order as a world order is understood to be constituted as a result of disproportionate Anglo-American influences. This is in line with much of international relations (IR) theory, which typically characterizes the emergence of order as resulting from the diffusion or imposition of norms and institutions from the world's centers of power. This article argues otherwise, its premise being that the international order founded on sovereign equal nation-states was co-constituted as well by the influence of relatively weak actors through decentralized processes of contestation over core international norms. Drawing on international relations, history, and law, this article outlines a framework to interpret the actions and mechanisms by which supposedly weak actors shaped international order. It concisely traces the constitution of order as based on its fundamental norms and assesses the implications of the argument for the current crisis of liberal order, as well as IR theory more broadly, laying out a research agenda for the future.

States with large markets routinely compete with one another to shield domestic regulatory policies from global pressure, export their rules to other jurisdictions, and provide their firms with competitive advantages. Most arguments about market power tend to operationalize the concept in economic terms. In this paper, we argue that a state's ability to leverage or block these adjustment pressures is not only conditioned by their relative economic position but also by the political institutions that govern their markets. Specifically, we expect that where a state chooses to draw jurisdictional boundaries over markets directly shapes its global influence. When a state expands its jurisdiction, harmonizing rules across otherwise distinct subnational or national markets, for example, it can curtail a rival's authority. We test the theory by assessing how changes in internal governance within the European Union altered firm behavior in response to US extraterritorial pressure. Empirically, we examine foreign firm delisting decisions from US stock markets after the adoption of the Sarbanes–Oxley accounting legislation. The act, which included an exogenous compliance shock, follows the harmonization of stock market governance across various European jurisdictions. Econometric analysis of firm-level data illustrates that EU-based companies, which benefited from jurisdictional expansion, were substantially more likely to leave the American market and avoid adjustment pressures. Our findings contribute to debates on the role of political institutions in economic statecraft and suggest the conditions under which future regulatory conflicts will arise between status quo and rising economic powers.