In 1989, peaceful change, which a leading realist theorist had declared a very low-probability event in international politics less than a decade before, accommodated the most fundamental geopolitical shift of the postwar era and perhaps of the entire twentieth century: the collapse of the Soviet East European empire and the attendant end of the cold war. Many factors were responsible for that shift. But there seems little doubt that multilateral norms and institutions have helped stabilize their international consequences. Indeed, such norms and institutions appear to be playing a significant role in the management of a broad array of regional and global changes in the world system today.

Democracy does not evolve sui generis. The spatial clustering in democracy and transitions suggests that international factors play a prominent role in forging democracies as well as influencing their durability. We argue that democracy often comes about as a result of changes in the relative power of important actors and groups as well as their evaluations of particular institutions, both of which are often influenced by forces outside the country in question. The scope and extent of connections with other democratic countries in a region can strengthen support for democratic reform and help sustain institutions in transitional democracies. Results from a transition model demonstrate that international factors can exert a strong influence on the prospects for transitions to democracy, and the spatial clustering in democracy and transitions cannot adequately be explained by the hypothesized domestic social requisites of individual countries.We are grateful for comments from Brian A'Hearn, Kyle Beardsley, Nathaniel Beck, Scott Gates, Håvard Hegre, David Lektzian, Jon Pevehouse, Dan Reiter, Kenneth Schultz, Heather Smith, Håvard Strand, and Kaare Strøm, the editors, and two anonymous reviewers, as well as the participants at the Conference on the International Diffusion of Democracy and Markets, University of California, Los Angeles, March 2003, and the Conference on the International Diffusion of Political and Economic Liberalization at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., October 2003.

Hegemonic stability theory has been advanced as an explanation of successful cooperation in the international system. The basis of this “hegemonic cooperation” is the leadership of the hegemonic state; its appeal rests on attractive implications about distribution. However, two distinct strands of the theory (“coercive” and “benevolent”) must be distinguished. These strands have different conceptions of hegemony and the role of hegemonic leaders and so have different implications. Both require us to assume that the underlying international issues are public goods and that the international system does not allow for collective action. The former assumption limits the theory's range of application while the likely failure of the latter means that the theory may be wrong even within this more limited range. Simple formal models demonstrate a conclusion completely at odds with hegemonic stability theory: the decline of a hegemonic power may actually lead to an outcome both collectively superior and distributively preferable than when the hegemon was at the apogee of its power. Thus hegemonic stability is, in fact, only a special case of international cooperation. Understanding cooperation in general requires less restrictive assumptions.

Europeans evaluate the European Community (EC) according to its economic performance, political salience, and role in international relations. During the last two decades their measured attitudes toward European integration warmed especially when inflation rates fell, as the EC share of the country's trade expanded, when EC elections and referenda increased attention to the community, and to some extend during periods when East-West relations were relaxed. Europeans did not vary their support according to their countries' shares of the Brussels budget. Thus, notwithstanding Denmark's 1992 rejection of the Maastricht treaty and the end of the cold war, recent EC reforms that increase monetary stability, intra-European trade and political attention are all likely to maintain or increase citizen support for the EC. These findings result from a model that blends comparative political economy with international relations in one of the first applications of pooled cross-sectional and time-series analysis to the comparative study of public opinion.

The international relations (IR) discipline is dominated by the American research community. Data about publication patterns in leading journals document this situation as well as a variance in theoretical orientations. IR is conducted differently in different places. The main patterns are explained through a sociology of science model that emphasizes the different nineteenth-century histories of the state, the early format of social science, and the institutionalized delineation among the different social sciences. The internal social and intellectual structure of American IR is two-tiered, with relatively independent subfields and a top layer defined by access to the leading journals (on which IR, in contrast to some social sciences, has a high consensus). The famous successive “great debates” serve an important function by letting lead theorists focus and structure the whole discipline. IR in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom has historically been structured differently, often with power vested more locally. American IR now moves in a direction that undermines its global hegemony. The widespread turn to rational choice privileges a reintegration (and status-wise rehabilitation) with the rest of political science over attention to IR practices elsewhere. This rationalistic turn is alien to Europeans, both because their IR is generally closer to sociology, philosophy, and anthropology, and because the liberal ontological premises of rational choice are less fitting to European societies. Simultaneously, European IR is beginning to break the local power bastions and establish independent research communities at a national or, increasingly, a European level. As American IR turns from global hegemony to national professionalization, IR becomes more pluralistic.

What makes international threats credible? Recent theories point to domestic audience costs—the domestic price a leader would pay for making foreign threats and then backing down. This article provides the first direct evidence of audience costs. The analysis, based on experiments embedded in public opinion surveys, shows that audience costs exist across a wide range of conditions and increase with the level of escalation. The costs are evident throughout the population, and especially among politically active citizens who have the greatest potential to shape government policy. Finally, preliminary evidence suggests that audience costs arise because citizens care about the international reputation of the country or leader. These findings help identify how, and under what conditions, domestic audiences make commitments credible. At the same time, they demonstrate the promise of using experiments to answer previously intractable questions in the field of international relations.I thank Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS), the National Science Foundation (CAREER Grant SES-0548285), and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for financial support. Colleagues at Knowledge Networks provided invaluable assistance in fielding the surveys. For helpful comments I am grateful to Jim Fearon, Page Fortna, John Freeman, Jon Krosnick, Skip Lupia, Helen Milner, Diana Mutz, Ken Scheve, Ken Schultz, Jas Sekhon, Alastair Smith, Paul Sniderman, Rob Van Houweling, Jonathan Wand, Jessica Weeks, and the anonymous referees. I also thank seminar participants at Berkeley, CASBS, Columbia, Duke, NYU, Rice, and Yale, and conference participations at the International Studies Association and the TESS meetings at the University of Pennsylvania.

Rising international trade flows are a primary component of globalization. The liberalization of trade policy in many developing countries has helped foster the growth of these flows. Preceding and concurrent with this move to free trade, there has been a global movement toward democracy. We argue that these two trends are related: democratization of the political system reduces the ability of governments to use trade barriers as a strategy for building political support. Political leaders in labor-rich countries may prefer lower trade barriers as democracy increases. Empirical evidence supports our claim about the developing countries from 1970–99. Regime change toward democracy is associated with trade liberalization, controlling for many factors. Conventional explanations of economic reform, such as economic crises and external pressures, seem less salient. Democratization may have fostered globalization in this period.We wish to thank the editors at International Organization, David Baldwin, Jim Fearon, Geoffrey Garrett, Barbara Geddes, Tim Groseclose, Robert Kaufmann, Robert Keohane, David Laitin, Jean Leca, Edward Mansfield, Jim Morrow, Ronald Rogowski, B. Peter Rosendorff, Alex Segura, Mike Tomz, Robert Trager, Romain Wacziarg, and Greg Wawro, for their very helpful comments on versions of this article. We also received helpful comments from seminar participants at the University of Michigan, Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, Syracuse University, Princeton University, Rutgers University, Yale University, and the University of California at Berkeley. Ben Judkins, Robert Trager, Megumi Naoi, and Tom Kenyon provided invaluable research assistance. An earlier version was presented at the 2001 APSA meeting in San Francisco.

Hegemons exercise power in the international system not only by manipulating material incentives but also by altering the substantive beliefs of elites in other nations. Socialization—the process through which leaders in these secondary states embrace a set of normative ideals articulated by the hegemon—plays an important role both in establishing an international order and in facilitating the functioning of that order. This article develops the notion of socialization in the international system and examines three hypotheses about the conditions under which it occurs and can function effectively as a source of power. The first hypothesis is that socialization occurs primarily after wars and political crises, periods marked by international turmoil and restructuring as well as by the fragmentation of ruling coalitions and legitimacy crises at the domestic level. The second is that elite (as opposed to mass) receptivity to the norms articulated by the hegemon is essential to the socialization process. The third hypothesis is that when socialization does occur, it comes about primarily in the wake of the coercive exercise of power. Material inducement triggers the socialization process, but socialization nevertheless leads to outcomes that are not explicable simply in terms of the manipulation of material incentives. These hypotheses are explored in the historical case studies of U.S. diplomacy after World Wars I and II and the British colonial experience in India and Egypt.

The 350th anniversary of the Peace of Westphalia in 1998 was largely ignored by the discipline of international relations (IR), despite the fact that it regards that event as the beginning of the international system with which it has traditionally dealt. By contrast, there has recently been much debate about whether the “Westphalian system” is about to end. This debate necessitates, or at least implies, historical comparisons. I contend that IR, unwittingly, in fact judges current trends against the backdrop of a past that is largely imaginary, a product of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century fixation on the concept of sovereignty. I discuss how what I call the ideology of sovereignty has hampered the development of IR theory. I suggest that the historical phenomena I analyze in this article—the Thirty Years' War and the 1648 peace treaties as well as the post–1648 Holy Roman Empire and the European system in which it was embedded—may help us to gain a better understanding of contemporary international politics.

The contemporary debate on compliance has been framed in terms of two contending perspectives on how best to make states comply with international rules: enforcement or management. Whereas enforcement theorists stress a coercive strategy of monitoring and sanctions, management theorists embrace a problem-solving approach based on capacity building, rule interpretation, and transparency. In this article, I challenge the conception that enforcement and management are competing strategies for achieving compliance. Based on the case of the European Union (EU) and a comparison with other international regimes, I suggest that enforcement and management mechanisms are most effective when combined. The twinning of cooperative and coercive instruments in a “management-enforcement ladder” makes the EU highly successful in combating violations, thus reducing non-compliance to a temporal phenomenon. An examination of regimes in the areas of trade, environment, and human rights lends additional support to this proposition; compliance systems that offer both forms of mechanism are particularly effective in securing rule conformance, whereas systems that only rely on one of the strategies suffer in identifiable ways.

Do political leaders learn from historical experience, and do the lessons of history influence their foreign policy preferences and decisions? It appears that decision makers are always seeking to avoid the failures of the past and that generals are always fighting the last war. The “lessons of Munich” were invoked by Harry Truman in Korea, Anthony Eden in Suez, John Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, and George Bush in the Persian Gulf War. The “lessons of Korea” influenced American debates about Indochina, and the “lessons of Vietnam” were advanced in debates about crises in the Persian Gulf and in Bosnia. Statesmen at Versailles sought to avoid the mistakes of Vienna and those at Bretton Woods, the errors of the Great Depression. Masada still moves the Israelis, and Kosovo drives the Serbs. Inferences from experience and the myths that accompany them often have a far greater impact on policy than is warranted by standard rules of evidence. As J. Steinberg argues, in words that apply equally well to the Munich analogy and the Vietnam syndrome, memories of the British capture of the neutral Danish fleet at Copenhagen in 1807 (the “Copenhagen complex”) “seeped into men's perceptions and became part of the vocabulary of political life,” and it influenced German decision making for a century.

Recent studies have found that natural resources and civil war are highly correlated. Yet the causal mechanisms behind the correlation are not well understood, in part because data on civil wars is scarce and of poor quality. In this article I examine thirteen recent civil wars to explore the mechanisms behind the resource-conflict correlation. I describe seven hypotheses about how resources may influence a conflict, specify the observable implications of each, and report which mechanisms can be observed in a sample of thirteen civil wars in which natural resources were “most likely” to have played a role. I find that two of the most widely cited causal mechanisms do not appear to be valid; that oil, nonfuel minerals, and drugs are causally linked to conflict, but legal agricultural commodities are not; and that resource wealth and civil war are linked by a variety of mechanisms, including several that others had not identified.For their comments on earlier drafts, I am grateful to Paul Collier, J. R. Deshazo, Pierre Englebert, Barbara Geddes, Anke Hoeffler, Macartan Humphreys, Philippe Le Billon, Roy Licklider, Dan Posner, Ken Shultz, and Libby Wood.

This article explores the theoretical implications of the logic of practicality in world politics. In social and political life, many practices do not primarily derive from instrumental rationality (logic of consequences), norm-following (logic of appropriateness), or communicative action (logic of arguing). These three logics of social action suffer from a representational bias in that they focus on what agents think about instead of what they think from. According to the logic of practicality, practices are the result of inarticulate know-how that makes what is to be done self-evident or commonsensical. Insights from philosophy, psychology, and sociology provide empirical and theoretical support for this view. Though complementary with other logics of social action, the logic of practicality is ontologically prior because it is located at the intersection of structure and agency. Building on Bourdieu, this article develops a theory of practice of security communities arguing that peace exists in and through practice when security officials' practical sense makes diplomacy the self-evident way to solving interstate disputes. The article concludes on the methodological quandaries raised by the logic of practicality in world politics.For helpful comments on earlier versions of this article, many thanks to Emanuel Adler, Janice Bially Mattern, Raymond Duvall, Stefano Guzzini, Jef Huysmans, Markus Kornprobst, Jennifer Mitzen, Iver Neumann, Daniel Nexon, David Welch, Alexander Wendt, and Michael Williams, as well as the journal's reviewers.

Studies of international institutions, organizations, and regimes have consistently appeared in the pages of International Organization. We review the theoretical and empirical work on international institutions and identify promising directions for the institutionalist research program. Early studies of international institutions were rich with empirical insights and often influenced by theoretical developments in other fields of political science, but lacking an overarching analytical framework they failed to produce a coherent body of scholarship. Current efforts to reinvigorate the study of international institutions draw on a new body of theory about domestic institutions. We argue that the assumptions of this new approach to institutions are more appropriate to international studies than those of earlier attempts to transfer theories across levels of analysis. We suggest that the most productive questions for future research will focus on specifying alternative mechanisms by which institutions can influence outcomes and identify particular sets of questions within this agenda that are especially promising.

Why do some wars result in the intentional killing of large numbers of civilians? In this article we examine the incidence of mass killing in all wars from 1945 to 2000. In the statistical analysis of our data set of 147 wars, we find strong evidence supporting our hypothesis that mass killing is often a calculated military strategy used by regimes attempting to defeat major guerrilla insurgencies. Unlike conventional military forces, guerrilla armies often rely directly on the local civilian population for logistical support. Because guerrilla forces are difficult to defeat directly, governments facing major guerrilla insurgencies have strong incentives to target the guerrillas' civilian base of support. We find that mass killing is significantly more likely during guerrilla wars than during other kinds of wars. In addition, we find that the likelihood of mass killing among guerrilla conflicts is greatly increased when the guerrillas receive high levels of active support from the local population or when the insurgency poses a major military threat to the regime.For their helpful comments on previous versions of this article the authors thank Bear Braumoeller, Alex Downes, Jim Fearon, Hazem Goborah, Stathis Kalyvas, Gary King, Will Lowe, Matthew Krain, Lisa Martin, Manus Midlarsky, Bruce Russett, Nicholas Sambanis, Naunihal Singh, Abdulkader Sinno, Allan Stam, Jeremy Weinstein, and the anonymous reviewers of International Organization. We are also grateful to Wolfgang Moehler for his research assistance.Our coauthor Dylan Balch-Lindsay was killed in an automobile accident on 1 September 2002, cutting short a promising career. He was a gifted young scholar, without whom this article would not have been possible. He is sorely missed by his friends and colleagues. Donations in his name can be sent to the Dylan Balch-Lindsay Memorial Fund for Graduate Education/Foundation of the University of New Mexico, c/o Carol Brown, Department of Political Science, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, 87131-1121.

A growing number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have come to play a significant role in governing state compliance with human rights. When they supply hard standards that tie material benefits of integration to compliance with human rights principles, PTAs are more effective than softer human rights agreements (HRAs) in changing repressive behaviors. PTAs improve members' human rights through coercion, by supplying the instruments and resources to change actors' incentives to promote reforms that would not otherwise be implemented. I develop three hypotheses: (1) state commitment to HRAs and (2) PTAs supplying soft human rights standards (not tied to market benefits) do not systematically produce improvement in human rights behaviors, while (3) state commitment to PTAs supplying hard human rights standards does often produce better practices. I draw on several cases to illustrate the processes of influence and test the argument on the experience of 177 states during the period 1972 to 2002.I would like to thank Mike Colaresi, Dan Drezner, David Lake, Lisa Martin, Walter Mattli, John Meyer, Mark Pollack, Erik Voeten, Jim Vreeland, and two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and thoughtful comments on various drafts of this manuscript, as well as the many other people who have helped me by asking hard questions along the way. I would also like to thank Michael Barnett, Charles Franklin, and Jon Pevehouse for advice during the dissertation research that supports this article, and Alexander H. Montgomery for assistance in data management. All faults are my own. For generous assistance in the collection of data, I thank the National Science Foundation (SES 2CDZ414 and SES 0135422), John Meyer, and Francisco Ramirez. For support during the writing of the article, I thank Nuffield College at Oxford University, and most importantly, Lynn Eden and Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation.

International relations theorists have devoted insufficient attention to the processes through which state sovereignty is being transformed in the modern world. The human rights issue offers a case study of a gradual and significant reconceptualization of state sovereignty. In the human rights issue-area, the primary movers behind the international actions leading to changing understandings of sovereignty are transnational nonstate actors organized in a principled issue-network, including international and domestic nongovernmental organizations, parts of global and regional intergovernmental organizations, and private foundations. These networks differ from other forms of transnational relations in that they are driven primarily by shared values or principled ideas. Through a comparative study of the impact of international human rights pressures on Argentina and Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s, this article explores the emergence and the nature of the principled human rights issue-network and the conditions under which it can contribute to changing both state understandings about sovereignty and state human rights practices.

Nontax revenues make up a substantial amount of government revenue around the world, though scholars usually focus on individual sources of such revenue (for example, foreign aid and state-owned oil companies). Using a theory of regime change that builds on recent models of the redistributional foundations of dictatorships and democracies, I generate hypotheses regarding all nontax revenue and regime stability. I argue that an increase in nontax revenue should be associated with less taxation of elites in democracies, more social spending in dictatorships, and more stability for both regime types. I find support for all three of these hypotheses in a cross-sectional time-series analysis, covering all countries and years for which the necessary data are available. Significantly, I show that the particular source of nontax revenue does not make a difference: they all act similarly with regard to regime stability and the causal mechanisms.

In recent decades a great expansion has occurred in world environmental organization, both governmental and nongovernmental, along with an explosion of worldwide discourse and communication about environmental problems. All of this constitutes a world environmental regime. Using the term regime a little more broadly than usual, we define world environmental regime as a partially integrated collection of world-level organizations, understandings, and assumptions that specify the relationship of human society to nature. The rise of an environmental regime has accompanied greatly expanded organization and activity in many sectors of global society. Explaining the growth of the environmental regime, however, poses some problems. The interests and powers of the dominant actors in world society—nation-states and economic interests—came late to the environmental scene. Thus these forces cannot easily be used to explain the rise of world mobilization around the environment, in contrast with other sectors of global society (for example, the international economic and national security regimes).