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This paper presents two sets of arguments: one theoretical and one analytical. The theoretical arguments concern the relationship between regional ordering and systemic change. The paper questions the usefulness of the unipolar conception of the contemporary system arguing that the interaction of the Great Powers cannot be understood without reference to regional dynamics. Thus, a unipolar system implies considerable potential for U.S. hegemonic intervention at the regional level but in East Asia, we find an equilibrium constructed out of both material and normative forces, defined as a concert, which presents a considerable restraint on all powers, including the U.S. The paper then proceeds to examine these claims through an analysis of the foreign policies of the U.S., Russia, and China over the North Korean nuclear problem that emerged after 2002. It finds that China and Russia have substantive common interests arising from internal and external re-ordering in which they look to strategic partnerships, regional multilateralism, and systemic multipolarization as inter-locking processes. The paper finds that they have collaborated over the Korean crisis to prevent a U.S. unilateral solution but that this should not be construed as a success for an open counterhegemonic strategy as it was only under the constraining conditions of East Asian concert, including the dynamics within the U.S. alliance systems, that this collaboration was successful. Nevertheless, the paper concludes that regional multipolarity and systemic unipolarity are contradictory: a system that exhibits multipolarization at the regional level cannot be characterized as unipolar at the global level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies often assume that empty sanction threats inflict reputation costs on senders. However, target response to senders' previous decisions whether to back down or impose sanctions remains unexamined. In this paper, I argue that the target of sanction threats looks to the sender's actions against prior resistant targets. When the sender has backed down recently, the target, inferring that the sender is prone to making empty threats, is less likely to acquiesce. Conversely, when the sender has recently imposed sanctions against a resistant target, the current target infers that sanction imposition is likely to follow resistance, and therefore, it is more likely to acquiesce, all else equal. In statistical tests of US sanction threats spanning 1971-2000, I find strong evidence that the target is less likely to acquiesce when the United States recently backed down from a sanction threat. I find somewhat weaker evidence that the target is more likely to acquiesce when the United States recently imposed sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Powerful states build different coercive tools to manage their broad foreign policy agenda. Do different coercive strategies help or hurt deterrence success? I analyze a simple crisis model where the Defender seeks to deter a Challenger from investing in a novel coercive technology through hassling and preventive threats. Subtle differences between my model and those of Schram, Bas and Coe, and others generate different logics that clarify the Defender's costs and benefits for building diverse coercive tools. Unlike others, I show that hassling can complement and undercut the threat of war in a one-shot, complete information crisis. I show that adverse effects arise when we want deterrence to hold the most: against technologically sophisticated rivals with moderately to severely opposed preferences. After I detail my model, I connect different core specifications to different empirical domains. This exercise helps connect formal theory to empirical research. I argue that my model best fits Defenders who want to deter Challengers from building novel coercive technologies in the modern era. I propose a novel approach for modeling policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although often omitted from final texts, armchair speculation is vital to much politics research. This article argues that thought experiments are a powerful tool for harnessing scholarly imagination with enormous potential for international relations (IR). To provide guidance for thought experiments' incorporation into IR research, the article begins by clarifying thought experiments' epistemological foundations and expanding existing best practices criteria for minimal-rewrite counterfactuals. Doing so enables consideration of the diversity of thought experiments useful to the discipline, ranging from alien invasions to zombie apocalypses. Then, the article outlines five ways in which thought experiments prove particularly useful in researching international politics: probing modal consequences of macro-level theories; refining concepts; formulating hypotheses; speculating about rare events; and conveying theories' real-world implications. To facilitate thought experiments' incorporation into mixed- and multi-methods research, the article's final section offers a novel typology to guide scholars in not only formulating new thought experiments, but also adapting and comparing them, including in conjunction with empirical methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pacifism and anarchism have been until recently largely missing on the landscape of international relations (IR) theories, even though they help articulate valuable and nuanced reflections on core IR themes such as war and peace, the structure of the international order, and the multiple effects of political violence. In particular, an analysis grounded in the territory shared by pacifism and anarchism offers a focused vantage point from which an original contribution can be articulated around five main themes: the widespread fetishization of violence; the chronic sliding toward systemic militarism; the multifaceted manifestations of intersectional exploitation and domination enforced by states around the world; both current and potential alternative structurings of international politics; and reflections concerning political agency. This puts an anarcho-pacifist encounter with IR in a position to either develop further or dispute claims central to more established schools of IR theory. This article thus offers a normative reading of international politics, which adapts and develops arguments aired separately by anarchism and pacifism, demonstrates where they fruitfully overlap, develops anarcho-pacifism by extending its analysis specifically to international politics, and invites a reconsideration of established orthodoxies in IR theory by articulating a more radical, critical, and normative diagnosis of the Westphalian international order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The realities of interdependence dictate that the ability of governments to pursue domestic policies effectively is influenced and constrained by developments in the international system. It is equally evident that the realization of international objectives depends meaningfully on domestic politics and economics. Our purpose in this paper is to lay the foundation for a Realist theory of state action which bridges domestic and international politics. We proceed by positing assumptions about state objectives and deducing strategies relevant to their pursuit. First, we examine conceptions of the state found in classical and structural Realism. Second, we present two models or "faces" of state action which relate the goals of state officials in one arena to the strategies available in the pursuit of such goals in the other. Third, building upon these two models, we put forth several hypotheses which explore the types of challenges to the state that arise in one arena that may trigger responses in the second. Fourth, we introduce variations in domestic and international structures and predict the choice of strategy made by the states across venues. Finally, a concluding section examines the implications of this effort for future Realist inquiry and the study of domestic and international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the apex of foreign policy making in all governments or ruling parties are actors with the ability to commit the resources of the government and the power to prevent other entities within the government from reversing their position—the ultimate decision unit. Although this decision unit may change with the nature of the policy problem and with time, its structure will shape a government's foreign policy. In this paper we propose three types of decision units: predominant leaders, single groups, and multiple autonomous actors. Each of these exists in one of several conditions that help to determine whether the decision unit affects foreign policy largely through the pre-existing knowledge, beliefs, and style of those participating in the unit (a self-contained unit) or whether factors outside the decision unit must be taken into consideration in understanding the results of the decisionmaking process (an externally influenceable unit). The hypotheses that self-contained units will engage in more extreme foreign policy behavior than externally influenceable units and that single group decision units will show more extreme foreign policy behavior than those comprised of multiple autonomous actors are examined using data from twenty-five nations during the decade from 1959 to 1998. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of literature in political science, sociology, and development economics asserts that specialization in the export of unprocessed goods hinders a nation's economic development. However, attempts to test that thesis empirically have been thwarted by the absence of a good measure of export processing. In this paper we introduce such a measure and use it to provide estimates of export processing for 73 (LDCs) in 1970 and 1980. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists have long been aware of the need to improve our ability to predict the effect of divergent preference orderings on policy choices made by coalitions. More recently scholars have demonstrated the crucial role of differing assumptions about risk-taking preferences for predicting foreign policy choice. In this paper a theoretical approach for analyzing collective choice in the presence of risk and conflicting preferences is presented and then applied to a series of policy choices in Britain, France, and Germany in two historical periods: one, the three decades before World War I; the other, the decades after World War II. Although the specific cases examined all involve foreign and defense policy options that were embroiled in domestic disputes over extraction, the assumptions and hypotheses presented are designed to be applicable to collective decisionmaking in a wide variety of substantive areas. Indeed, they appear to provide a theoretically grounded interpretation for some characteristic patterns of policy choice that have long intrigued students of comparative foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues for conceiving international relations, including studies of world political order and disorder, as the intersection and union of behavioral-scientific, dialectical/Marxist and traditional approaches. Each is a tradition of scholarship, with dominant and inferior tendencies, visible in all parts of the scholarly world. A content analysis of Kornberg's collection of recent American international course lists shows a parochial behavioralism to dominate the instruction offered at our ‘leading’ universities. An intensive analysis of Waltz's influential treatment of radical/dialectical theorists shows many signs of the same myopia, as well as its consequences. Both epistemological and political differences in context are important for better, more ‘worldly’ and sophisticated research and teaching. Debates and convergences cutting across approaches or more specialized research programs are particularly important in this regard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In examining the diffusion of social and political phenomena like regime transition, conflict, and policy change, scholars routinely make choices about how proximity is defined and which neighbors should be considered more important than others. Since each specification offers an alternative view of the networks through which diffusion can take place, one's decision can exert a significant influence on the magnitude and scope of estimated diffusion effects. This problem is widely recognized, but is rarely the subject of direct analysis. In international relations research, connectivity choices are usually ad hoc, driven more by data availability than by theoretically informed decision criteria. We take a closer look at the assumptions behind these choices, and propose a more systematic method to asses the structural similarity of two or more alternative networks, and select one that most plausibly relates theory to empirics. We apply this method to the spread of democratic regime change and offer an illustrative example of how neighbor choices might impact predictions and inferences in the case of the 2011 Arab Spring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What counts as evidence that the other side is sincere? Within mainstream international relations literature, scholars have focused on costly signals. We argue, however, that in the real world leaders do not simply look at costly signals, but they rely to an important extent on their personal impressions of other leaders, taking these as credible indicators of sincerity. Our approach thus builds both upon the literature on interstate communication and perceptions and upon more recent research in the field of neuroscience regarding affective information. To probe the plausibility of our theory, we focus on the indicators British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain used to evaluate Germany sincerity in the late 1930s and Ronald Reagan employed to make sincerity judgments about Soviet intentions in the late 1980s. Additionally, we briefly discuss the 1961 Vienna Summit between Kennedy and Khrushchev as an illustration of how personal impressions can also result in negative assessments of sincerity. Our findings suggest that personal impressions are an important, but up until now relatively ignored, source of evidence for leaders of their counterparts' sincerity with significant implications for threat assessments and policy choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research indicates that if third parties provide assistance to sanctioned states, the sanctions are less likely to be successful. However, the scholarship on the profile of sanctions busters and their motivations remains underdeveloped. Drawing on the realist and liberal paradigms, this piece develops two competing theories to account for third-party sanctions-busting. The hypotheses drawn from these theories build upon existing work on sanctions, the political determinants of international trade, and the effects of indirect interstate relationships. A quantitative analysis develops a new measure to identify sanctions-busting behavior for a dataset covering 77 sanctions cases from 1950 to 1990. The liberal and realist explanations are then tested. The results offer strong support for the liberal theory of sanctions-busting and less support for the realist theory. In particular, the analysis reveals a counter-intuitive finding that a sender’s close allies are more likely to sanctions-bust on the target’s behalf than are other states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some mediation episodes produce successful negotiated settlements between the disputants of international conflict while others fail to achieve success? This article examines how certain characteristics of a mediator, that is, a mediator’s information about the disputants and a mediator’s bias toward them, affect the success of mediation of international conflicts. By drawing a conceptual distinction between absolute and relative bias and measuring the type of information that is relevant for mediation success, I demonstrate that both the degree of bias a mediator holds toward the disputants and the degree of information a mediator has about the disputants are significant predictors of mediation success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As intergovernmental organizations (IOs) have grown in number and influence, there has been an increase in calls for their accountability, not just to governments but also toward the general public. One of the principal ways they can improve their accountability is by becoming more transparent, that is, offering more information to the public. Over the past decade, some IOs have adopted official policies and changed their practices concerning public access to information, while others have not. This study asks which IOs are likely to be transparent. To answer this question, it derives several hypotheses based on the existing international relations literature as well as the literature explaining government transparency in the domestic realm. The hypotheses focus on the roles of the principal actors affecting access-to-information from IOs: member states, IO bureaucracies and international nongovernmental organizations. This study tests these hypotheses across 72 IOs by using three newly developed measures of transparency. It finds that some of the main factors that explain IO transparency are analogous to those that have affected government transparency at the domestic level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite considerable moral and material differences among states, the concept of sovereign equality permeates international relations theory and, in particular, normative international relations theory. Most traditions of international ethics incorporate the idea of equality. John Rawls's Law of Peoples is representative of this tendency. The states party to Rawls's contractual model of international justice are assumed to be equal. Despite the inequalities among states, the choice to model states as equals is justified to the extent that they all possess some degree of moral agency. As moral agents, states possess an inherent equality that justifies modeling them as equal. Nevertheless, states as equal moral agents would take into account certain aspects of international inequality. In particular, they could recognize the role that Great Powers can play in maintaining order and establishing the preconditions for international justice. This piece explores the extent of equality in normative international relations theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do presidents incorporate the preferences of the public into their foreign policy decisions? Previous scholarship has begun to sketch out the sources of variation in the policy–public opinion linkage, but we still lack a clear understanding of the factors that increase or decrease presidential responsiveness. To better explore the relationship, we conceptualize presidential foreign policy making as a five-stage process—problem representation, option generation, policy selection, implementation, and policy review—arguing that the degree to which presidents are responsive to public opinion varies with fluctuations in public attentiveness. At stages in which public interest is high, presidents are more likely to incorporate mass preferences into their decision making than during stages of public quiescence. The key finding in our analysis of 34 foreign policy cases is that the public's “issue-attention cycle” varies systematically across foreign policy crises and noncrises. Examining these cycles of attention allows us to make predictions about the conditions under which public opinion is most likely to influence decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]