After laying out a typology of international regimes, eight international and regional human rights regimes are analyzed in order to (1) examine the utility of regime analysis in noneconomic issue-areas, and (2) assess the nature, extent, and evolution of international cooperation on human rights. There has been a remarkable growth of international action since 1945, when human rights were not even widely accepted as a legitimate issue-area. This growth can be explained largely by expanding perceptions of moral interdependence and community, increased national commitment, the growing ideological appeal of human rights, and changes in the distributions of international power. These same factors, however, suggest only limited future growth. On a broader theoretical plane, the case of human rights suggests a significant, if limited and principally heuristic, utility for regime analysis, especially to the extent that international relations is becoming increasingly concerned with specific issues.

Many of the current theoretical debates in international relations focus on the connection between economics and security policies. Most traditional North American textbooks have considered the two policy areas as separate domains. Some scholars view the major economic trends and events of the 1970s as intertwined, whereas others argue that “state” interests properly should prevail when the two sets of values conflict. The traditional liberal, mercantilist, and neo-Marxist literatures shed some light on the nexus between politics and economics in foreign policy, but they offer very general statements that reflect only the conditions of the major powers. Two case studies of Japan and Finland in the postwar period suggest that generalizations must be applied cautiously, that some states are compelled to follow mercantilist policies to protect their political independence and autonomy, and that policies of welfare maximization often have to be subordinated to security concerns. The cases also reveal that the connection between economic and security concerns changes over time. A dynamic model of foreign policy will thus have to be sensitive both to the peculiar circumstances of a variety of states and to the sources of foreign-policy change.

Brazil's domestic computer industry, developed during the past decade, has excluded multinational giants such as IBM from Brazil's growing micro- and minicomputer markets. Changes in computer technology and in markets, as well as in domestic economic and political conditions, helped facilitate Brazil's progress toward technological independence. But primary support for the project came from technocratic and military elites who were determined for ideological reasons to reduce Brazil's computer dependency and to challenge the dominance of multinationals. Ideologically motivated technocrats used their positions in state bureaucracies to convince policy makers of the industry's viability and to set up institutions that would defend the autonomy model and turn a sectoral policy into a national policy. Brazil still depends on foreign software and microelectronics; however, bargaining theory correctly asserts that even dependency in sophisticated technological sectors can be partially overcome. Bargaining theories must not overlook the importance of cognitive and institutional processes, which can make the difference between taking action to reduce dependency or doing nothing.

In a recent article, Stephanie Neuman examines several critical factors that separate developing countries into arms producers and arms nonproducers. She ranks countries according to a weighted index of military production capability (derived from length of production, production capacity, and technical capabilities) and also according to the following seven socioeconomic indicators: population, land size, size of military, gross national product (GNP), GNP per capita, number of professional and technical workers, and number of industrial workers. She computes correlation coefficients (Kendall's tau) by region (Latin America, South Asia, and the Far East) and for twenty-six arms producers worldwide.