What makes a diplomatic or military signal credible? In strategic settings where deception is possible, rational actors' interpretations rely on their beliefs, intuition, and imagination—they rely on emotion. Two properties of emotion—as an assimilation mechanism and its use as evidence—are key to addressing four strategic problems. First, emotion explains why actors worry needlessly about their reputations. Second, emotion is important to understanding costly signals. Third, emotion explains radical changes in preferences. Fourth, emotion sharpens understanding of strategic problems without being self-invalidating: common knowledge of emotion's effects do not always change those effects. Understanding how rational actors think requires turning to emotion. Evidence from the Korean War captures strengths and weaknesses of competing perspectives.

How can authoritarian states credibly signal their intentions in international crises? Nationalist, antiforeign protests are one mechanism by which authoritarian leaders can visibly demonstrate their domestic vulnerability. Because protests in authoritarian states are risky and costly to repress, the decision to allow or stifle popular mobilization is informative. The threat of instability demonstrates resolve, and the cost of concession increases the credibility of a tough stance. The danger of instability and escalation increases foreign incentives to make concessions and preserve the status quo. This logic helps explain the pattern of authoritarian tolerance and repression toward nationalist protest. A case study of two U.S.-China crises shows how China's management of anti-American protests affected U.S. beliefs about Chinese resolve.

Efforts to fight international money laundering, corruption, and terrorist financing depend crucially on the prohibition barring the formation of anonymous shell companies. To study the effectiveness of this prohibition, we perform the first international relations (IR) field experiment on a global scale. With university institutional review board (IRB) clearance, we posed as consultants requesting confidential incorporation from 1,264 firms in 182 countries. Testing arguments drawn from IR theory, we probe the treatment effects of specifying (1) the international standards (managerialism), (2) penalties for noncompliance with these standards (rationalism), (3) the desire to follow norms through complying with international standards (constructivism), and (4) status as a U.S. customer. We find that firms prompted about possible legal penalties for violating standards (rationalism) were significantly less likely to respond to inquiries and less likely to comply with international law compared to the placebo condition. Some evidence also suggests that the constructivist condition caused significantly greater rates of noncompliance. The U.S. origin condition and the managerial condition had no significant effects on compliance rates. These results present anomalies for leading theories and underscore the importance of determining causal effects in IR research.

Recent studies cast doubt on the value added of international trade agreements and institutions. Using a new data set that consists of about 35,000 observations on the trade of fifty-four nations between 1919 and 1938, we examine whether this skepticism also applies to the infamous interwar trade blocs. Traditional historical accounts attribute to them a large drop in international trade and a rise in the political tensions that would later erupt in World War II. In this study, we show that no bloc raised trade among its members as a whole or decreased trade between members and nonmembers. However, our findings are not wholly consistent with the skepticism recent studies express. We argue that conflicts of interest among the great powers encouraged the emergence of the bloc system and also gave rise to intrabloc trade shifts consistent with the political interests of their great-power hubs. The political-military alliances these conflicts created also reduced trade between their signatories, and we argue more generally that the causal chain runs from politics to trade. As a result, measuring only the effect of agreements and institutions on aggregate trade between their members can generate inaccurate estimates of their value added.

The conclusion of peace treaties following war was a norm of international politics for millennia. Since approximately 1950, however, the rate at which interstate wars have ended with a formal peace treaty has declined dramatically. I argue that the costs of concluding peace treaties have risen with the development of the modern canon of the law of war. Using an original data set, I find that states today prefer to avoid admitting to a state of war and risk placing their leaders and soldiers at risk of punishment for any violations of the law of war.

Independent domestic courts play important roles in enforcing international human rights agreements, thereby providing a mechanism by which international institutions can affect government policy. Yet this enforcement power is constrained not only by independence but also by the courts' ability to overcome information problems. Domestic courts' enforcement power depends on information in two ways: the costs of producing legally admissible evidence of abuses and the applicable legal standards of proof. When countries ratify international agreements, judicial enforcement can improve government practices when evidence-production costs and standards of proof are low, but not otherwise. With respect to personal integrity rights violations, evidence is especially difficult to obtain, and standards of proof are high, meaning that the courts will not be able to constrain government practices. By contrast, evidence-production costs and standards of proof are lower for other civil rights violations, so courts will be able to prosecute offenders and bring governments into line with their international commitments. Consistent with this theory, I find that commitments to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) have significantly improved governments' respect for the freedoms of speech, association, assembly, and religion. With respect to personal integrity rights, however, I find that commitments to the ICCPR have not improved government practices.

What can explain the decline in incumbent victory in counterinsurgency wars? Political scientists offer a variety of explanations for these trends. Some focus on the structure and doctrine of counterinsurgent forces, while others emphasize the lethality and motivation of insurgent adversaries. I challenge these explanations. Declines in incumbent victory in counterinsurgency wars are not driven by fundamental shifts in the character of these conflicts, but in the political context in which they take place. Nineteenth-century colonial incumbents enjoyed a variety of political advantages—including strong political will, a permissive international environment, access to local collaborators, and flexibility to pick their battles—which granted them the time and resources necessary to meet insurgent challenges. In contrast, twentieth-century colonial incumbents struggled in the face of apathetic publics, hostile superpowers, vanishing collaborators, and constrained options. The decline in incumbent victory in counterinsurgency warfare, therefore, stems not from problems in force structure or strategy, but in political shifts in the profitability and legitimacy of colonial forms of governance.

Discussions of weapons taboos have failed to take into account the possibility that prescriptive international and national norms of behavior may come into conflict. Using psychological studies of trade-offs and protected values as a guide, this article argues that when these conflicts exist, the taboos' individual-level constraining effects can be vitiated. An analysis of General George Marshall's proposal to use chemical weapons against the Japanese in 1945 demonstrates that normative conflict can produce a readiness to violate weapons taboos. In these situations, state decisions to violate taboos may depend on the extent to which the perception of normative conflict is shared by other decision makers and society more generally.

Why do armed groups recruit large numbers of children as fighters, often coercively? The international community has tried to curb these crimes by shaming and punishing leaders who commit them—in short, making the crimes costlier. Are these policies effective and sufficient? The answer lies in more attention to the strategic interaction between rebel leaders and recruits. We adapt theories of industrial organization to rebellious groups and show how, being less able fighters, children are attractive recruits if and only if they are easier to intimidate, indoctrinate, and misinform than adults. This ease of manipulation interacts with the costliness of war crimes to influence rebel leaders' incentives to coerce children into war. We use a case study and a novel survey of former child recruits in Uganda to illustrate this argument and provide hard evidence not only that children are more easily manipulated in war, but also how—something often asserted but never demonstrated. Our theory, as well as a new “cross-rebel” data set, also support the idea that costliness matters: foreign governments, international organizations, diasporas, and local populations can discourage child recruitment by withholding resources or punishing offenders (or, conversely, encourage these crimes by failing to act). But punishing war crimes has limitations, and can only take us so far. Children's reintegration opportunities must be at least as great as adults' (something that demobilization programs sometimes fail to do). Also, indoctrination and misinformation can be directly influenced. We observe grassroots innovations in Uganda that could be models for the prevention and curbing of child soldiering and counterinsurgency generally.

The rationalist-constructivist divide that runs through the discipline of International Relations (IR) revolves around two figures of agency, the rational actor and the constructivist “self.” In this article I examine the models of agency that implicitly or explicitly underpin the study of international politics. I show how both notions of the rational actor and the constructivist self have remained wedded to individualist understandings of agency that were first incarnated in the discipline's self-understandings by Hobbes's natural individual. Despite its turn to social theory, this persistent individualism has hampered constructivism's ability to appraise the ways in which the actors and structures of international politics mutually constitute one another “all the way down.” My purpose is to lay the foundations for a nonindividualist, adequately relational, social theory of international politics. To this end I propose a third model of agency, Lacan's split speaking subject. Through a Lacanian reading of the Leviathan, I show how the speaking subject has in fact laid buried away in the discipline's Hobbesian legacy all along.

In recent years U.S. legal norms and practices reconfigured important elements of how law is thought of and practiced in both common and civil law countries around the world. With specific focus on the spread of American procedural practices (class action and pretrial discovery), this article applies a transactional view of law that emphasizes the private practice of law and nonstate actors. Such an approach highlights important aspects of world politics overlooked by traditional analyses of international legalization, conventionally understood as the direct spread of law by and among states. We find that the movement of law is a dynamic process involving diffusion, translation, and the repeated transnational exchanges of legal actors. Through our examination of this process, we offer insights into how aspects of American law moved into unlikely jurisdictions to reshape legal theory, pedagogy, procedure, and the organizing structure of the legal profession.

During the past three decades national human rights institutions (NHRIs) have spread to more than one hundred United Nations (UN) member states and become key to human rights enforcement and democratic accountability. Given that NHRIs can take on a life of their own even under adverse conditions, why do governments in the developing world create permanent, independent national bodies with statutory powers to promote and protect human rights? Human rights international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) are crucial for global diffusion. They empower local actors and influence governments in favor of NHRI adoption by mediating the human rights and NHRI discourses and mobilizing shame internationally. An event history analysis offers robust evidence that controlling for the UN, regional organizations, and other rival factors, human rights INGOs have systematic positive effects on diffusion. The case studies of South Korea and Malaysia provide process-tracing evidence that the hypothesized causal mechanisms are operative.

We analyze institutional solutions to international cooperation when actors have heterogeneous preferences over the desirability of the action and split into supporters and opponents, all of whom can spend resources toward their preferred outcome. We study how actors can communicate their preferences through voting when they are not bound either by their own vote or the outcome of the collective vote. We identify two organizational types with endogenous coercive enforcement and find that neither is unambiguously preferable. Like the solutions to the traditional Prisoners' Dilemma these forms require long shadows of the future to sustain. We then show that cooperation can be sustained through a noncoercive organization where actors delegate execution to an agent. Even though this institution is costlier, it does not require any expertise by the agent and is independent of the shadow of the future, and thus is implementable when the others are not.

The IR literature on hegemony rarely combines attention to material power and ideas. Cox's neo-Gramscian work is a rare exception, but it too narrowly construes Gramsci's conceptualization of common sense, reducing it to elite views on political economy. But Gramsci argued that hegemony had to reckon with mass quotidian common sense. If political elites do not take into account the taken-for-granted world of the masses, elite ideological projects would likely founder against daily practices of resistance. In this article, I show how mass common sense can be an obstacle to an elite hegemonic project aimed at moving a great power into the core of the world capitalist economy. In contemporary Russia, a ruling elite with a neoliberal project is being thwarted daily by a mass common sense that has little affinity with democratic market capitalism. Scholarly work on future Chinese, Brazilian, or Indian participation in constructing a new hegemonic order would do well to pay attention to the mass common senses prevailing in those societies

Do international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) lessen the need for states to provide their own services? In the case of health, many assume that INGOs limit health spending by governments. Against the conventional wisdom, we argue that these organizations create increased demand for governmental health spending through three mechanisms: (1) indirectly affecting the policy-making climate (“climatic conditioning”), (2) aiding domestic NGO and health activists in their efforts, and (3) directly pressuring governments for increased health spending themselves. Given these mechanisms, health INGOs, although typically supplying health services of their own within a country, should augment pressure for public service provision by the state and, it follows, lead to increased state health spending. We test our argument using a new data set on health INGOs, together with a well-established model of health spending, and find ample support for our arguments. Increases in health INGOs' activities do lead to increased governmental health spending, mainly by indirectly affecting the policy-making climate and, most especially, advancing the effective efforts of domestic activists.

Domestic approaches to compliance with international commitments often presume that international law has a distinct effect on the beliefs and preferences of national publics. Studies attempting to estimate the consequences of international law unfortunately face a wide range of empirical and methodological challenges. This article uses an experimental design embedded in two U.S. national surveys to offer direct systematic evidence of international law's effect on mass attitudes. To provide a relatively tough test for international law, the surveys examine public attitudes toward the use of torture, an issue in which national security concerns are often considered paramount. Contrary to the common contention of international law's inefficacy, I find that legal commitments have a discernible impact on public support for the use of torture. The effect of international law is also strongest in those contexts where pressures to resort to torture are at their highest. However, the effects of different dimensions in the level of international agreements' legalization are far from uniform. In contrast to the attention often devoted to binding rules, I find that the level of obligation seems to make little difference on public attitudes toward torture. Rather, the relative precision of the rules, along with the degree to which enforcement is delegated to third parties, plays a much greater role in shaping public preferences. Across both international law and legalization, an individual's political ideology also exerts a strong mediating effect, though in varying directions depending on the design of the agreement. The findings have implications for understanding the overall impact of international law on domestic actors, the importance of institutional design, and the role of political ideology on compliance with international agreements.