Scholars and policymakers long believed that norms of global information openness and private-sector governance helped to sustain and promote liberalism. These norms are being increasingly contested within liberal democracies. In this article, we argue that a key source of debate over the Liberal International Information Order (LIIO), a sub-order of the Liberal International Order (LIO), is generated internally by “self-undermining feedback effects,” that is, mechanisms through which institutional arrangements undermine their own political conditions of survival over time. Empirically, we demonstrate how global governance of the Internet, transnational disinformation campaigns, and domestic information governance interact to sow the seeds of this contention. In particular, illiberal states converted norms of openness into a vector of attack, unsettling political bargains in liberal states concerning the LIIO. More generally, we set out a broader research agenda to show how the international relations discipline might better understand institutional change as well as the informational aspects of the current crisis in the LIO.

This article describes the basic components of the operating and normative systems as a conceptual framework for analyzing and understanding international law. There are many theoretical questions that follow from the framework that embodies a normative and operating system. We briefly outline one of those in this article, namely how the operating system changes. In doing so, we seek to address the puzzle of why operating system changes do not always respond to alterations in the normative sphere. A general theoretical argument focuses on four conditions. We argue that the operating system only responds to normative changes when response is “necessary” (stemming from incompatibility, ineffectiveness, or insufficiency) for giving the norm effect, and when the change is roughly coterminous with a dramatic change in the political environment (that is, “political shock”). We also argue, however, that opposition from leading states and domestic political factors might serve to block or limit such operating system change. These arguments are illustrated by reference to three areas of the operating system as they concern the norm against genocide.

This essay uses COVID-19 to illuminate the sacrificial practices of the liberal international order as woven through the concepts of humanitarian governance, moral economy, triage, and sacrifice. The concept of a sacrificial international order calls attention to how all international orders have their share of sacrifices—and this includes liberal international orders. International orders can be distinguished by the selection mechanisms used to identify the sacrifices and the meanings attached to them. I call attention to how liberal international orders often rely on markets as a selection mechanism and interpret these deaths as part of progress. Following critical contributions to the study of neoliberalism that show how markets shape the ethics of “giving life” and “letting die,” I illuminate these processes through four concepts: humanitarian governance and the claim that the highest moral principle is saving lives and relieving suffering; moral economy that regulates who has access to basic subsistence goods during periods of crisis; triage, which considers how to prioritize whose lives are valued; and whether all deaths count as sacrifices or whether they are better understood as “those who can be killed.” I conclude by discussing how COVID-19 conjures hierarchies of humanity ignored by the liberal international order and challenges the discipline to consider the sacrifices in world order.

The political economy of trade policy has largely neglected popular elections. When legislatures determine protection, politicians supply tariffs that are demanded by their constituents. A model of this political market is specified and tested with data related to the McKinley Tariff of 1890. An index of the extent to which tariff protection accrued to individual congressional districts is applied, along with demand and supply variables, to three questions: Did representatives supply tariffs to their districts as the model predicts? Did they vote in accordance with the district tariff interest in the roll-call vote on the McKinley Tariff? Did electors reward representatives for the district tariff protection in a manner consistent with a political market model? Empirical estimations based on the model provide answers that are generally affirmative and appear to be inconsistent with the traditional view that the Republican defeat in 1890 was a result of the McKinley Tariff.

Two of the most significant regional organizations to emerge in Southern Africa in recent years are the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC), with nine members, and the Preferential Trade Area for Eastern and Southern Africa (PTA), comprised of fourteen states including five SADCC members. Although their purposes and programs are similar and steadily converging, SADCC and PTA exhibit distinct differences in their origins, memberships, institutional structures, financial patrons, ideologies, and strategies. Although national development remains the ultimate aim of both bodies, reducing external dependency, especially in the case of SADCC on South Africa, and regional cooperation are seen as essential to success. While obvious areas of conflict exist, the two organizations may be able to restrain their rivalry in the interests of their members and possibly of their own survival.

Power sharing, in which elites from rival societal groups agree to share control of the central government, is a key source of domestic peace, enabling states to escape devastating cycles of exclusion and civil war. Yet the conditions giving rise to inclusive governance are not well understood. In contrast to existing scholarship that emphasizes the importance of external third-party mediation or strong formal institutions, we point to the structural roots of power sharing in which political inclusion stems from the distribution of societal power and the balance of threat capabilities it produces. Only when both the ruling group and a given rival group possess strong mobilizational capabilities, such that each could credibly threaten to recapture state power if excluded from the central government, does self-enforcing power sharing emerge. A strong rival induces the ruler to commit to power sharing and to reluctantly accept coup risk over civil war risk. The ruling group's own threat capabilities, in turn, constrain rivals from trying to convert their share of power into absolute power. Supported by extensive quantitative and qualitative evidence with particular reference to weak states in sub-Saharan Africa, we shed light on the conditions under which the distribution of violence within a state underwrites a peaceful and productive equilibrium. In doing so, we rethink how scholars approach the study of civil war. Rather than conceiving of it in terms of effective resistance, we model civil war as a contest for state power shaped by groups’ capabilities to project force in the capital.

It is widely agreed that the work of Thomas Hobbes established and continues to nourish the tradition of “realism” in international political theory. But this association is in many ways paradoxical, and above all because Hobbes's avowed purpose was to “show us the highway to peace.” It is usually assumed that he aimed exclusively at internal peace while resigning himself to permanent rivalry among states, but there are a good many indications that this may not be an adequate interpretation. Hobbes devoted substantial effort to explicating several modifications of the inherited intellectual tradition, in both politics and education, that seem to have been intended to promote beneficial effects in interstate relations. When these substantive aims are taken into account, rather different lessons seem to emerge. One, in particular, is that it may be misleading to think of the Hobbesian tradition as one of realism.

The principles and norms adopted by the regime governing food aid in the 1950s have changed substantially during the subsequent three decades. Explaining the changes necessarily includes analyzing the efforts of an international epistemic community consisting of economic development specialists, agricultural economists, and administrators of food aid. According to the initial regime principles, food aid should be provided from donors' own surplus stocks, should supplement the usual commercial food imports in recipient countries, should be given under short-term commitments sensitive to the political and economic goals of donors, and should directly feed hungry people. As a result of following these principles, the epistemic community and other critics argued, food aid often had the adverse effects of reducing local production of food in recipient countries and exacerbating rather than alleviating hunger. The epistemic community (1) developed and proposed ideas for more efficiently supplying food aid and avoiding “disincentive” effects and (2) pushed for reforms to make food aid serve as the basis for the recipients' economic development and to target it at addressing long-term food security problems. The ideas of the international epistemic community have increasingly received support from international organizations and the governments of donor and recipient nations. Most recently, they have led to revisions of the U.S. food aid program passed by Congress in October 1990 and signed into law two months later. As the analysis of food aid reform demonstrates, changes in the international regime have been incremental, rather than radical. Moreover, the locus for the change has shifted from an American-centered one in the 1950s to a more international one in recent decades.

The dramatic transformation of the climate surrounding relations between rich and poor nations since the OPEC oil embargo in 1973 has raised new hopes that MNCs may be made to energize development in the Third World. Improved information about the vulnerability of the rich nations and about techniques for dealing with MNCs, some writers argue, will enable underdeveloped countries to ensure that foreign investment serves as an “engine of development.” This view exaggerates the strengths of Third World states. A lack of information about opportunities and techniques is a small part of the burden which underdevelopment imposes on poor countries in their dealings with MNCs. A case study of Japanese MNCs in Southeast Asia raises doubts concerning the likelihood that the poor countries will be able to harness MNCs for their development. Southeast Asia's growing dependence on Japan in the fields of trade, official development aid, and private investment tends to impose constraints on efforts to influence the behavior of MNCs. A more basic problem resides in the “softness” of underdeveloped states, which renders ineffectual regulations intended to control MNCs. Because MNCs in certain important respects inhibit the process of building viable indigenous institutions and even contribute to the perpetuation of soft states, they may do more to impede than to stimulate development, at least in the softer Third World states. It may well be that more serious attention should be paid to studies of how Third World states might develop if the role of MNCs were circumscribed.

Bargaining relationships in formal international conferences and negotiations may involve structural asymmetries. A comprehensive analysis of these asymmetries in bargaining may be found in a synthesis of literature from formal game theory, structural-manipulative approaches to bargaining, social psychology, and the study of political influence. Propositions based on this literature focus on two factors which are likely to contribute to asymmetrical outcomes in negotiations: unequal costs to the negotiators from the failure to agree, and unequal resources available to employ in bargaining or influence attempts. An analysis of bargaining in the section of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) dealing with the issues of European security gave qualified support to these propositions. Influence over the final text in the CSCE agreement is related to a rough index of losses which would have resulted for individual nations from the failure to reach agreement in the CSCE. In addition, influence over the final text is related to each nation's resources, especially military resources. More significantly, the two superpowers exerted considerable asymmetrical influence over what was not included in the CSCE agreement, thus exercising a substantial veto. Thus, the asymmetrical outcomes within the CSCE negotiations were reflective of both differences in “threat potential,” that is, in the losses which actors would receive if no agreement had ensued, as well as differences in resources.

That domestic political economic factors are important determinants of a nation's trade barriers has been empirically well established. However, the question of how effective strategically retaliatory trade barriers are in deterring foreign protectionism has received far less systematic empirical attention. In this article we use bilateral nontariff barrier (NTB) data between the United States and five developed partner countries (Japan, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom) to systematically examine the effectiveness of strategic retaliation. We employ a simultaneous Tobit model where the home and foreign NTB levels are determined endogenously in a bilateral game. The model provides estimates of deterrence coefficients, that is, the reduction in foreign trade barriers as a result of U.S. retaliation, which we use to characterize the nature of bilateral NTB games. Our hope is that the empirical results presented here, which have realistic though controversial implications, will inform U.S. trade policy.

Alternative explanations for the formation of U.S. foreign economic policy are explored using the acrimonious but inconclusive conflict between the United States and its largest South American ally over Brazil's restrictive policies toward the computer industry. After comparing a post-dependency/bargaining perspective, the theory of hegemonic stability, and Stephen Krasner's structural conflict model, the article argues that systemic perspectives on foreign economic policy must be complemented by an account of the interaction between the effects of international position and the dynamics of domestic politics. The resulting politicized state-centric approach, which integrates interest-based politics and ideologically defined state aims, is proposed as a means of more fully understanding the dilemmas of a declining hegemon.

This article questions the validity of anarchy as an assumption in International Relations theory. Powerful states often provide public goods to smaller states in return for their acquiescence on matters of interest. This transactional provision of public goods is analogous to how central governments behave in domestic environments; thus the hierarchic structure of domestic politics is replicated in international politics. The anarchy-hierarchy distinction, which rests on a neat separation of international and domestic structures, is therefore highly contentious. One public good that great powers provide, largely ignored by the literature on hierarchy, is justice. Powerful states can provide a forum for aggrieved parties to settle their disputes, and thus contain conflicts before they escalate to war. If such a forum is no longer provided, the system reverts to anarchy, where escalation—and therefore, war—is more likely. South America's war-prone decade can be explained by the variation in structural conditions on the continent. Due to the Depression, its Good Neighbor policy, and the onset of World War II, the United States was less interested in South American affairs in the 1930s, resulting in a more anarchic structure and a higher propensity for war.

What is the impact of economic insecurity on the development of institutions of social insurance? Existing studies have examined this question by exploring the impact of various measures of economic volatility on aggregate government expenditures or revenues. These aggregate data are, however, an imperfect proxy of the character of institutions of social protection. To overcome the limitations of earlier studies, this article explores the conditions under which economic insecurity leads to the extension of the level of social insurance coverage. I argue that economic insecurity sharpens a sectoral cleavage between coalitions in “high-risk” and “low-risk” sectors. Workers (and some employers) in high-risk sectors will favor the introduction of social insurance institutions characterized by broad levels of coverage and a high redistribution of costs across occupations. In contrast, a cross-class alliance in low-risk sectors will oppose proposals aiming at the introduction of redistributive social policies, fearing that these policies will turn them into subsidizers of high-risk industries. A redistributive social insurance policy will be introduced only if the “high-risk” coalition is larger. The article tests both the micro- and macro-level implications of this theory, by examining the development of unemployment insurance policies in interwar Europe.I gratefully acknowledge comments from Carles Boix, Peter Gourevitch, and two anonymous referees. Many thanks to Stefano Bartolini, John Fitzgerald, and Michael Tomz for sharing data with me.

International relations specialists who have been examining transgovernmental processes in the contemporary international system may be surprised to learn that at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 conscious efforts were made to organize the League of Nations along transgovernmental lines. Key British and French officials, most notably Sir James Arthur Salter and Jean Monnet, supported by Americans involved in implementing the Covenant, hoped to employ both the Secretariat and the organs designed for functionally specific cooperation to bring officials of national social and economic ministries into direct contact with one another, without the intermediation of their respective foreign ministries. While these officials only partially realized their objectives, sections of the League's Secretariat, an elaborate system of expert committees, and the League of Nations Assembly did provide transgovernmental linkages during the interwar period.

This article analyzes the bargaining process in the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Conference/Conference of the Committee on Disarmament, in Geneva during 1969–70, on the issue of the Seabeds Denuclearization Treaty, which was opened for signature in 1971. A procedure called bargaining process analysis was employed to content analyze the interactions within this forum throughout four major phases of these negotiations. Limited support was given to several hypotheses about the effects of the bargaining process on the level of agreement. First, in several phases of these negotiations, the more the negotiating strategies were characterized as soft rather than as hard, the greater was the level of agreement relative to disagreement. Second, in several phases, the higher the ratio of task-oriented to affect-oriented behavior in bargaining style, the greater was the ratio of agreements to disagreements on issues under negotiation. Finally, the bargaining process analysis was able to describe several trends in these negotiations, especially the ability of the nuclear powers to reach relatively rapid agreement after initial differences, followed by much longer bargaining where differences between the nuclear and the nonnuclear states had to be resolved. This line of division may be increasingly characteristic of multilateral arms control negotiations and may be reflected in future negotiations in which nonnuclear states are important participants.

One of the ways that international organizations promote policy agendas is through the use of management strategies, including initiatives that focus on domestic capacity building. As the European Union (EU) has evolved, it has used management strategies to expand its influence over a multitude of policy issues in innovative ways. This research note provides an empirical examination of how the EU has used capacity building strategies in an effort to address violence against women. In particular, I focus on EU efforts to build the capacity of domestic advocacy organizations through the distribution of resources and the facilitation of transnational networking. By using data I collected on the Daphne program, the EU's primary mechanism for addressing gender violence, and by employing both qualitative and social network analysis, I provide empirical evidence that demonstrates how the EU has provided new political opportunities for domestic organizations to improve their capacity to combat violence against women.I would like to acknowledge the following people for their comments and support at various stages of this project: Lee Ann Banaszak, Steven Bloom, Tobin Grant, Phil Habel, Scott McClurg, Emma Moburg-Jones, Meg Rincker, Steve Shulman, Fred Solt, Gina Yannitell Reinhardt, Michelle Wade, and anonymous reviewers.

To reduce its strategic vulnerability, a small state may enter into a cliency relationship with a more powerful state. Among the consequences of cliency for the small state are the acquisition of resources, which can be used against threatening neighbors as well as against domestic populations, and the reduction of autonomy. In 1899, Mubarak, Kuwait's ruler, entered a cliency relationship with Britain. As a result, Kuwait was able to avoid incorporation into the Ottoman Empire. Although Mubarak and subsequent Kuwaiti rulers lost their foreign policy autonomy, they acquired resources enabling them to enhance their domestic autonomy by suppressing elite groups that were formerly integral participants in governing Kuwait. In 1961, oil revenues enabled Kuwait's rulers to end the cliency relationship and to provide their own resources for repressing or pacifying domestic groups. But the fact that oil revenues proved less effective than cliency in maintaining Kuwait's strategic security illustrates the fundamental security dilemma faced by all small states, even rich ones.