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James Vreeland's book offers a clear and concise introduction to the International Monetary Fund, together with an overview of its debates and controversies.

As the world turns against international institutions, this article reviews evidence of the corrupting of global organizations. The review focuses on three international organizations that emerged from World War II: the Bretton Woods institutions [the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank] and the United Nations (UN). The article explores evidence of major shareholders (mainly the United States) using the Bretton Woods institutions to funnel money and other favors to strategically preferred countries. Then the review discusses vote buying across a range of issues debated at the UN and finally turns to dark scholarship on the use of UN human rights institutions by autocratic states as a veil to violate those very rights. The article concludes that government pursuit of strategic objectives may be a necessary part of global cooperation, but scholarship should continue to delve into the micro foundations underlying the macro evidence presented here to better inform reformers on how to limit corrupting influences.

Research published in the American Political Science Review shows that anocracies—as defined by the middle of the Polity index of political regime—are more susceptible to civil war than are either pure democracies or pure dictatorships. Yet, certain components of the Polity index include a factional category, where political competition is ``intense, hostile, and frequently violent. Extreme factionalism may be manifested in the establishment of rival governments and in civil war'' (Gurr 1989, 12). Not surprisingly, these components exhibit a strong relationship with civil war. When they are removed from the Polity index, however, the original relationship disappears. I conclude that the original finding is not driven by the relationship between political institutions and civil war but rather by a less provocative relationship between political violence and civil war.

Why do governments and the International Monetary Fund (imf) enter into agreements? Conventional wisdom holds that governments turn to the Fund for a straightforward reason: they need an imf loan. An alternative argument is that governments want imf conditions to be imposed to help push through unpopular economic reforms. To illustrate how the desire for imf conditions can play a role in the decision to enter into an agreement, this article considers two analytically significant cases. Drawing upon a data set of 7011 country-year observations of 199 countries from 1952 (or year of independence) to 2000, two outliers are selected: the country observed with the least need for an imf loan participating in an imf program (Uruguay in 1990) and the country with the strongest need for an imf loan not participating in an imf program (Tanzania in 1983).