Suchergebnisse

The United States is involved in a substantial reconfiguration of its overseas military bases that requires negotiating new base agreements with prospective host nations and amending old agreements with others. U.S. officials must grapple with the effects of anti-base social movements during this process. However, if history is any indication, these officials are unlikely to succeed fully. Both the United States's historical approach and much of the relevant scholarship on military bases underemphasize an important issue in the negotiation of base agreements: the domestic political contexts of host nations. Borrowing from social movements theory, this Article argues that the United States needs to take into account the structural determinants of successful anti-base mobilization in order to understand fully its bargaining position and to produce effective base agreements. The Article uses comparative case studies on anti-base movements in Okinawa and the Philippines to explain that the concept of "political opportunity structure" can be used to achieve these ends.

Abstract
The compulsory study of international law is a universal component of legal education in some states but extremely uncommon or non-existent in others. This article uses global data and statistical methods to test a number of conceivable explanations for this puzzling feature of international society. In contrast to much of the empirical literature on state behaviour in relation to international law, we find that functionalist and socio-political variables carry little explanatory power and that historical variables – specifically, legal tradition and regional geography – instead account for the overwhelming majority of the global pattern. We explore potential explanations for these findings and discuss implications for scholars, legal educators and policy-makers.