In an effort to contribute to the dialogue between gender studies and international studies, this report presents findings from an empirical investigation based on the integrated secondary analysis of survey data from Israel, Egypt, Palestine, and Kuwait. The goal is to assess the utility of both gender and attitudes pertaining to the circumstances of women in accounting for variance in views about war and peace, and thereafter to examine the degree to which political system attributes constitute conditionalities associated with important variable relationships. Major findings include the absence of gender-linked differences in attitudes toward international conflict in all four of the societies studied and a significant relationship in each of these societies between attitudes toward gender equality and attitudes toward international conflict. Based on data from the Arab world and Israel, with attitudes about a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict treated as the dependent variable, the research also aspires to shed light on more practical considerations pertaining to the international relations of the Middle East.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, highlight the general absence of attention to religion in international scholarship. The absence is understandable, for it arises from the secularized nature of the authority structure of the international system, described here as the “Westphalian synthesis.” Over the past generation, though, the global rise of public religion has challenged several planks of the synthesis. The sharpest challenge is “radical Islamic revivalism,” a political theology that has its roots in the early twentieth century and that gave rise to al-Qaeda. If international relations scholars are to understand the events of September 11, they ought to devote more attention to the way in which radical Islamic revivalism and public religion shape international relations, sometimes in dramatic ways.

Although many features of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) are consistent from one agreement to the next, a closer look reveals that the treaties exhibit considerable variation in terms of their enforcement provisions, which legal scholars have singled out as the central component of the treaties. An original data set is compiled that captures three important treaty-design differences: whether the parties consent in advance to international arbitration, whether they allow treaty obligations to be enforced before an institutionalized arbitration body, and how many arbitration options are specified for enforcement. Drawing upon several relevant literatures on international institutions, three potentially generalizable explanations for this important treaty variation are articulated and tested. The strongest support is found for the theoretical perspective that emphasizes the bargaining power and preferences of capital-exporting states, which use the treaties to codify strong, credible investor protections in all their treaties. Empirical tests consistently reveal that treaties contain strong enforcement provisions—in which the parties preconsent to multiple, often institutionalized arbitration options—when the capital-exporting treaty partner has considerable bargaining power and contains domestic actors that prefer such arrangements, such as large multinational corporations or right-wing governments. In contrast, there is no evidence to support the popular hands-tying explanation, which predicts that investment-seeking states with the most severe credibility problems, due to poor reputations or weak domestic institutions, will bind themselves to treaties with stronger investment protections. likewise, little support is found for explanations derived from the project on the rational design of international institutions, which discounts the identities and preferences of the treaty partners and instead emphasizes the structural conditions they jointly face. In sum, this foundational study of differences across investment treaties suggests that the design of treaties is driven by powerful states, which include elements in the treaties that serve their interests, regardless of the treaty partner or the current strategic setting.

Five years after the downfall of Ferdinand E. Marcos, scholars of Philippine politics have yet to achieve even minimal consensus on the proper characterization of his authoritarian regime. More importantly, scholarship has failed to account for fundamental continuity, across regimes, in the way in which dominant economic interests interact with the Philippine state. The author argues that a focus on patrimonial aspects of the Philippine state will not only bring a greater sense of coherence to many disparate aspects of Marcos's rule, but will also lead to clearer understanding of enduring characteristics of the Philippine political economy. Throughout the postwar years, political administration is often treated as a personal affair, and the assignment of privileges granted by the state is largely determined by the personal discretion of those oligarchs currently holding official position. The article explores factors that help to explain why there has been no effective pressure from either domestic or external forces to undermine the patrimonial features of the state, and suggests that future research should analyze why patrimonial features have persisted in the Philippines despite enormous change, yet elsewhere seem to have subsided in the face of change.

Does “soft power” matter in international relations? Specifically, when the United States seeks cooperation from countries around the world, do the views of their publics about US foreign policy affect the actual foreign policy behavior of these countries? The authors examine this question using multinational surveys covering fifty-eight countries, combined with information about their foreign policy decisions in 2003, a critical year for the US. They draw their basic conceptual framework from Joseph Nye, who uses various indicators of opinion about the US to assess US soft power. But the authors argue that his theory lacks the specificity needed for falsifiable testing. They refine it by focusing on foreign public opinion about US foreign policy, an underemphasized element of Nye's approach. Their regression analysis shows that foreign public opinion has a significant and large effect on troop commitments to the war in Iraq, even after controlling for various hard power factors. It also has significant, albeit small, effects on policies toward the International Criminal Court and on voting decisions in the UN General Assembly. These results support the authors' refined theoretical argument about soft power: public opinion about US foreign policy in foreign countries does affect their policies toward the US, but this effect is conditional on the salience of an issue for mass publics.

This article argues that clans, informal organizations based on kin and fictive kin ties, are political actors that have a profound impact on the nature of posttransitional regimes and the potential for regime durability. The article first develops the concept of “clan” conceptually. It then develops several propositions about clan politics and explores them empirically in the context of the post-Soviet Central Asian cases. These cases suggest the limits of the prevailing transitions and institutionalist approaches; these theories cannot explain regime transition in the Central Asian cases because they focus on the formal level and ignore the crucial informal actors—clans—and the informal politics that shape these cases. The distinct mode of transition, new regime institutions, and leadership and elite ideologies evident at the formal level have a very short-term effect; withinfiveyears, these cases converge toward a pattern of informal, clan-based politics. By contrast, this article draws upon the insights of the early literature on political development as well as the state-society literature to develop an alternative framework for explaining the dynamic between clans and the regime. Clan networks and clan deals penetrate and transform the formal regime in several ways—by clan-based appointments and patronage, by stripping state assets to feed one's clan network, and by crowding out other mechanisms of representation. As they undermine formal institutions, clans create an informal regime best understood as “clan politics.”

Although we live in a world of international regimes, the scholarly literature on them remains rudimentary, especially in analytic terms. This essay examines the proposition that all international regimes are social institutions, even though there is great variation among them. Among other things, this suggests that regimes are dependent upon the maintenance of convergent expectations among actors; formalization is not a necessary condition for the effective operation of regimes; and regimes are always created rather than discovered. A conceptual framework and a research agenda for the comparative study of international regimes, as laid out in this essay, would guide studies of specific regimes and improve our ability to reach general conclusions about this fundamental, yet poorly understood, international phenomenon.

This article examines recent works that investigate how ideas acquire influence over economic policy choice. The revival of interest in the “material power of ideas” stems from discontent with the inability of rational interest-based models to explain particular policy outcomes, except by resorting to auxiliary assumptions. The works under review primarily apply “ideas approaches” as supplementary analytical devices to clarify the dynamics of policy choices. These studies succeed in illuminating the interpenetration of interests and ideas in order to plumb the problematic variability of interest formation and the degree of public influence over economic policy parameters. The bolder thesis that ideas have a force of their own (independent of all interests) is, however, misconceived and unproved.

Going beyond historical and rational choice institutionalism, this article elaborates the core of a new theory that can account for the discontinuous, disproportionate, and frequently wave like-nature of institutional change. Cognitive-psychological findings on shifts in actors' propensity for assuming risk help explain why periods of institutional stasis can be followed by dramatic breakthroughs as actors eventually respond to a growing problem load with efforts at bold transformation. And insights on boundedly rational learning explain why solutions to these problems often occur as emulation of other countries' innovations and experiences. The new approach, which elucidates both the demand and the supply side of institutional change, is illustrated through an analysis of the transformation of developmental states, welfare states, and political regimes.

The end of the cold war has generated numerous reflections on the nature of the world in its aftermath. The reduced military threat to American security has triggered proposals for expanding the concept of national security to include nonmilitary threats to national well-being. Some go further and call for a fundamental reexamination of the concepts, theories, and assumptions used to analyze security problems. In order to lay the groundwork for such a reexamination, the emergence and evolution of security studies as a subfield of international relations is surveyed, the adequacy of the field for coping with the post—cold war world is assessed, and proposals for the future of security studies are discussed. It is argued that a strong case can be made for reintegration of security studies with the study of international politics and foreign policy.

Why have European states introduced mandatory integration requirements for citizenship and permanent residence? There are many studies comparing integration policy and examining the significance of what has been interpreted as a convergent and restrictive “civic turn,” a “retreat from multiculturalism,” and an “inevitable lightening of citizenship.” None of these studies, however, has puzzled over the empirical diversity of integration policy design or presented systematic, comparative explanations for policy variation. This article is the first to develop an argument for what, in fact, amounts to a wealth of variation in civic integration policy (including scope, sequencing, and difficulty). Using a historical institutionalist approach, the author argues that states use mandatory integration to address different membership problems, which are shaped by both existing citizenship policy (whether it is inclusive or exclusive) and political pressure to change it (in other words, the politics of citizenship). She illustrates this argument by focusing on three case studies, applying the argument to a case of unchallenged restrictive retrenchment and continuity (Denmark), to a case of negotiated and thus moderated restriction (Germany), and to a case that recently exhibited both liberal continuity (the United Kingdom, 2001–6) and failed attempts at new restriction (the United Kingdom, 2006–10). These cases show that although states may converge around similar mandatory integration instruments, they may apply them for distinctly different reasons. As a result, new requirements augment rather than alter the major contours of national citizenship policy and the membership association it maintains.

The state often struggles to meet citizens’ demands but confronts strong public pressure to do so. What does the state do when public expectations exceed its actual governing capacity? This article shows that the state can respond by engaging in performative governance—the theatrical deployment of language, symbols, and gestures to foster an impression of good governance among citizens. Performative governance should be distinguished from other types of state behavior, such as inertia, paternalism, and the substantive satisfaction of citizens’ demands. The author illustrates this concept in the realm of environmental governance in China. Given the severity of China’s environmental pollution, the resulting public outcry, and the logistical and political challenges involved in solving the problem, how can the state redeem itself? Ethnographic evidence from participant observation at a municipal environmental protection bureau reveals that when bureaucrats are confronted with the dual burdens of low state capacity and high public scrutiny, they engage in performative governance to assuage citizens’ complaints. This study draws attention to the double meaning of “performance” in political contexts, and the essential distinction between the substantive and the theatrical.

The concrete lessons of recent history have helped us to appreciate the paramount importance of the political preconditions of social and economic development in the new states. The basic problem of political stability must be solved before all others—or everything else may be in vain. For this reason, some of the scholarly attention that used to be focused on social and economic development has shifted to political organization and has given prominence to terms such as “nation-building,” “political culture,” and “democratization.”

Perhaps the most striking feature of the postcommunist transformation is the tremendous variation in rates of economic growth across countries. To account for these differences, this article develops an alternative to the J-curve and partial reform views that currently dominate discussions of the politics of economic reform. This approach treats economic performance as a political struggle between excommunist and anticommunist factions engaged in a war of attrition over economic and political resources. Using a pooled time-series analysis of economic growth across twenty-five postcommunist countries for the period 1990–98, it finds that political polarization between ex-communist and anticommunist factions has had a devastating effect on economic growth. Where these competing factions have had roughly equal power and have struggled over the economic rules of the game—as in Bulgaria or Ukraine—economic growth has been slow. In contrast, where either excommunist or anticommunist factions have dominated the political scene—as in Estonia or Uzbekistan—economic performance has been much better. In addition, economic growth has followed the electoral calendar in polarized countries. As elections approach and the odds of a change in economic policy increase, growth rates have plummeted in polarized countries. These findings have implications for studies of the postcommunist transformation, the political business cycle, and the politics of economic reform more generally.

This article reviews some recently published volumes on the subject of Third World security and, in the light of the analyses presented in these books, attempts to discuss a series of major issues in the field of Third World security studies. These include (1) the applicability of the concept of security as traditionally defined in the Western literature on international relations to Third World contexts; (2) the domestic variables affecting the security of Third World states; (3) the impact of international systemic factors on Third World security; (4) the effect of late-twentieth-century weapons technology on the security of Third World states; and (5) the relationship between the security and developmental concerns of Third World states. The author concludes that while international and technological factors have important effects on the security of Third World states, the major variables determining the degree of security enjoyed by such states at both the intrastate and interstate levels are related to the twin processes of state making and nation building that are at work simultaneously within Third World polities.

The current burst of work on regimes or, more broadly, on international institutions, reflects an emerging sense—especially among Americans—that the international order engineered by the United States and its allies in the aftermath of World War II is eroding rapidly and may even be on the verge of collapse. But is the resultant surge of scholarly work on international regimes any more likely to yield lasting contributions to knowledge than have other recent fashions in the field of international relations? The jury will remain out until a sustained effort is made to evaluate the significance of regimes or institutions more broadly, as determinants of collective behavior at the international level.

There is no consensus among scholars on how to test hypotheses about deterrence systematically. The disputes are sometimes rooted in differences about theory or sources of data, but they are magnified by methodological confusion, especially over concepts and operational definitions that produce perverse empirical results. Serious theoretical errors include inadequate appreciation of the role of uncertainty in deterrence as well as selection biases that undermine empirical tests. Rigorous examination of our previous work in light of recent criticism discloses very robust findings on the conditions for deterrence success and failure.

Analyses of economic growth have drawn on the experiences of the East Asian newly industrializing countries to highlight the contribution of cohesive and autonomous states in the resolution of market failures. Within an explicit collective action and public goods framework, this article argues for an institutionalist approach to development that incorporates, but also goes beyond, statism. Through an examination of auto manufacturing in five countries in Southeast and Northeast Asia, the article identifies specific collective action problems central to the development process, and it explores limits to the capacities of even strong states to resolve such problems. The article stresses the role of private sectors and joint publicprivate sector institutions, identifies systematic differences within and among local entrepreneurs with regard to development issues, emphasizes the need for research on factors influencing the supply of institutions; and argues for an approach to development that emphasizes cooperation among domestic interests rather than domination.

The United States emerged from the 1990s as an unrivaled global power to become a “unipolar” state. This extraordinary imbalance has triggered global debate. Governments and peoples around the world are struggling to understand to how an American-centered unipolar system operates—and to respond to it. What is the character of domination in a unipolar distribution? To what extent can a unipolar state translate its formidable capabilities into meaningful influence? Will a unipolar world be built around rules and institutions or be based more on the unilateral exercise of unipolar power? Scholars too are asking these basic questions about unipolarity and international relations theory. The individual contributions develop hypotheses and explore the impact of unipolarity on the behavior of the dominant state, on the reactions of other states, and on the properties of the international system. Collectively, they find that unipolarity does have a profound impact on international politics. international relations under conditions of unipolarity force a rethinking of conventional and received understandings about the operation of the balance of power, the meaning of alliance partnerships, the logic of international economic cooperation, the relationship between power and legitimacy, and the behavior of satisfied and revisionist states.