Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgements -- Preface -- One. Introduction -- PART ONE: THE ECONOMICS OF FREE TRADE -- Two. Free Trade and the Promise of Prosperity -- Three. The Dangers of Market Fundamentalism -- Four. Learning and the Risks of Specialization -- Five. The Dangers of Protestor Mentality -- Six. Free Trade and the Rise of Inequality -- PART TWO: THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF FREE TRADE -- Seven. Trade Rules, the New Weapons of Corporate Warfare -- Eight. Morality, Genetically Modified Food, and Free Trade -- Nine. Free Trade and the Brain Drain -- Ten. Free Trade and the Arts -- Eleven. NAFTA and the Environment -- Twelve. The WTO and the Environment -- Thirteen. Conclusion -- Appendix. Summary of Recommendations -- Bibliography -- Index

ABSTRACTGender diversity is good for the study of international relations (IR) and political science. Graduate training is an opportunity for scholars to affect the demographics of their field and the gendered practices within it. This article presents a first-cut investigation of the degree to which gender bias exists in graduate IR syllabi. The author found that the gender of the instructor for graduate courses matters significantly for what type of research is taught, in two ways. First, on average, female instructors assign significantly more research by female authors than male instructors. Second, women appear to be considerably more reluctant than men about assigning their own research as required readings. Some but not all of the difference between male- and female-taught courses might be explained by differences in course composition.

Domestic political upheaval has profound consequences, both for the country in which it takes place and for international politics. It is therefore striking that there is no standard cross-national time-series dataset that focuses specifically on the concept of revolution. This article aims to address that gap by introducing a new dataset on revolutionary governments and leaders, 1945–2004. Revolutionary leaders tend to be younger, to have longer tenure in office, and to be more prone to international conflicts than non-revolutionary leaders. This new dataset facilitates quantitative analyses of a variety of questions about both the causes and consequences of revolutionary governments.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) both publish datasets on military expenditure that are widely used by scholars and military analysts. This article illustrates the limitations in the reliability and validity of these data, using a case study of contemporary Venezuela to highlight the issues. There is a debate over recent Venezuelan military expenditure under President Chávez: some argue that the expenditure has increased dramatically; others argue that it has not. The SIPRI and IISS datasets ought to be tailor-made for resolving this debate, but the estimates they provide are significantly flawed: military spending is reported to be quite low and to have declined as a percentage of GDP. New evidence presented in this article suggests that Venezuela's recent military expenditures were typically at least 20% to 70% higher than the estimates provided by SIPRI and IISS. Moreover, the military expenditures have at least kept pace with GDP growth as oil revenues increased over the period 2002–08. A key source of the discrepancy in the estimates is the way in which extra-budgetary purchases, especially of foreign arms and supplies, are treated. In some states, such as Venezuela in recent years, extra-budgetary purchases are responsible for a large portion of the expenditure, but these purchases are frequently not captured by standard data sources.

What is the relationship between oil and international conflict? In an era of increased dependence on, and greater volatility within, global markets for oil and energy, this question is central to understanding contemporary world politics. It is an empirical fact that petrostates—defined as states that have at least 10% of GDP derived from oil exports—are more prone to international conflict than non-petrostates. Indeed, in the period 1965–2001, petrostates engaged in militarized interstate disputes at roughly twice the rate of non-petrostates, on average. What explains this propensity?

International order is easy to take for granted, but it shapes our world. Governing arrangements allow us to eat food imported from other countries, live safely from nuclear war, travel to foreign cities, profit from our savings, and much else. Yet, the textbook explanation for how order changes-that the most powerful country sets up and sustains new rules of international order after winning a major war-fails to explain a lot of events. Instead of thinking of 'the' international order as a single thing, this book explains how it operates in parts, and often changes in peacetime. It sheds light on a huge range of topics, from US-China rivalry to climate change.

AbstractMany international conflicts are in some way related to energy, ever since oil became the world's preeminent strategic commodity in the early 20th century. I argue that the most important energy-related variable for international conflict is a state's net oil import position. Oil politics tends to appear in one of three ways in security studies. Some have emphasized resource wars; others have focused on the needs of oil importers; and still others on the pathologies of oil exporters. These disparate approaches, largely isolated from each other, can better be understood as relating to a single explanatory variable. Lots of other variables matter but none are as central as net oil imports. This means that to understand energy and security, a political economy framework is a necessity. For oil exporters, external petro-aggression and internal pathologies of the resource curse are the key mechanisms. For oil importers, energy consumption needs generate a plethora of mechanisms that complicate conflict dynamics. A sophisticated understanding of these mechanisms can improve our understanding of both national and global security.