While scholars have written much about the role played by international institutions in cooperative behavior among nations, they have not examined the domestic political motives that may lie behind nations' decisions to join such organizations. Two-level games analysis provides a framework for studying domestic politics not as a constraint upon nations that enter into international agreements but as a catalyst for nations to enter into agreements. The dispute settlement procedures of the North American Free Trade Agreement and its predecessor, the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, offer an empirical illustration of this point.

Over the past decade, foreign direct investment (FDI) in the United States has grown dramatically, changing the composition of many U.S. industries and bringing foreignowned firms into the domestic political process. Presumably, FDI also has affected the politics of protection, by both altering the domestic coalitions around protectionist demands and shifting the potential benefits that protectionism is likely to bring. To understand this process, we create and test a model that examines the level of inward investment and the extent to which this investment either complements or substitutes for existing import levels. Import-complementing investment, we suggest, will cause a split in protectionist demands, with local producers favoring protectionism and foreign investors pushing for free trade. Import-substituting investment, by contrast, will create convergent interests between local and foreign producers. In both cases, inward FDI reshuffles traditional alliances and demands for protection, challenging many prevailing views about protectionism in the United States.

Hardly anyone expects public institutions to die. Yet a census reveals that fully one-third of the international governmental organizations (IGOs) in existence in 1981 had in fact become defunct by 1992. Most Eastern bloc and many regional developing country organizations vanished or became inactive. During this period a slightly larger number of new organizations was born. Not governments but other IGOs spawned most of the new offspring. Wealthy democratic countries increased their IGO memberships while poor unstable countries increasingly dropped out. This bifurcation was accompanied by greater reliance by all on a set of core universal-membership institutions dominated by Western values. Functionalism, organizational ecology, and realism each partly help us to understand these trends but leave important dynamics unexplained.

Voting patterns in the United National General Assembly provide an exceptionally good set of evidence for observing issues and alignments of states in international politics. We analyze those patterns in three post-cold war sessions of the General Assembly and compare them with the alignments and issues that characterized sessions during the cold war. We find new groups and alignments (with most of Eastern Europe now voting with rather than against West European positions) and a new prominence of long-term North-South issues as they now relate to questions of redefining “human security” in the post-cold war world. The predominant General Assembly division is between richer and poorer nations. Key correlates of voting with the North are wealth, democracy, and proportionately low levels of trade with the United States.

Although agents employ a wide range of conflict management techniques in practice, scholars have evaluated only a few of these. A more complete empirical analysis of the spectrum of third-party procedures used to manage international crises reveals that two techniques in particular are most effective: mediation efforts and third-party activities to open or maintain lines of communication. The endpoints of preventing escalation and promoting peaceful settlement take into account the notion of conflict as a dynamic evolutionary process, consisting of several phases, which in turn affect the outcome of third-party management. Crisis management methods that have proved successful in a bipolar world may be similarly successful in the post-cold war environment, an issue future work must address.

The end of the cold war has signaled a dramatic increase in the number and forms of United Nations (UN) intervention into ongoing conflicts. Yet, this larger UN role has not always translated into success. Short-term failures are evident, but the long-term effects of UN efforts are not readily apparent. We explore this longer-term impact by examining the incidence of recurring conflict between state dyads following a crisis. Overall, UN intervention has proved ineffective in inhibiting, delaying, or lessening the severity of future conflicts, independent of the level of violence in the precipitating crisis, the relative capabilities of the two states, the states' history of conflict, and the form of crisis outcome; nor were UN efforts successful in deterring future conflict. These sobering results suggest that changes in long-term strategy may be in order.