The idea of international society is an essential element in the study of international relations. International society is the core concept of the English school and has not yet been systematically integrated with American-originated structural realism and regime theory. This article brings together these three bodies of theory and shows how they complement and strengthen each other. It uses structural realism to show that international society is, like balance of power, a natural product of anarchic international relations and not, as some in the English school assume, only a result of exceptional historical circumstances. This line of analysis establishes definitional criteria for international society that enable a clear boundary to be drawn between international systems with and without international societies. It also shows how state-based international society relates to individual-based world society and supports an argument that in advanced systems, this relationship becomes complementary, not contradictory. The resulting theoretical synthesis provides an essential historical and political-legal foundation for regime theory, showing that international society is both the intellectual forebear and the necessary condition for the development of regimes. Connection strengthens all three bodies of theory and opens up useful channels that connect realist and liberal thinking. One result is that international society can be used both to conceptualize the complexities of a contemporary global international system, with its network of regimes ordered in terms of concentric circles, and to sketch out a policy-relevant research agenda for understanding it.

One of the strengths of Robert Putnam's two-level bargaining game model is its ability to capture how international negotiations make it possible for negotiators to pursue synergistic strategies aimed at improving their prospects for a favorable deal by reshaping politics in both their own and their counterparts' domestic arenas. While reaffirming the utility of this approach, this article argues that Putnam describes only some of the synergistic strategies available to negotiators. In addition to “reverberation” and “synergistic linkage,” a negotiator can also reshape politics in his or her counterpart's domestic arena in two other ways: (1) by transforming decision making in ways that expand elite participation and bring the weight of public opinion to bear on policies that were previously dictated by small groups of privileged domestic actors and (2) by influencing the way in which policy alternatives are considered in the decisionmaking process. Through an examination of the Structural Impediments Initiative, a set of negotiations through which the United States applied a great deal of foreign pressure (gaiaisu) on Japan, the article makes the case for the above modifications to the Putnam model and argues that “participation expansion” strategies are most likely to be successful when involvement in decision making (before foreign intervention) is limited and latent support for foreign demands exists outside the privileged elite, while “alternative specification” is most likely to work when opportunities exist to link favored policy proposals to already recognized domestic problems.

The literature on international economic cooperation has devoted relatively little attention to domestic bargaining tactics and their determinants. Recent scholarship has tended to stress the utility and frequency of side-payments while discounting other prominent bargaining tactics and a broader understanding of tactical choice. This article argues that policymakers choose among domestic bargaining tactics to garner support when faced with situations in which other government officials or societal interest groups block the ratification of international economic agreements. Focusing on offers of side-payments and attempts at issue redefinition, the article's findings suggest that differences in domestic resistance to proposals of material compensation and in external security threat may explain choices between those tactics in domestic bargaining.

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.

Realism explains the ruling of the international system through the underlying distribution of power among states. Increasingly, analysts have found this power analysis inadequate, and they have developed new concepts, most prominently structural power. The usage of structural power actually entails three different meanings, namely indirect institutional power, nonintentional power, and impersonal power. Only the first, however, is compatible with the current neorealist choice-theoretical mode of explanation. This is the basic paradox of recent power approaches: by wanting to retain the central role of power, some international relations and international political economy theory is compelled to expand that concept and to move away from the very theory that claims to be based on power. Neorealism does not take power seriously enough. At the same time, these extensions of the concept are themselves partly fallacious. To account simultaneously for the different meanings of structural power and to avoid a conceptual overload, this article proposes that any power analysis should necessarily include a pair or dyad of concepts of power, linking agent power and impersonal governance. Finally, it sketches some consequences of those concepts for international theory.

Markus Fischer characterizes his recent article in this journal as an “empirical contribution” to the debate among neorealist scholars and those whom, ignoring the diversity of their research interests and theoretical perspectives, he subsumes under the rubric of “critical theorists.” Fischer's piece requires a response because of (1) its tendentious reading of the work of other students of international relations theory and (2) its misuse of history.

Hall and Kratochwil raise several serious claims in their critique of my recent article on feudal Europe. In order to demonstrate that these claims are unwarranted and that my study is sound, I will address the following points: (1) the relevance of context to empirical analysis, (2) counterfactual evidence and the representativeness of sample, (3) understanding the normative argument of critical theory, and (4) the accuracy of my citations.