Recent developments in U.S.-Soviet relations have prompted reassessments of the effects that nuclear weapons may have had on world politics. If there has been a “nuclear revolution,” both the meaning of that term and its precise implications for the behavior of states remain unclear. This article agrees with the realist argument that the discovery of nuclear weapons did not by itself fundamentally change the structure of the international system. However, it argues that the subsequent condition of nuclear deterrence, resulting from the widespread deployment of nuclear weapons and sophisticated delivery systems during the 1960s, does constitute a source of structural change. Under nuclear deterrence, the superpowers have acquired a new function—“joint custodianship” of the system—which differentiates their role from that of other states. This suggests that the international system has a new organizing principle that varies from the standard realist conception of anarchy. Structural change led to the rise of detente in the 1970s; but because the processes by which leaders in Washington and Moscow adjusted to structural change were not always parallel, this detente was limited in scope and could not be sustained. As processes of adjustment begin to converge, the modified structural approach proposed in this article predicts that superpower cooperation in a new detente of the 1990s will go beyond what was achieved in the 1970s and also beyond what would be consistent with standard realist arguments.

The constituent influences on congressional voting patterns for trade policy have long been an important field of study. A central theoretical component (explicitly or implicitly) of all these studies is the level of factor mobility that defines which constituent coalitions will form and how they will be affected. Yet the recent literature offers contradictory evidence on the current level of factor mobility. Using an original data set of economic demographics of House districts and the roll call votes of U.S. House members on trade policies from 1963 to 1992, I argue that factor mobility was relatively low in the 1960s and 1970s but was rising. The relative level of factor mobility, then, reached a pivot point in the late 1970s and was subsequently relatively high in the 1980s and 1990s. I check the robustness of these results on the expected strength of the political parties in supplying these policies and the effects of divided government.I would like to thank Oksan Bayulgen, Sam Best, Mark Boyer, Stephen Bronars, Walter Dean Burnham, Virginia Hettinger, Alan Kessler, Peter Kingstone, Tse-Min Lin, Robert Moser, Phil Paolino, Dennis Plane, Howard Reiter, Brian Roberts, Ken Scheve, Lyle Scruggs, Mathieu Turgeon, the editor of IO, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. Any errors that remain are, of course, my own.

This article argues that specific characteristics of the domestic legal institutions of Islamic law states shape these states' choices of peaceful resolution methods in territorial disputes. After providing original data on the characteristics of Islamic legal structures, I systematically compare pertinent rules of international dispute resolution methods and Islamic law. I demonstrate empirically that not all Islamic law states view international settlement venues in the same way. Secular legal features, such as constitutional mentions of education, supreme court, or peaceful settlement of disputes have the power to attract these states to the most formal international venues—arbitration and adjudication. On the other hand, Islamic law states whose legal system is infused with Islamic religious precepts are attracted to less-formalized venues.

As common markets, free trade associations, and limited-purpose regional arrangements continue to proliferate in many corners of the globe, the basic question of the relevance of these efforts to the process of building political communities also continues to be posed for theorist and practitioner alike. One approach for linking these two phenomena is the intensive and comparative study of common markets and free trade associations in terms of their capacity to transform member states into a political union. In principle, at least, the careful and comparative study of key variables in the process of achieving and perfecting economic unity at the regional level could yield propositions which might have predictive value for assessing the chances of success of various discrete efforts at regional unification. In methodological terms such an approach would combine case studies with the use of aggregate data.

What drives leaders’ decisions about whether to continue or end an ongoing war? The private information explanation for war holds that leaders fight because they believe that doing so will advance national interests, and they settle hostilities when new information reduces their optimism about the possibility of long-term success. Yet significant theoretical disagreement exists about both the extent to which and the manner in which new information, especially battlefield information, promotes settlement. This article unpacks the logic of the informational mechanism, arguing that settlement will be more likely when there has been more extensive fighting and that countries are more likely to make concessions to end wars when battlefield results have deteriorated; short-term spikes in war intensity by contrast do not promote settlement. Moreover, building on work on leadership turnover and settlement, I show that leader replacement is sometimes part of the information-updating process, especially in autocracies: new leaders without political ties to the person in power at the start of the war are more likely both to come to power when war is going poorly and to end wars once in office. Tests of these arguments make use of new participant-level data on the timing of battle deaths for all Correlates of War interstate wars, which allows me to examine the effects of changing battlefield developments across a wide range of cases in a manner that was previously impossible.

The idea of liberal international order as a world order is understood to be constituted as a result of disproportionate Anglo-American influences. This is in line with much of international relations (IR) theory, which typically characterizes the emergence of order as resulting from the diffusion or imposition of norms and institutions from the world's centers of power. This article argues otherwise, its premise being that the international order founded on sovereign equal nation-states was co-constituted as well by the influence of relatively weak actors through decentralized processes of contestation over core international norms. Drawing on international relations, history, and law, this article outlines a framework to interpret the actions and mechanisms by which supposedly weak actors shaped international order. It concisely traces the constitution of order as based on its fundamental norms and assesses the implications of the argument for the current crisis of liberal order, as well as IR theory more broadly, laying out a research agenda for the future.

Contrary to the general trend of trade liberalization, specific goods—such as small arms, drugs, and antiquities—have come under increasing international control in recent decades through a set of international regulatory agreements. This article offers a theoretical framework of government preferences on the international regulation of these goods. Departing from conventional models of trade policy, the theoretical framework introduces negative externalities, rather than protection, as the motivation for restricting trade; it also takes moral concerns into account. I test this framework empirically through an original survey of government views on international small-arms regulation. Based on interviewing officials from 118 countries, the survey reveals a large variation in government preferences that conforms to the theoretical expectations. I employ this variation to explain why the international regulation of small arms is weak, despite the fact that these are the deadliest weapons of all in terms of actual death toll.

During the twentieth century states negotiated and ratified formal treaties on the treatment of prisoners of war (POWs). These treaties have created a system for the treatment of POWs with universal and detailed standards and decentralized enforcement. I explain the form of the POW system as a rational institutional response to four strategic problems the issue of POWs poses: monitoring under noise, individual as opposed to state violations, variation in preferred treatment of POWs, and raising a mass army. In response to these four problems, neutral parties help address the problem of monitoring the standards. The ratification process screens out some states that do not intend to live up to the standards. The two-level problem of state and individual violations is addressed by making states responsible for punishing the actions of their own soldiers. By protecting POWs, the treaties help states raise armies during wartime. The POW case supports many, but not all, of the Rational Design conjectures. In particular, it suggests other strategic logics to explain variation in the membership and centralization of international institutions.

National security is one of many fields where experts make vague probability assessments when evaluating high-stakes decisions. This practice has always been controversial, and it is often justified on the grounds that making probability assessments too precise could bias analysts or decision makers. Yet these claims have rarely been submitted to rigorous testing. In this paper, we specify behavioral concerns about probabilistic precision into falsifiable hypotheses which we evaluate through survey experiments involving national security professionals. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that decision makers responding to quantitative probability assessments are less willing to support risky actions and more receptive to gathering additional information. Yet we also find that when respondents estimate probabilities themselves, quantification magnifies overconfidence, particularly among low-performing assessors. These results hone wide-ranging concerns about probabilistic precision into a specific and previously undocumented bias that training may be able to correct.

Research on mass opinion in international political economy overwhelmingly relies on survey data. This poses problems of external validity, especially for a frequently low-salience issue such as trade policy. To examine whether survey findings about attitudes toward economic openness apply outside of surveys, this note considers patterns of voting in the 2007 Costa Rican plebiscite about joining the Central American Free Trade Area. Several extant theories appear to explain voting patterns, but the results are less in line with traditional economic models based on locally important economic sectors.

When and where do states coercively alter their internal demography? We build a theory that predicts under what conditions states alter the demographic “facts on the ground” by resettling and expelling ethno-national populations. We predict that, under particular scope conditions, states will employ demographic engineering to shore up control over (1) nonnatural frontiers, and (2) areas populated by ethnic minorities who are co-ethnics with elites in a hostile power. We then substantiate our predictions using new subnational data from both China and the USSR. Causally identifying the spatially differential effect of international conflict on demographic engineering via a difference-in-differences design, we find that the Sino-Soviet split (1959–1982) led to a disproportionate increase in the expulsion of ethnic Russians and resettlement of ethnic Han in Chinese border areas lacking a natural border with the USSR, and that resettlement was targeted at areas populated by ethnic Russians. On the Soviet side, we similarly find that the Sino-Soviet split led to a significant increase in expulsion of Chinese and the resettlement of Russians in border areas, and that resettlement was targeted at areas populated by more Chinese. We develop the nascent field of political demography by advancing our theoretical and empirical understanding of when, where, and to whom states seek to effect demographic change. By demonstrating that both ethnic group concentration and dispersion across borders are endogenous to international conflict, our results complicate a large and influential literature linking ethnic demography to conflict.

In recent years, the volume and intensity of attacks on globalization have been steadily rising. It is frequently argued that the antiglobalization backlash stems from strains that have been placed on the compromise of embedded liberalism. We argue that existing research underemphasizes how technological change and the digital revolution have contributed to these strains. Global value chains facilitated by the digital revolution have linked technology in advanced industrial countries to low-cost labor in developing countries, precipitating distributional losses for low-skilled labor in the industrial world. Further, the digital revolution has led to regulatory challenges involving both capital and labor. We argue that, as a result, governments face both mounting opposition to globalization and heightened difficulty in supporting the programs and policies necessary to buffer the adverse domestic effects of globalization and maintain support for embedded liberalism.

Why are ethnic movements more likely to turn violent in some multiethnic countries than in others? Focusing on the long-term legacies of European overseas colonialism, I investigate the effect of distinct ethnic cleavage types on the consequences of ethnic group mobilization. The colonial settler states and other stratified multiethnic states are characterized by an equilibrium of inequality in which historically marginalized groups lack both the organizational strength and the opportunities for armed rebellion. In contrast, ethnic mobilization in the decolonized states and other segmented multiethnic societies is more likely to trigger violent conflict. I test these arguments in a global quantitative study from 1946 to 2009, using new data on the linguistic and religious segmentation of ethnic groups. The results confirm that the extremely unequal colonial settler states experience less violence than the decolonized states and other multiethnic countries. Ethnic conflict is generally more likely the more segmented and less hierarchically structured multiethnic states are. Specifically, stable between-group hierarchies reduce the risk of governmental conflict, whereas segmentation affects secessionist violence.

Economic policies in Britain after World War II, both domestic and international, were dominated by foreign policy goals. This provides the primary explanation for Britain's poor economic performance in the postwar years. Commitments made in the late 1940s and 1950s, particularly with regard to Britain's international position and responsibilities, and domestic economic policies devised to support these commitments, locked Britain into a low-growth situation. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the widespread consensus supporting these commitments began to disintegrate and efforts were made to develop new policies directed toward stimulating domestic economic growth. These efforts were unsuccessful–largely because of the unwillingness of government leaders to shift national priorities away from traditional international commitments. This failure made it impossible for the British economy to meet the rising expectations of the British population and contributed, after 1967, to a widespread increase in social conflict. Compared to other advanced industrial nations, Britain's economic performance since 1945 has been poor. Britain's poor economic performance is due, however, not to the weakness of British governments or to their inability to resist demands made by interests groups, but rather to a series of policy choices, especially in the international area, that were inappropriate for Britain's resources but to which successive governments adhered with remarkable stubbornness and rigidity.

This article highlights the dynamic interaction between Chinese, Thai, and Sino-Thai identity construction, on the one hand, and the mutual production of domestic and international politics, on the other. It questions how nationalism and cosmopolitanism are formulated by arguing against the popular notion that a diaspora is a cosmopolitan community situated in a foreign nation. Diasporic public spheres are critically examined to show how Sino-Thai identity is produced in relation first to neo-nationalism in Thailand and China, and second in specific contexts within Thailand that call into question essential notions of Thai, Chinese, and overseas Chinese identity. Diasporas thus both construct and deconstruct the seemingly opposing forces of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. The article uses the ethnographic approach of anthropological constructivism to build on sociological constructivism's focus on national identity, norms, and formal institutions. Rather than looking to culture as a substance, the article highlights how culture takes shape in context-sensitive relations between identity and difference. This ethnographic approach encourages one to look in different places for world politics, shifting away from state actors to transnational nonstate actors, from geopolitics and international political economy to economic culture, and from law and institutions as the foundations of international society to the less formal organizations of the diasporic public sphere. Diaspora thus not only adds new data to arguments about global/local relations—it helps one question the structures of world politics that look to the opposition between cosmopolitanism and nationalism.

Specialists in the field of international organization have noted with some alarm a decline of interest among students and foundations in the study of the United Nations system. There has been a shift toward the study of regionalism and the theory of integration. The former shift reflects one reality of postwar world politics—the division of a huge and heterogeneous international system into subsystems in which patterns of cooperation and ways of controlling conflicts are either more intense or less elusive than in the global system. The interest in integration reflects both the persistence and the transformation of the kind of idealism that originally pervaded, guided, and at times distorted the study of international organization. We have come to understand that integration, in the sense of a process that devalues sovereignty, gradually brings about the demise of the nation-state, and leads to the emergence of new foci of loyalty and authority, is only one, and by no means the most important, of the many functions performed by global international organizations. This has led only in part to a more sober and searching assessment of these functions. It has resulted primarily in a displacement of interest toward those geographically more restricted institutions (like the European Communities) whose main task seems to be to promote integration.

The economic theory of international trade has changed dramatically over the last decade by admitting into its mainstream a body of literature that focuses on the implications of monopolistic and oligopolistic elements in international markets. By applying the tools of the “new” industrial organization in an international context, two new classes of models have emerged: models of intra-industry trade and models of strategic trade policy. The policy implications of models of strategic trade policy were quite disturbing for the economics profession, since these models demonstrated that the classical harmony between national and cosmopolitan welfare maximization does not exist if one assumes opportunities for strategic manipulation of oligopolistic international industries. This article reviews two prominent models of strategic trade policy—the Brander-Spencer model and the Krugman model—and relates them to more familiar earlier concepts, such as Stackelberg's asymmetrical duopoly solution and the venerable infant-industry argument for government intervention. The primary purpose of this article, however, is to provide a synopsis of the large literature addressing the question of whether models of strategic trade policy can give guidance for government policy.