The cross-border movement of people, goods, and information frequently results in legal disputes that come under the jurisdiction of multiple states. The principle of deference—acceptance of another state's exercise of legal authority—is one mechanism to manage such jurisdictional conflicts. Despite the importance of deference in international law and cooperation, little is known about the causes of variation in its use. In this article, we develop a theory of deference that focuses on the role that domestic institutions and norms play in ensuring procedural and substantive fairness. We test this theory in an original data set concerning accession practices in the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction. Our findings offer considerable support for the idea that states evaluate partners on the likelihood that they can offer a fair legal process. Exploring empirically the efforts against parental child abduction, we offer a nuanced account of the link between domestic institutions and norms and international cooperation. This account suggests that greater attention should be paid to the use of deference as a mechanism to manage the conflicts posed by globalization.

What type of trade agreement is the public willing to accept? Instead of focusing on individual concerns about market access and trade barriers, we argue that specific treaty design and, in particular, the characteristics of the dispute settlement mechanism, play a critical role in shaping public support for trade agreements. To examine this theoretical expectation, we conduct a conjoint experiment that varies diverse treaty-design elements and estimate preferences over multiple dimensions of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) based on a nationally representative sample in Germany. We find that compared to other alternatives, private arbitration, known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), generates strong opposition to the trade agreement. As the single most important factor, this effect of dispute settlement characteristic is strikingly large and consistent across individuals’ key attributes, including skill levels, information, and national sentiment, among others.

Institutional constraints on executive behavior are commonly understood to be crucial constitutional features that limit state expropriation, protect property rights, and promote economic development. Combining new data describing the presence of parliamentary constraints for the entire European continent with data on city sizes, we build upon theories of endogenous economic growth to demonstrate that paths of both economic and political development over the long span of European history from 1200 to 1900 are the consequence of a common process of urban agglomeration. In doing so, we provide evidence that both outcomes—the existence of constraining institutions and growth—are driven by initial conditions that fostered technical know-how embodied in urban-dwelling artisans who, in turn, were able to force institutional limits on rulers’ actions. Hence, instead of reflecting a true underlying cause of development, parliamentary constraints are themselves outcomes determined by an endogenous process of growth.

Originally developed by applying models from cognitive psychology to the study of foreign policy decision making, the field of behavioral IR is undergoing important transformations. Building on a broader range of models, methods, and data from the fields of neuroscience, biology, and genetics, behavioral IR has moved beyond the staid debate between rational choice and psychology and instead investigates the plethora of mechanisms selected by evolution for solving adaptive problems. This opens new opportunities for collaboration between scholars informed by rational choice and behavioral insights. Examining the interactions between the individual's genetic inheritance, social environment, and downstream behavior of individuals and groups, the emerging field of behavioral epigenetics offers novel insights into the methodological problem of aggregation that has confounded efforts to apply behavioral findings to IR. In the first instance empirical, behavioral IR raises numerous normative and philosophical questions best answered in dialogue with political and legal theorists.

In 1980 Mexico decided not to join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Certain objective conditions formed a positive environment for Mexican adherence, but President L6pez Portillo postponed Mexican entry indefinitely. This critical decision is examined from two perspectives: a left-leaning foreign policy, anddomestic constraints in the Mexican political system. Major foreign policy factors were a growing resentment of U.S. dominance combined with a preference for conducting relations with the U.S. on a bilateral basis. Internal political pressures reflected the continued reform of the Mexican political system at the upper levels andthe relative autonomy of some elite groups from the state. L6pez Portillo's decision did not constitute an outright rejection of trade liberalization. However, the decision could have international repercussions in ‘politicizing’ U.S.-Mexican trade relations, in slowing trends toward freer trade (especially in Latin America), and in strengthening multilateral organizations like UNCTAD in which Third World countries exercise considerable power.

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the most recent effort at regional integration in the Third World, is the first potential success for such endeavors among less developed countries (LDCs). Deficient in some of the neofunctional variables of regional integration, ECOWAS differs from similar LDC groupings. Its formation was the result of high-level political support. The terms and provisions of its treaty create a harmonious political environment for cooperation, and the community has so far been free of the conflicts that destroyed several similar LDC ventures. A quasi-supranational secretariat serves as a vanguard of integration by insulating technical issues from the politics of national interest. Nigeria, the major subregional actor, endeavors to make side payments (despite its economic difficulties), and a more conducive international environment has accompanied the changed attitude of France, the principal extraregional actor, from opposition to support. Despite some contrary forces, ECOWAS may become the Third World's first success in integration.

Export promotion has replaced import substitution as the orthodox strategy for economic development. In sectors dominated by transnational corporations, however, such a strategy may run afoul of difficulties not immediately apparent from the neo-classical comparative-advantage perspective that has provided its principal theoretical support. Evidence from the Mexican automobile industry shows that an export promotion policy may face problems of a) demand rigidities in TNC intracompany transfers, b) decision dependency, c) difficulties in enforcing sanctions in cases of recalcitrance, and d) an unequal distribution of benefits between foreign-owned and domestically-owned firms.

Why do armies sometimes surrender to the enemy and sometimes fight to the bitter end? Existing research has highlighted the importance of battlefield resolve for the onset, conduct, and outcome of war, but has left these life-and-death decisions mostly unexplained. We know little about why battle-level surrender occurs, and why it stops. In this paper, we argue that surrender emerges from a collective-action problem: success in battle requires that soldiers choose to fight as a unit rather than flee, but individual decisions to fight depend on whether soldiers expect their comrades to do the same. Surrender becomes contagious across battles because soldiers take cues from what other soldiers did when they were in a similar position. Where no recent precedent exists, mass surrender is unlikely. We find empirical support for this claim using a new data set of conventional battles in all interstate wars from 1939 to 2011. These findings advance our understanding of battlefield resolve, with broader implications for the design of political-military institutions and decisions to initiate, continue, and terminate war.

The idea of weighted voting is not new. In 1849 Sir George Cornewall Lewis stated that “history affords instances in which opinions have been weighed instead of counted”, and the subsequent unfolding of a system which finds notable contemporary expression in the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Monetary Fund has seen various manifestations. While it would be extravagant to assert that weighted voting is a crucial issue of the present day, or even a hotly-contested one, its potentialities as a means toward more effective international procedure merit discussion.

During more than two decades, West German foreign economic policy has served a strategy of export-oriented growth. The success of this strategy is based on a number of factors, such as Germany's industrial structure, a favorable international environment, a pro-investment domestic economic policy and the constructive role of labor in postwar economic development. Decision making in foreign economic policy is characterized by the dominance of the export sector. The strategy of export expansion met withobstacles in two areas. In Eastern trade policy export interests clashed with the imperatives of “high politics” during the Cold War era. In monetary policy, the chronic undervaluation of the Deutsche Mark, a crucial factor of export competitiveness, collided with the goal of price stability. Both cases highlight the limits of export sector dominance. In recent years, the internationalization of German industry and the process of structural change have created problems that suggest that theGerman economy is reaching the limits of export-oriented growth. These pose new challenges to economic policy makers.

Writing about alternative international regimes to deal with direct foreign investment (DFI) may seem to be somewhat like discussing a perpetual motion machine: most people would like one for their own purposes; no one has ever built one; and discussions about their construction often take on a certain air of unreality. In contrast to the issue areas of money, trade, and aid, there is no important set of international institutions concentrating primarily on DFI. Numerous bilateral agreements and multilateral arrangements regulate or facilitate, in one way or another, the activities of private investors, but these have not been systematized into a coherent structure. Negotiations for new agreements do not take place within a large and semiformal international arrangement, such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and no large international institution, such as the World Bank in the aid field, exists primarily to give direction to activities in this area.

Writing in 1966, I examined the degree to which changes in research methods in political science are affecting research on international organizations and made some suggestions for extending the use of more rigorous empirical methods in international organization research. This effort stimulated a desire to make a more systematic inquiry. Reported in that paper are the results of a systematic survey of fourteen journals and eleven international relations readers which have been published over the past decade. The survey identified some 300 works on international organizations, 61 of which are based on quantitative analysis and field work. This study reports data obtained from coding these works on nine characteristics and provides examples of major findings. The purpose is to help the community of scholars engaged in this work to see where our collective activity is heading in the hope that this will enable us to make more effective use of the limited skills, time, and money available.

This article examines why rebel groups make large demands of governments that are inconsistent with their fighting capacity, especially when such demands are almost always rejected. We show that making large demands, even if ultimately rejected by the government, makes sense for rebels who face a credibility dilemma. Such a dilemma is most likely to arise when militarily weak rebel groups face governments of uncertain strength and can commit to fight credibly only when they believe the government is also weak. This results in a counterintuitive set of strategic incentives for weak rebels, who choose their demands to ensure that they are rejected even when the government is weak. Thus, to make their threat to fight credible, weak rebels make large demands that, when rejected, result in inefficient fighting. Since most civil wars are characterized by weak rebels bargaining with much stronger governments, it is important to understand how this particular feature of civil war shapes intrawar negotiations between the rebels and the government. We develop a model of bargaining between a government and rebel group and evaluate its implications using historical data on civil conflict in Africa from 1989 to 2010. The results suggest that the tendency for the government to be significantly stronger than rebels induces rebel groups to make unrealistically large demands.

The decision of the Supreme Council of the Paris Peace Conference in January 1919 to place the German colonies and Turkish territories under the supervision of the League of Nations raised serious political and legal questions to which no one had satisfactory answers. But, by contrast with the numerous recent studies of World War I and the Peace Conference that deal at least in passing with the origins and establishment of the mandates system, there are very few satisfactory scholarly essays that analyzer the aftermath of the Peace Conference's deliberations on international colonial affairs. The opening of the archives of the government of the United Kingdom after 1919 provides a good opportunity to review the subject and to examine what the unpublished records reveal about international supervision in colonial areas.

The internationalization of capital markets that occurred during the era of the classical gold standard (1870-1914) was part of a broader set of trends that threatened to drain local markets from capital and channel that capital to the national financial center and, from there, toward other national financial centers. Still, internationalization was neither inevitable, uniform, nor irreversible but was a political choice informed by redistributional considerations between rival domestic interests and decided by politically dominant coalitions. The domestic institutional structure in each country determined the composition of the politically dominant coalition. Decentralized structures allowed potential losers to curb public policies favorable to capital market internationalization, whereas centralized structures allowed expected winners to promote such policies. As a result, economies with centralized states ended up being the most dependent on the international capital market, whereas economies with decentralized states took a less active part in the globalization of finance.

The World Bank, under the stewardship of the United States, stands out as the global leader among international development organizations. Does China's establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) undermine this status? Examining this question, we focus on the borrowing practices of a special set of countries: the founding members of the AIIB. These founders openly defied the public preference of the United States, arguably to create a potential rival to the World Bank. Using a new causal inference method, Pang, Liu, and Xu's Dynamic Multilevel Latent Factor Model—as well as several well-known estimation models as robustness checks—we document at least a temporary decrease in the number of World Bank infrastructure projects that the developing AIIB founders have entered into. This study presents the first systematic evidence that China's AIIB could unsettle the political influence the United States has enjoyed over developing countries through its leadership of the World Bank. An important set of countries may be parting ways with the World Bank and looking to a Chinese institution for leadership in the world of development.

States often negotiate with each other over more than one issue at the same time. This article presents a model of multidimensional international crisis bargaining. Unlike unidimensional bargaining, with two issue dimensions states can send costless signals about their resolve that have dramatic effects on other states' beliefs and actions. One reason is that when states claim a willingness to fight over an issue they in fact are not willing to fight over, they may lose the opportunity to get what they really want without conflict. As a result, when there is a chance that adversaries may each be willing to fight over two issues, the states can even sometimes convey with certainty when they will fight for both issues. The model also leads to some surprising comparative statics, for example, decreases in the probability that the target is willing to fight can increase the probability of war.

The Liberal International Order is in crisis. While the symptoms are clear to many, the deep roots of this crisis remain obscured. We propose that the Liberal International Order is in tension with the older Sovereign Territorial Order, which is founded on territoriality and borders to create group identities, the territorial state, and the modern international system. The Liberal International Order, in contrast, privileges universality at the expense of groups and group rights. A recognition of this fundamental tension makes it possible to see that some crises that were thought to be unconnected have a common cause: the neglect of the coordinating power of borders. We sketch out new research agendas to show how this tension manifests itself in a broad range of phenomena of interest.

Andrew Moravcsik's article titled “A New Statecraft? Supranational Entrepreneurs and International Cooperation” is a powerfully argued and provocative contribution to our understanding of the role of individuals in the dynamics of international cooperation. His revisionist account of the parts played by prominent figures like Jean Monnet and Jacques Delors in the development of the European Union (EU) is sufficient all by itself to ensure that this piece will stimulate vigorous debate.

Recent efforts by North American social scientists to devise systematic empirical tests for a series of propositions purportedly drawn from structural theories of dependency have focused largely on the consequences of foreign economic linkages for the economies of developing countries. Although the results of these tests have been received with considerable skepticism by dependentistas and neo-positivists alike, cross-national, quantitative studies of the dependence-development relationship are not without value: they have focused research on a central problem, namely the effects of various forms of economic linkages on rates and types of economic development. This concentration of research activities, in particular the current spate of replications, has yielded new empirical knowledge concerning these relationships, plus some intriguing conflicting evidence. This is now sufficient to support further inquiry in itself, independent of the confines of dependencia theories which gave rise to the research originally.