For over forty years the United Nations’ General Assembly has been meeting annually to examine a broad range of international issues. At the conclusion of its debates, it adopts resolutions and decisions on each of its agenda items. While some resolutions are procedural, many can be considered important, even historic, because of the events they spawned or because they marked a turning point in international relations. These include, among others, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, the Partition of Palestine, and the recognition of the People's Republic of China as the only legitimate representative of China in the UN.

The main hypothesis of this article is that transgovernmental interaction among central banks and finance ministries of industrialized countries was as significant in economic policy formation as intergovernmental interaction. Elite interview data indicate, however, that the international consultative process among deputy central bank governors and deputy finance ministers conformed more closely to the intergovernmental image of international politics than had been expected. Both interaction patterns within the deputies’ consultative group and the impact of international consultations upon national economic policies could be explained moderately well in terms of a unified rational actor model. Examination of the transgovernmental interaction does suggest ways to systematically modify and improve interpretations based upon the rational actor model. In addition, the degree of politicization of issues may prove to be a reliable guide when deciding whether the transgovernmental dimension of an issue requires detailed study.

Discussions of weapons taboos have failed to take into account the possibility that prescriptive international and national norms of behavior may come into conflict. Using psychological studies of trade-offs and protected values as a guide, this article argues that when these conflicts exist, the taboos' individual-level constraining effects can be vitiated. An analysis of General George Marshall's proposal to use chemical weapons against the Japanese in 1945 demonstrates that normative conflict can produce a readiness to violate weapons taboos. In these situations, state decisions to violate taboos may depend on the extent to which the perception of normative conflict is shared by other decision makers and society more generally.

Are most voters opposed to globalization? A growing body of empirical research, using data from available surveys of public opinion, suggests that antiglobalization sentiments are strong, especially among blue-collar workers. This article reports the findings from a survey experiment aimed at measuring the impact of issue framing on individuals' stated attitudes toward international trade. Respondents given an antitrade introduction to the survey question, linking trade to the possibility of job losses, were 17 percent less likely to favor increasing trade with other countries than were those asked the same question without any introduction at all. Curiously, respondents who were given a protrade introduction to the question, suggesting that trade can lead to lower prices for consumers, were not more likely to express support for trade than those who received no introduction. In addition, the responses of less educated individuals were more sensitive to framing effects than those of highly educated individuals. Without measuring and taking these types of framing effects into account, opinion surveys offer unreliable guides to gauging the extent (and distribution) of opposition to trade among voters. Results from a second experiment reveal that knowledge of the endorsement of trade openness by economists mitigates framing effects and raises overall support for trade liberalization by a substantial degree.I would like to thank Adam Berinsky, Mac Destler, Jeffry Frieden, Judith Goldstein, Jens Hainmueller, Helen Milner, Diana Mutz, Dani Rodrik, Ken Scheve, Mike Tomz, and seminar participants at Harvard, Duke, Columbia, Stanford, Princeton, Berkeley, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Pennsylvania for helpful comments on earlier drafts. My thanks also go to Lisa Martin and two anonymous IO reviewers.

A functioning balance-of-power system, comparable to the one which existed throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, limits the ability of Small Powers to achieve their own goals. However, in compensation it provides more real security for them—in terms of the maintenance of independence—than other historical systems, all of which offered the Small Power some elements of maneuverability but to the detriment of long-range security. At first glance the contemporary political system appears to contradict this generalization: Surely, one would presume, the new status of Small Powers reflects a system in which the weaker units of international politics have finally achieved both security and influence. Nevertheless, a closer examination of actual patterns of interaction substantially qualifies this presumption: The original generalization, that is, remains basically sound.

Interest in the field of ecology, which is centered in the developed countries, has recently increased due to the sudden discovery of a possible imbalance between man and earth. Resulting from the population explosion and the misuse of existing and newly developed technologies, this potential imbalance could bring about an environmental crisis menacing the future of mankind. In several countries the emergence of an interest in ecological problems has not been confined to the realm of the scientific community. It has aroused public concern which has expressed itself, although sometimes vaguely, in such initiatives as Earth Week, celebrated in the United States in April 1970, and the mushrooming of a specialized literature.

The African scramble for independence has led to two major political trends which have at least the superficial look of being contradictory but which may still turn out to be complementary. One is the consolidation of states, and, it may be, of nations, within the frontiers traced on the map of Africa with an imperial flourish by the colonial powers. The other is the unceasing agitation and conferring to secure some sort of African unity which would bring together within a common framework either all the African peoples or such more limited groupings of them as are now prepared to join forces for general or particular purposes. The unanswered, and still unanswerable, question is whether the states which have been emerging in such quantities, with more still to come—29 African Members of the UN at the end of 1961 as against five in 1955—will serve as the building blocks for a greater African union or whether they will jealously guard the separate identity which they have now achieved.

In this article, I make two primary contributions to the literature on international cooperation. First, I present a simple version of Fearon's bargaining and enforcement model and show that impatience (as captured in the discount factor) can be a source of bargaining strength when the outcome of the bargaining phase is followed by an enforcement phase that resembles a prisoners' dilemma. Second, I illustrate how to apply this model to the question of the division of cartel profits within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), particularly with regard to the relationship between bargaining strength and disparate time horizons. I find that for some critical threshold level, states that discount the future more heavily tend to receive better oil production offers than those that do not. I examine empirical evidence that suggests that countries in OPEC fall into the range where this proposition holds; in other words, relatively poor, populous countries and relatively unstable ones are allowed by OPEC to overproduce.I am grateful to Christino Arroyo, Jim DeNardo, Joe Gochal, James Honaker, Shuhei Kurizaki, Drew Linzer, Barry O'Neill, Art Stein, Hiroki Takeuchi, George Tsebelis, Jana von Stein, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. I am especially indebted to Ken Schultz for his advice and to Randy Calvert for a helpful discussion during the 2003 EITM Summer Institute at Washington University in St. Louis.

The United States faces a formidable and growing economic challenge from Japan. Over the last decade, the American state has characteristically responded to the loss of domestic market dominance in the manufacturing sector to foreign firms by invoking the principles of free and fair trade in order to delegitimate this foreign competition and legitimate the imposition of trade barriers designed to encourage the investment of multinational corporations (MNCs) in the United States. These tactics have largely succeeded in attracting investment and thus aided domestic employment and the balance of trade. The short-term benefits, however, have been achieved at long-term, unforeseen, undesirable economic and political costs in terms of both the balance of payments and state autonomy. Alternative state responses to the threat posed by Japanese MNCs, while consistent with principles of free trade, challenge the traditional liberal conception of the scope and domain of state behavior and provide more effective policies in achieving both short- and long-term objectives. This article draws on data relating to the treatment of subsidiaries of American automobile manufacturers by European governments with competing indigenous producers in specifying two variables critical to identifying policy alternatives: first, the degree of access granted by the state to foreign firms (limited or unlimited access) and, second, the type of support provided by the state to domestic firms (discriminatory or nondiscriminatory intervention). The analysis suggests that there are four possible policy combinations, which generally reflect the four different postwar state policies pursued by West Germany, France, Britain, and the United States. Of these four, the combination employed by West Germany has proved most effective in pursuing policies consistent with liberal trade principles while reconciling short-term employment and fiscal goals with the broader long-term objectives of sustaining state autonomy and balance-of-payments surpluses in the face of foreign competition. British policies, which have consistently proved the most ineffective, have sacrificed long-term objectives for short-term ones. As a result of structural changes during the 1970s, the American state's chosen policy combination was altered and now replicates the traditional British formula. The United States therefore risks comparable economic and political consequences.

Recent works in international relations theory have focused on the value of reciprocity as a means of achieving cooperation in international politics. They argue that even in an anarchic setting in which self-help typifies the behavior of sovereign nation states, the strategy of matching comparable responses to the actions of other nations may educate them over time to cooperate. This article empirically confirms that this assumption is correct. It examines the use of flexible reciprocal bargaining strategies between the United States and its major trading partners in key sectors in which surplus capacity and domestic adjustment difficulties have made commercial conflicts apparent. The outcomes of most of the disputes demonstrate that reciprocity is an effective means of eliciting cooperation from trading partners. Results also illustrate that this cooperation is usually consistent with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) norms of liberal trade and dispute settlement, even when it is inconsistent with the GATT principle of nondiscrimination.

The selection process leading to the appointment of Antonio Guterres as Secretary-General of the United Nations gave way to unprecedented practices in world politics, such as public hearings with candidates. A textbook case of what historical institutionalism calls “layering,” this episode of institutional development features intriguing puzzles, including its timing, form, and limits. Drawing on historical institutionalism and practice theory, I develop a “pulling” theory of agency that complements intentionalist accounts. The webs of practices that agents find themselves in afford certain actions over others, orienting the push of interests. I infer three mechanisms—relational crossover, competence transfers, and pushback—and show how a set of nine practices, available at the UN in 2015–2016 but not in earlier episodes, account for the specifics of the recent renewal of the Secretary-General's selection procedure. A full explanation of this critical case of institutional change is impossible without understanding how agents struggled with one another under the pull of the UN web of practices, affording some innovations but not others.

The conclusion of peace treaties following war was a norm of international politics for millennia. Since approximately 1950, however, the rate at which interstate wars have ended with a formal peace treaty has declined dramatically. I argue that the costs of concluding peace treaties have risen with the development of the modern canon of the law of war. Using an original data set, I find that states today prefer to avoid admitting to a state of war and risk placing their leaders and soldiers at risk of punishment for any violations of the law of war.

Britain's 1931 suspension of the gold standard remains one of the most shocking policy shifts of the past century. Conventional explanations focus on changing international conditions alongside the rise of social democracy: when Britons refused to shoulder the increasing costs of defending the exchange rate, the Bank of England was “forced” to abandon the gold standard. This article refocuses attention on policy-makers’ causal ideas at critical moments. Drawing on numerous primary sources held in several archives, it reveals a cleavage within the Bank over the appropriate response to the flight from sterling. Following the nervous collapse of the Bank's governor, the deputy governor shifted the Bank's strategy from making defensive rate hikes to pursuing fiscal austerity. He then “temporarily” suspended gold convertibility in a gambit to forestall the election he (incorrectly) assumed would unseat the gold standard's supporters in Parliament. When the unintended experiment with a managed float proved successful, Keynes was able to persuade policy-makers to embrace the new exchange rate regime.

Ethiopia and Liberia instituted litigation in 1960 before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to test the legality of South Africa's administration of the mandated territory of South West Africa. The ICJ received, thereby, an opportunity to deal with a major question of international concern. Hopes were raised that the role of international adjudication would be enhanced by the results of this litigation. The case was also expected to demonstrate to the new states that the procedures and institutions of traditional international law could be used to promote, as well as to retard, their distinctive goals in international life.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are being applied with increasing frequency, and with increasing sophistication, in international relations and in political science more generally. Their benefits have been impressive: analyses that simply would not have been possible without GIS are now being completed, and the spatial component of international politics—long considered central but rarely incorporated analytically—has been given new emphasis. However, new methods face new challenges, and to apply GIS successfully, two specific issues need to be addressed: measurement validity and selection bias. Both relate to the challenge of conceptualizing nonspatial phenomena with the spatial tools of GIS. Significant measurement error can occur when the concepts that are coded as spatial variables are not, in fact, validly measured by the default data structure of GIS, and selection bias can arise when GIS systematically excludes certain types of units. Because these potential problems are hidden by the technical details of the method, GIS data sets and analyses can sometimes appear to overcome these challenges when, in fact, they fail to do so. Once these issues come to light, however, potential solutions become apparent—including some in existing applications in international relations and in other fields.

Militant groups, like all organizations, carefully consider the tactics and strategies that they employ. We assess why some militant organizations diversify into multiple tactics while others limit themselves to just one or a few. This is an important puzzle because militant organizations that employ multiple approaches to violence are more likely to stretch state defenses, achieve tactical success, and threaten state security. We theorize that militant organizations respond to external pressure by diversifying their tactics to ensure their survival and continued relevance, and that the primary sources of such pressure are government repression and interorganizational competition. We find consistent support for these propositions in tests of both the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior (MAROB) data sets. We bolster these findings with an additional specification that employs ethnic fractionalization in the first stage of a multi-process recursive model. These findings are relevant not only for academic research but for policy as well. While it is difficult for countries to anticipate the character of future tactical choices, they may be able to anticipate which groups will most readily diversify and thereby complicate counterterrorism efforts.

Preferences for conflict and cooperation are systematically different for men and women: across a variety of contexts, women generally prefer more peaceful options and are less supportive of making threats and initiating conflict. But how do these preferences affect states’ decisions for war and patterns of conflict at the international level, such as the democratic peace? Women have increasingly participated in political decision making over the last century because of suffragist movements. But although there is a large body of research on the democratic peace, the role of women's suffrage has gone unexplored. Drawing on theory, a meta-analysis of survey experiments in international relations, and analysis of crossnational conflict data, we show how features of women's preferences about the use of force translate into specific patterns of international conflict. When empowered by democratic institutions and suffrage, women's more pacific preferences generate a dyadic democratic peace (i.e., between democracies), as well as a monadic peace. Our analysis supports the view that the enfranchisement of women is essential for the democratic peace.

A new approach is suggested to analyze the relations between the EC and national administrations on the one hand and the EC and national interest groups on the other. Drawing from research in comparative politics and public administration, the essay examines the working relationship between a government agency and an interest group in order to see what functions each performs. Under certain conditions, there arises a situation called clientela, a close relationship between agency and group. When studying the EC, a crucial question concerns the reasons why an interest group would forsake a productive national relationship for a new one at the Community level. One conclusion suggests that the extent of national clientela will determine both the development of Community-level interests groups as well as the strength of EC-national interest group linkages.

Recent world events, such as the rise of hypermasculine authoritarian leaders, have shown the importance of both sex and gender for understanding international politics. However, quantitative researchers of conflict have long relegated the study of sex and gender inequality as a cause of war to a specialized group of scholars, despite overwhelming evidence that the connections are profound and consequential. In this review essay, we demonstrate the tremendous progress made in this field by analyzing a wave of research that examines the relationships between sex and gender inequality and war. We divide this work into theories that emphasize strategy versus those that analyze structures. In addition, we focus on two aspects of this research agenda—specifying mechanisms that link sex and gender inequality to war, and leveraging data at multiple levels of analysis—to outline fruitful pathways forward for the broader international security research agenda. Ultimately, we argue that the study of the nexus of sex and gender inequality and war will enliven theoretical debates, illuminate new hypotheses, and enrich the policy discourse with robust evidence.