Managing foreign affairs is in no small measure about anticipating the actions (and non-actions) of others, and about taking steps to limit the unexpected—and the undesired. Law has long been recognized as important to these tasks. Nevertheless, standard IR treatments often overlook important properties of law, even when trying to account for international law's effects on behavior. Chief among these overlooked properties is the fact that legal rules are formulated for general use, which means their provisions lack determinate meaning in relation to the full range of facts they may be applied to. Selecting and using legal rules to guide or assess behavior thus requires interpretation. Self-interested actors may differ regarding the applicability, scope, or meaning of individual rules, and still more so where multiple legal rules are in play. In situations where political stakes are high, powerful actors may not be content to leave all options on the table. Instead they may use interpretative tactics to mingle obligations from different agreements and, where needed, to augment relevant legal obligations in efforts to prospectively ensure, in the mode of Riker's heresthetics, that interlocutors feel compelled by legal circumstances to enact the more powerful actor's preferences. I demonstrate how agreement mingling and augmentation function in complex legal environments by reexaming US efforts to insulate its citizens from unwanted exercises of jurisdiction by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Under conditions of guerrilla conflict, mass indiscriminate violence has been shown to effectively starve a guerrilla of its support. Consequently, counter-guerrilla mass violence is concentrated within territories where a guerrilla is dominant. However, in roughly 40 percent of mass violence episodes (e.g., Rwanda and Cambodia), the violence was aimed at populations within areas of secure territorial control. These episodes have therefore been explained by attributing ideological preferences to leaders or as unique cases only. I argue that leaders adopt mass indiscriminate violence against outgroups to consolidate power under conditions of elite rivalry. The violence serves two main goals. First, it helps build coalitions with constituencies that gain from violence; and second, it targets rival factions indirectly by forcing local security officials to facilitate or oppose the violence. The violence thereby provides rival supporters with an exit option, provides the regime with information on rival supporters’ private loyalties, and undermines rivals’ abilities to mount an effective resistance. These rivals can ultimately be purged from the regime. Based on newly collected original data on elite purges and on the type of mass indiscriminate violence for the years 1950 to 2004, I show that this type of mass violence, which I call “genocidal consolidation,” is intimately connected to authoritarian consolidation.

Can third parties build nations after ethno-sectarian war? We provide a positive theory of peace building that highlights trade-offs that are inherent in any foreign intervention, narrowing the conditions for success even when interventions are well resourced and even-handed. A “sectarian” dilemma arises because peace must rely on local leaders, but leaders who earned their reputations through ethno-sectarian conflict have no incentive to stop playing the ethnic card and will not provide public goods. Intervention can shift those incentives if it stops ethnic violence and rebuilds state institutions. But an “institutional” dilemma arises if intervention crowds out local leaders, limiting state legitimacy and constraining the pace with which state building unfolds. The window for a lengthier, slower pace of foreign-led state building will close due to its own success as the population switches from ethnic to national identification, creating a “sovereignty” dilemma that pushes third parties out. If intervention ends before institutions can deepen leader incentives for a unifying nationalism, violence will likely recur. We provide an “intervention diagnostic” that reflects these three dilemmas, which are a function of the type of intervention, local political development, and the identity of the intervener. In deciding whether to intervene, the limits of building self-enforcing peace should be weighed against the likelihood and costs of ongoing violence.

How quickly and unfortunately the two words “Southeast Asia” have become common currency in American political discourse! I say unfortunately because I do not believe there is such a thing as Southeast Asia except for cartographic purposes. There are several small countries, either colonies or former colonies, situated in that area but they do not constitute an entity. So, too, the words “Southeast Asia” have become common currency in controversy over diplomatic and military strategy, and again I say unfortunately, because I do not think there is in the area a basis for any such strategy that can be at all effective.

An economist in an international organization has certain obligations as a member of his profession, as a citizen of his country, and as an international civil servant. These are not always readily harmonized in the individual. For economists from different backgrounds (i.e., economies which are capitalistic, welfare-oriented, underdeveloped, etc.), of different nationalities, and working in different capacities with organizations of differing international functions, there can surely be no single prototype. There may nonetheless be some generalizations which can be made about the role of this sort of professional in this occupational setting. Where may the lines be drawn between the pursuit of truth, however relative it may be, and the advocacy of policies? To what extent must the economist align himself with the practical when that is the enemy of the desirable? Does an economist withdraw from the heady atmosphere of academic recognition into bureaucratic anonymity when he fills out the twenty-page employment form of an international organization; or does he escape from the pallid world of equilibrating models into the invigorating arena of problems, pressure and power? Is an economist trained in a particular school of thought—whether Marxist, Keynesian, Chicago or institutionalist—under any obligation to suppress or dilute the distinctive point of view he initially brings to bear on economic problems?

The Colombo Plan has been defined as “a cooperative plan to enable members to help one another through bilateral arrangements for assistance, both capital and technical. Its objective is to raise the standard of living by accelerating the pace and extending the scope of economic development in the countries of South and South-East Asia with special emphasis on the production of food.” Frederick Benham, British economist and student of the Plan, has called it “one of those voluntary and flexible arrangements based on goodwill which are not subject to any formal rules—it is not really a plan at all. It may be regarded as an envelope covering the development programs of member countries in South and South-East Asia.”

By many criteria, Japan is weak internationally. As a consequence one would expect its foreign economic policy to have been marked by limited choice, weakness, and constant vacillation in the face of external pressures. The domestic political structures of the country, however, have for most of the period since World War II permitted wide choice, strength, and consistency. A corporatist coalition of finance, major industry, trading companies, and the upper levels of the national bureaucracy, coupled with the consistent rule of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, the systematic exclusion of organized labor from formal policy-making channels, and the lack of social overhead spending, has permitted the Japanese state to function as official doorman determining what, and under what conditions, capital, technology, and manufactured products enter and leave Japan. The strengths acquired from such past policies make it likely that the Japanese state will remain capable of dealing with the increasing domestic and international threats to its capacity to make relatively autonomous choices about Japan's international economic behavior.

The so-called “Chinese Question” in the United Nations has been an issue in UN politics for the last seventeen years. It has hampered the operation of the UN and influenced the course of post-World War II international politics. Yet little study has been done with regard to the attitudes of the Communist Chinese themselves toward the UN.

Charles Tilly's classical claim that “war made states” in early modern Europe remains controversial. The “bellicist” paradigm has attracted theoretical criticism both within and beyond its original domain of applicability. While several recent studies have analyzed the internal aspects of Tilly's theory, there have been very few systematic attempts to assess its logic with regard to the territorial expansion of states. In this paper, we test this key aspect of bellicist theory directly by aligning historical data on European state borders with conflict data, focusing on the period from 1490 through 1790. Proceeding at the systemic, state, and dyadic levels, our analysis confirms that warfare did in fact play a crucial role in the territorial expansion of European states before (and beyond) the French Revolution.

International relations theory has had a trust revival, with scholars focusing on how trust can enhance interpersonal cooperation attempts between leaders. We propose there is another type of trust at play in world politics. International system trust is a feeling of confidence in the international social order, which is indexed especially by trust in its central unit, state persons. System trust anchors ontological security, and its presence is an unstated assumption of the international relations trust scholarship. In this paper we conceptualize system trust. We illuminate its presence by flagging the production of state personhood in a familiar case in international relations trust scholarship, the 1985 Geneva Summit between Reagan and Gorbachev. Interpersonal and system trust perspectives highlight different aspects of the same summit. The juxtaposition suggests new lines of research into the production of state persons in diplomacy, the relationship between interpersonal and system trust, and the impact of the rise of personalistic/patrimonial leadership on diplomacy and international order.

Cultural expansion has been a major component of postwar French foreign policy. The creation and operation of UNESCO afforded opportunities for pursuit of French cultural relations. French authorities determined to secure the location of UNESCO in Paris, the privileged use of the French language, and to direct the organization towards activities with appeal to an international intellectual clientele. France also endeavored to divert UNESCO from paths detrimental to French cultural policy. These dangers included the creation of international norms and mandatory reports on bilateral cultural relations, adherence by UNESCO to a philosophy inimical to French cultural policy, and penetration by multilateral organs into areas of French cultural predominance. At the same time, France availed itself of UNESCO to supplement its independent actions, to infiltrate a French presence into new areas, to facilitate the operational conduct of cultural relations, and to diversify the conventional instruments of cultural action. Additionally, the French National Commission for UNESCO emerged as an agent for the conduct of French cultural diplomacy.

Referring to “domestic jurisdiction” as used in the League Covenant, Professor J. L. Brierly characterized it as “a new catchword,” capable of proving as great a hindrance to the orderly development of international law as “sovereignty” and “state equality” had been in the past, and about which “little seems to be known except its extreme sanctity.” Since these words were written, the Covenant of the League of Nations has been replaced by the Charter of the United Nations as the basic law of the organization of the world community. The concept of a reserved domestic jurisdiction is still with us. In fact, Article 2, paragraph 7, of the Charter gives it a broader definition and a wider range of application than did Article 15, paragraph 8, of the Covenant. What is the meaning of the domestic jurisdiction principle as set forth in the Charter? What effect has it had in practice on the working and development of the United Nations?

In the study of comparative foreign policy, two schools of thought disagree over what accounts for variations in processes and outcomes of foreign policies within and between states. One holds that differences in the characteristics of the countries in question lead to differences in their foreign policies. The other argues that the important differences are not between countries but between issue-areas. A comparison of the Soviet Union and the United States in the issue-area of military policy (in particular, the process of weapons innovation) suggests that the policy processes differ substantially, contrary to what an issue-area approach would predict. On the other hand, the distinctions made by some students of political economy who focus on domestic structures appear to account well for differences between the U.S. and Soviet processes of innovation. The domestic structural approach should be applied to the study of comparative military policy as well as foreign economic policy.

A key piece of conventional wisdom among scholars of modern armed conflict is that collateral damage is often strategically costly in war. Yet most combatants already know this and take actions after mistakes—most prominently, the distribution of “condolence payments” to civilian victims—in order to mitigate these costs. Do these payments work? This question is important not only for policymakers but also for deeper theoretical debates about how civilians respond to combatant signals in war. To examine these issues, I use micro-level conflict event data on 4,046 condolence payments made by Coalition forces to civilian victims during the Iraq War from 2004 to 2008, matching it with corresponding data on collateral damage and insurgent violence. The results of this analysis reveal that post-harm compensation does significantly diminish local rates of insurgent violence, and that this is true across different types of payments (cash handouts or in-kind assistance). Ultimately, these patterns can be best explained by a rationalist mechanism in which civilians update their beliefs about violent events based on new information about combatants’ wartime intentions. The results thus provide a compelling strategic rationale for combatants to compensate their victims in war, and suggest that civilians are not blinded to new information about conflict dynamics by their preexisting biases.

Although evidence shows that territorial disputes fundamentally shape relations among states, we know surprisingly little about when territorial claims are made. We argue that revisionist states have incentives to make territorial claims when the great powers that manage the system are in crisis. We identify five main sources of systemic instability and develop measures of each of them, demonstrating that the majority of territorial claims in Europe are drawn at times when regional great powers are embroiled in crisis, for example, 1848 or 1870 during the nineteenth century. The claims that emerge at these times are not necessarily among states involved in the crises that generated turmoil (e.g., Prussia and France in 1870). We use a newly developed spatial measure of historical boundary precedents in Europe from 1650 to 1790 to demonstrate that the effect of this known spatial correlate of where claims are drawn matters only when the European system is in crisis. We further demonstrate that this claim-timing pattern is general to the global system of states. In the appendix we corroborate our explanation of our findings with a detailed case study of the territorial claims that led to the contemporary Italian state's formation.