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1. Harris, Paul G.: International environmental cooperation in Pacific Asia. Introduction. 2. Elliott, Lorraine: Environmental security in East Asia. Defining a common agenda. 3. Harris, Paul G.: Environmental security, international cooperation, and U.S. foreign policy toward Northeast Asia. 4. Barkenbus, Jack N.: Reconciling trade and environment in East Asia. 5. Boas, Morten: The Asian Development Bank and environmental diplomacy. Limits to the technocratic consensus. 6. Ooi Giok Ling ; Tay, Simon S. C. ; Kog Yue Choong: Environmental agreements in Southeast Asia. Balancing economic interests and regional politics. 7. Brown, Donald A.: Emerging norms of international justice. Global warming and China's changing environment. 8. Nam Sangmin: Ecological interdependence and environmental governance in Northeast Asia. Politics versus cooperation. 9. Lee Shin-wha: Building environmental regimes in Northeast Asia. Progress, limitations, and policy options. 10. Takahashi, Wakana: Problems of environmental cooperation in Northeast Asia. The case of acid rain. 11. Toward a greener peace? Nuclear reprocessing, security, and international cooperation in East Asia. / Stephanie Tai ... 12. Naess, Tom: Politics of the South China Sea. Diplomacy, cooperation, and environmental regimes. 13. Springer, Allen L.: Indonesian forest fires. Internationalizing a national environmental problem

A considerable amount of research in the field of International Relations (IR) has acknowledged the interplay between domestic politics and foreign policy. Few studies, however, have investigated this phenomenon in the narrower field of transboundary water politics. There is also a general lack of research exploring how the formation of a national identity can overlap with the construction of a large hydraulic infrastructure, and how this can have repercussions at the international level. This paper draws on Robert Putnam's (1988) two-level game theory to illustrate how the interrelation between the domestic and the international dimensions matters in transboundary water politics. Perspectives from IR, political geography, and water politics serve to present a conceptual framework which is then linked to studies on nationalism. This helps to highlight the analytical relevance of such a perspective to understand the issue of large dams. The paper takes the cases of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia and the Rogun Dam in Tajikistan as examples.

This paper is an attempt at reconstituting the emergence of the international mechanisms of criminal justice after the Cold War from the point of view of the articulation between the fundamental norm of the modern system of states -sovereignty- and the corpus of human rights, more precisely, on the regime formation of international criminal justice. Our approach will focus on the political, rather than on the legal aspects of this process. While it is difficult enough to conceptualize and to theoretically justify the link between sovereignty and the possibility for individuals to become subjects of international law, a further obstacle to the emergence of international criminal justice is the overcoming of the strategic interests of particular states, especially great powers, in establishing such a jurisdiction. Since international law remains politically negotiable, we will try to look into the political context that allowed for the developments that led, at the end of the 1990s, to the creation of the ICC, as well as to the transformation of the meaning of "sovereignty", in order to include the responsibility to protect citizens against ethnic cleansing, genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Thus, some of the questions addressed in this contribution will be: which is the conceptual link between sovereignty and human rights? Subsequently, how do individuals become subjects of international law? Which is the extent of the "universality" of human rights? The linkage between these sets of questions might provide a critical perspective on the transformation of international politics.

Regions—geopolitical spaces based on various definitions—have been judged as important for explanations about international politics. Area specialists devote their professional lives to the study of one or, perhaps, two regions. Quantitative international relations scholars use regional controls in empirical models of conflictual or cooperative relations, and they typically find that regions matter, at least statistically. Most states conduct much of their political relationships1 within regions rather than globally (Acharya 2007; Hurrell 2007). At a very minimum, geopolitical context constitutes a strong conditioning effect on how they conduct their external (and often internal) affairs. Yet rarely are explanations of interstate relations embedded in a comparative regional perspective,2 using region as either the primary level or unit of analysis. This is due to a variety of definitional, conceptual, theoretical, and empirical issues that have retarded development of systematic, comparative, and rigorous inquiry at the regional level. Our intention here is not to address those problems fully, nor to resolve them. Instead, we wish to offer a view of the more recent quantitative literature, suggest some trends, and offer a theoretical framework that may be useful to the development of more comparative regional analysis. We take on these tasks in the context of three puzzles of interest concerning international relations. First, what accounts for variation in intraregional cooperative relationships between states? Some regions contain cooperative relationships and institutionalized cooperative relations that are far more extensive than others; additionally, regions also go through cycles of greater or lesser cooperation. Do state level and dyadic findings explain these differences, or, do regional dynamics exist that may provide additional insights? Second, regions vary in terms of the extent of conflict between their members. Can regional dynamics help explain variation in conflicts across regions and across time within regions? Third, we are interested in the literature on diffusion processes, including both conditions that may accelerate diffusion processes and emerging work on firewalls that may retard the diffusion of phenomena, including conflicts and cooperation (Solingen 2012). In particular, we wish to probe the extent to which regions vary in creating such firewalls and their relative effectiveness.

Current approaches for understanding and analyzing religion in international politics insufficiently incorporate the role of ethics in the practices of religious actors. Primordialist approaches essentialize religion, instrumental approaches consider it to be an epiphenomenon, and cosmopolitan approachesa prioridowngrade alternative ethical constructs as insufficiently universalist. An approach to religion that begins with a constitutive understanding of religious belief and economic, social, and political practice as outlined in Weber'sSociology of Religion, is more helpful. However, because Weber's method insufficiently addresses ethical intentionality, the 'neo-Weberian' approach I advance here incorporates the concepts of 'common good' and 'popular casuistry' into socio-historical contextualization. This approach provides a way to understand and theorize how religious adherents connect religious guidelines to moral action that avoids the essentialization of religion which is often characteristic of other perspectives.