The United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea marks the threshold of a major transition in regimes governing the use of ocean fisheries. After 200 years of operation, the principle of the freedom of the seas for fishing is being abruptly dismantled and replaced by extended zones of national jurisdiction. The new acquisition of authority by coastal states will, in many situations, greatly facilitate the adoption of improved management techniques. But in most regions throughout the world, the authority over numerous stocks of fish will continue to be diffused among neighboring countries because of the migratory patterns of the stocks. Arrangements for the distribution of yields from these shared stocks, for the provision of information, the adoption of regulations, and enforcement will be extremely difficult to achieve and may become significant sources of conflict and waste for many years into the future.

In 1955 the General Assembly of the United Nations will have to consider the revision of the Charter, and there are reasons for believing that a number of governments are already giving thought to this question.

Does whataboutism work in global affairs? When states face international criticism, they often respond with whataboutism: accusing their critics of similar faults. Despite its prevalence in policy discussions, whataboutism remains an understudied influence strategy. This study investigates how states use whataboutism to shape American public opinion across various international issues. We find, using survey experiments, that whataboutism mitigates the negative impacts of criticism by reducing public approval of US positions and backing for punitive actions. Whataboutist critiques referencing similar, recent misdeeds have more power to shape opinions. However, the identity of the whataboutist state does not significantly affect effectiveness. US counter-messaging often fails to diminish the effects of whataboutism. These results show that whataboutism can be a potent rhetorical tool in international relations and that it warrants greater attention from international relations scholars.

Multinational firms operate in multiple national jurisdictions, making them difficult for any one government to regulate. For this reason the firms themselves are often in charge of their own regulation, increasingly in conjunction with international organizations by way of public-private governance initiatives. Prior research has claimed that such initiatives are too weak to meaningfully change firms’ behavior. Can public-private governance initiatives help firms self-regulate, even if they lack strong monitoring or enforcement mechanisms? I take two steps toward answering this question. First, I introduce a new measure of firms’ performance on ESG (environmental, social, and governance) issues: the extent to which the firms issue public responses to claims of misconduct from civil society actors. Second, I argue that public-private governance initiatives allow firms to benefit from the legitimacy of their public partners, lowering the reputational cost of transparent response. Employing novel data on firm responses to human rights allegations from the Business and Human Rights Resource Center, I find that membership in the largest and most prominent initiative, the United Nations Global Compact, significantly increases firms’ propensity to respond transparently to stakeholder allegations. These results suggest a limited but important role for public-private initiatives in global governance.

By the Charter of the United Nations the Secretariat is established as one of the six principal organs of the United Nations. The Secretary-General is designated ‘the chief administrative officer,’ not—be it noted—of the Secretariat but of the Organization. The Secretariat comprises the Secretary-General together with the staff appointed by him. The two institutions, the Secretariat and the Secretary-General, may well be regarded as distinct but inseparable—distinct in that the Charter confers in Articles 98 and 99 certain functions and powers specifically on the Secretary-General; inseparable in that the Secretariat is a unitary institution, organized on a functional basis, the members of which are ‘subject to the authority of the Secretary-General’ and ‘responsible to him in the exercise of their functions.’

Economic interdependence complicates domestic policymaking by interposing the decisions of foreigners in the loop that links policy instrument settings to economic outcomes. Nowhere was this vulnerability to external decisions demonstrated more forcefully—even for the world's major economies—than by the energy supply shocks of 1973 and 1979. The oil shocks posed challenges that offer unusual insight into the way nations choose policies: their severity forced a policy response; their unpredictable timing and (at least in 1973) unprecedented nature ruled out conventional formulas and brought to the fore explicit policy trade-offs. This article seeks to explain how policymakers in the world's two major economies responded to these external shocks. The analysis successively employs three vantage points—system, society, and state—in tracing the sources of domestic adjustment policies. It focuses specifically on the extent to which policies accommodated or extinguished each shock's inflationary impulses and on the coherence and consistency with which the executive in each government formulated and pursued particular policy goals. A comparison of these four cases illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of increasingly detailed theoretical frameworks for explaining policy choice. Although the research does not contradict the depiction of the United States and Japan in terms of state strength, it does underscore the importance of looking beyond formal institutional arrangements to consider how elite policy preferences, ambitions, and capacities can define the way constraints influence policy.

Virtually eveyone reconizes the existence on an environmental crisis in the world today, but may uncertianties remain concerning the precise nature of this cirsis and its domestic and interational implications. This much is clear: The world's popu;lation is continuing to grow at an alarming pace; finite resources are being utilized at exponential rates; and technological advances are contributing to negative ecological outcomes. These trends have been documented extensively. Their political significance, however, has received little attention if only because the visibility of the problem is such a recent phenomenon. This article is addressed to some of the political consequences and international implications of the environmental crisis.

It is a commonplace that the world in which we live has changed more rapidly and more drastically in the last hundred years than perhaps at any other stage of its history. So evident is this fact, and so familiar are the forces that have made for change, that by a curious paradox the mere repetition of arguments about “the shrinking globe,” “the increased speed of travel,” “the growth of communications,” and so on has tended to deaden our awareness of what they mean. From the earliest years of the century, we have become accustomed to hearing that the invention of automobiles, of aircraft, of telephones, and of radio would radically transform our world. If, now, we once more hear the same, or similar statements, made about space travel, ballistic missiles, atomic energy, and television, our immediate reflex is probably a shrug, denoting the understandable feeling that we have met it all before.

The vast majority of the decisions made in our global society are responses to problems in which cause and effect are closely related in time and in space. When a problem becomes important, its source is usually obvious, and any appropriate response usually becomes effective in time to eliminate the difficulty. For this class of phenomena it is satisfactory to react after a problem is already apparent. Thus, the institutions involved need only monitor the current status of the system; they need not maintain a long planning horizon. It is important to realize that most environmental problems do not fit into this category. The delays associated with most environmental processes will require us to add an explicit consideration of the time dimension in formulating environmental policy.

Suggested from the study of budgeting, the quasi-budgeting framework is used to analyze a certain type of negotiation. Three pre-conditions are spelled out for using this framework. A simple structural equation model to account for how negotiation outcomes are determined on the basis of the Soviet-Japanese salmon catch negotiations in the Northwest Pacific for the 1957–1977 period is presented. The estimation results for the 1957–1976 period as well as the predictive performance for the 1977 negotiations are demonstrated to be fairly good, thereby suggesting that the quasi-budgeting framework is both conceptually powerful and methodologically feasible in the study of various international negotiations.

It is just over a year since General Eisenhower exchanged the academic robes he had donned so shortly before for the uniform with which his name and fame were more closely related. This time, despite the ”US” on his lapels, he became, as he has said, only ”one-twelfth” American. The eleven-twelfths he dedicated to the other nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. To that body, and its goal of European cooperation for defense against aggression, he has devoted a full measure of his time and energy.

The market-oriented focus of the global food regime, as it functioned from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, has proved inadequate. Preoccupation with perfecting markets led food policy makers to underemphasize the need for increased production in the Third World. It also led them to exaggerated attention to short-term surplus disposal and too little concern about scarcity. The regime emerged from a context in which unilateral actions and domestic considerations prevailed. This resulted in regime pathologies in which mutually beneficial international food solutions were not reached and multilateral coordination to analyze and solve food problems was discouraged. Such regime inadequacies cumulated over time; while they did not cause the food “crisis” of 1973–74, they blunted international responses to it. Reform of the global food regime is needed to (1) raise priorities accorded to rural modernization in Third World countries, (2) increase attention to malnutrition and chronic hunger, (3) provide resources for development, and (4) structure and stabilize the market so as to provide security of supply and income. The legitimacy of multilateral forums and processes also must be enhanced.

The major difference between Canadians and Americans on the subject of their relationship is in the intensity of their perceptions. There is bound to be conflict between a people who regard the relationship as critical and those who have scarcely noticed the other country. Firmly fixed in the Canadian view is the idea that a special relationship has come to an end. When the British contemplated the end of their special relationship with the United States, they were interested in an alternative—association with the European Economic Community (EEC). The problem for Canadians is that no alternative association seems clear, attractive, or promising. In light of their relative comfort in the energy crisis of 1973, however, the need for any special relationship has seemed less urgent.

Canadian anxiety about increasing involvement with the American economy is partly based on a deeply rooted conviction that economic dependence necessarily brings political dependence in its wake. That conviction was at the bottom of the Canadian rejection of proposals of reciprocity with the United States in the general elections of 1891 and 1911. It has also been explicitly recognized as an underlying rationale of Canadian policy toward the United States in the Department of External Affairs's recent paper on Canadian-American relations.

The political challenge to the post-World War II order in shipping has been issued in the context of the North-South debate, but American power and interest are central to current developments. In the bulk and tanker sector the United States retains a strong interest in stability and successfully defends the existing order. In the liner sector, on the other hand, the United States has participated in recent assaults on the postwar order, producing great tension between Europe and America. There is a strong correlation between this growing maritime conflict and the political processes anticipated by the general theory of hegemonic stability. But “hegemony” and “power” are distinct concepts. Instability in international shipping arises neither from America's loss of power in shipping nor from challenges from Europe and the Third World. Rather, instability reflects American attempts to establish a closer identity between the existing regime and short-term national interest.

The technology of warfare is in a constant state of flux. In recent years weather modification activities have been employed by military forces and other methods of environmental manipulation have been contemplated for military use. The development of the 1976 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques and the negotiations in the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament (CCD) which culminated in its adoption are focused upon. To date this treaty has generated little in the way of commentary in either the press or in academic journals. The treaty and the politics surrounding its drafting and adoption are considered and shown to be quite instructive on disarmament politics and the operation of the CCD. Further, they reflect the fact that the North-South polarity found in a number of issue areas in world politics is increasingly evident in the field of disarmament and arms control.

Because of the nature of modern weapons, significant innovations in arms technology have the potential to induce dramatic changes in the international distribution of power. Consider, for example, the “strategic defense initiative” (SDI), a program initiated by the United States in the early 1980s. Had the program been successfully completed, it might have led to a substantial devaluation of Soviet nuclear capabilities and put the United States in a very dominant position. It should not then come as a surprise that interstate rivalry, especially among super powers, often takes the form of a race for technological superiority. Mary Acland-Hood claims that although the United States and the Soviet Union together accounted for roughly half of the world's military expenditures in the early 1980s, their share of world military research and development (R&D) expenditures was about 80 percent. As further proof of the perceived importance of R&D, note that whereas the overall U.S. defense budget increased by 38 percent (from $225.1 billion to $311.6 billion in real terms) from 1981 to 1987, military R&D spending increased by 100 percent (from $20.97 billion to $41.96 billion). Moreover, before World War II military R&D absorbed on average less than 1 percent of the military expenditure of major powers, but since then it has grown to 11–13 percent. The emphasis on military technology is bound to become more pronounced in the future as R&D becomes the main arena for interstate competition.

That the anarchic system generates incentives for states to balance each other's power is conventional wisdom in international relations. As such, the contemporary unipolar system is an anomaly. Observers explain its existence in several ways, including the benevolence of US hegemony and the constraints international institutions impose on the exercise of US power. None of them, however, explain what is perhaps the most puzzling outcome of the Soviet collapse: the decision of the United States to maintain its level of military spending. To explain its choice, we extend the seminal argument Waltz advanced long ago to a dynamic setting. Using a simple model, we show that the interest of the unipole in deterring a challenge to its power can induce it to continue to invest in guns rather than to shift its resources to the production of butter. This strategy can enable the incumbent unipole to pre-empt the balancing process that has long been thought to be central to state survival under anarchy.

The year 1967 saw two inter-American conferences of major significance for the changing course of the inter-American system. One, the Third Special Inter-American Conference, held in Buenos Aires in February 1967, had as its purpose the revision of the 1948 Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS). The first conference to take such action, it culminated several years of debate over shortcomings in the OAS and ways and means of correcting them. The other principal assemblage of the year was the Meeting of American Chiefs of State at Punta del Este, Uruguay, in April. Although a regional “summit” meeting had been held in 1956, the one at Punta del Este was the first to give serious substantive consideration to major issues.

“International-Law-and-Organization” has become a hyphenated conception but the implied interrelations are assumed rather than explored. All international organization, of course, may be seen as an aspect of law partaking of its forms and sharing its purposes. Law and organization have in common that, in both, nations eschew laissez-faire and “going it alone” and identify and prefer common interests. Often, on the other hand, one thinks of international organization in contradistinction to law as making different promises, suffering different limitations, evoking different loyalties.