Two big assumptions fuel current mobilization against and policy discussions about the U.S. war on terror and its implications for human rights and international cooperation. First, terrorism creates strong pressures on governments—especially democracies—to restrict human rights. Second, these restrictions are not only immoral and illegal, but also counterproductive to curbing terrorism. If these two assumptions are correct, then democracies face a vicious circle: terrorist attacks provoke a reaction that makes it harder to defeat terrorist organizations.
Does the dramatic rise of the number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) worldwide make economic sanctions more likely through increasing the leverage of the powerful and pitting states against each other in competition (power) or less likely through increasing the benefits of trade, resolving disputes, and promoting like-minded communities (plenty)? The authors offer the first systematic test of these propositions, testing hypotheses on sanctions onset using a data set of episodes from 1947 through 2000. In favor of the plenty argument, increases in bilateral trade do decrease sanctioning behavior; in favor of the power argument, an increase in the potential sanctioner's GDP or centrality in the network of all PTAs make sanctioning much more likely. However, mutual membership in PTAs has no direct effect on the propensity of states to sanction each other.
Cox & Drury broaden the democratic peace literature from the domain of militarized conflict to economic sanctions. Their analysis of economic sanctions data from 1978 through 2000 finds that democracies are more likely to enact sanctions but are less likely to do so against other democracies. In this article, their analysis is extended in three different ways: first, their methodology and sample size are improved; second, interactions between variables are examined; and, third, additional hypotheses are tested. This article finds that the substantive effects of joint democracy on the likelihood of sanctions disappear after accounting for the disproportionate role of the United States (and correcting for method); the United States has a significantly different pattern of implementing sanctions than other states; and the trade dependence of a potential sender plays a significant role in determining the likelihood of sanctions.
A growing number of international relations scholars argue that intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) promote peace. Existing approach esemphasize IGO membership as an important causal attribute of individual states, much like economic development and regime type. The authors use social network analysis to show that IGO memberships also create a disparate distribution of social power, significantly shaping conflicts between states. Membership partitions states into structurally equivalent clusters and establishes hierarchies of prestige in the international system. These relative positions promote common beliefs and alter the distribution of social power, making certain policy strategies more practical or rational. The authors introduce new IGO relational data and explore the empirical merits of their approach during the period from 1885 to 1992. They demonstrate that conflict is increased by the presence of many other states in structurally equivalent clusters, while large prestige disparities and in-group favoritism decrease it.
A growing number of developed country governments link good governance, including human rights, to developing countries' access to aid, trade, and investment. We consider whether governments enforce these conditions sincerely, in response to rights violations, or whether such conditions might instead be used as a veil for protectionist policies, motivated by domestic concerns about import competition. We do so via an examination of the world's most important unilateral trade preference program, the US Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), which includes worker rights as one criterion for program access. We argue that the two-tiered structure of the GSP privileges some domestic interests at one level, while disadvantaging them at the other. Using a new data set on all US GSP beneficiary countries and sanctioning measures from 1986 to 2013, we demonstrate that labor rights outcomes play a role in the maintenance of country-level trade benefits and that import competition does not condition the application of rights-based criteria at this level. At the same, however, the US government does not consider worker rights in the elements (at the country-product level) of the program that have the greatest material impact. The result is a situation in which the US government talks somewhat sincerely at the country level in its rights-based conditionality, but its behavior at the country-product level cheapens this talk.
The discipline of political science has developed an active research program on the development, operation, spread, and impact of international legal norms, agreements, and institutions. Meanwhile, a growing number of public international lawyers have developed an interest in political science research and methods. For more than two decades, scholars have been calling for international lawyers and political scientists to collaborate, and have suggested possible frameworks for doing so. Some prominent collaborations are under way—sharing research methods and insights.
International relations research has regarded networks as a particular mode of organization, distinguished from markets or state hierarchies. In contrast, network analysis permits the investigation and measurement of network structures—emergent properties of persistent patterns of relations among agents that can define, enable, and constrain those agents. Network analysis offers both a toolkit for identifying and measuring the structural properties of networks and a set of theories, typically drawn from contexts outside international relations, that relate structures to outcomes. Network analysis challenges conventional views of power in international relations by defining network power in three different ways: access, brokerage, and exit options. Two issues are particularly important to international relations: the ability of actors to increase their power by enhancing and exploiting their network positions, and the fungibility of network power. The value of network analysis in international relations has been demonstrated in precise description of international networks, investigation of network effects on key international outcomes, testing of existing network theory in the context of international relations, and development of new sources of data. Partial or faulty incorporation of network analysis, however, risks trivial conclusions, unproven assertions, and measures without meaning. A three-part agenda is proposed for future application of network analysis to international relations: import the toolkit to deepen research on international networks; test existing network theories in the domain of international relations; and test international relations theories using the tools of network analysis.
This special issue seeks to move forward the development of an empirical research agenda that takes seriously the complexity of how international organizations (IOs) function and the need to study that complexity at all levels of analysis by using robust research tools. We advocate for a broad empirical research approach that molds and sharpens theories about IOs by conducting systematic tests in large-sample environments. Two themes create a common thread throughout this issue. First, shifting the focus from whether IOs matter to how they work requires acknowledgment of the contingency of cause and effect. A second common thread lies in the authors' treatment of IO membership as an aggregate phenomenon—that is, as a set of institutions and relationships evolving over time and with many members rather than as a single organization.
