Unlike interstate wars, civil wars rarely end in negotiated settlements. Between 1940 and 1990 55 percent of interstate wars were resolved at the bargaining table, whereas only 20 percent of civil wars reached similar solutions. Instead, most internal wars ended with the extermination, expulsion, or capitulation of the losing side. In fact, groups fighting civil wars almost always chose to fight to the finish unless an outside power stepped in to guarantee a peace agreement. If a third party agreed to enforce the terms of a peace treaty, negotiations always succeeded regardless of the initial goals, ideology, or ethnicity of the participants. If a third party did not intervene, these talks usually failed.

Trade barriers, though usually considered welfare-reducing, are globally ubiquitous. In light of the enormous clash between what is and what ought to be, researchers have begun addressing the question of why countries so consistently pursue such apparently counterproductive policies.

Japan's level of defense expenditure relative to the size of its economy has long been uniquely low among the major industrialized countries. As of 1995, Japan's expenditures stood at 0.96 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Even adding to this the approximately 0.3 percent of GDP devoted to pensions for retired personnel, the level of spending is considerably less than that of major Western states such as the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany, as well as industrialized Asian states such as South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore. Furthermore, these relative magnitudes have remained reasonably stable over the past few decades.

Domestic agricultural subsidy policies in the United States and in the European Union (EU) underwent substantial liberal reforms between 1990 and 1996. In the United States in 1990, Congress reduced acreage on which farmers could receive income-support payments (deficiency payments) by 15 percent under a budget reconciliation act. In the EU in 1991–92, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was dramatically modified under a set of reforms (the MacSharry reforms) that reduced internal cereal price guarantees by 29 percent over three years and obliged larger EU farmers to leave 15 percent of their arable land idle as a further check on excess production. Then in 1995–96, the U.S. Congress passed the Federal Agricultural Improvement and Reform (FAIR) Act, a sweeping measure that eliminated for at least seven years all deficiency payments to farmers as well as all annual land-idling programs. U.S. Senator Richard Lugar, chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, asserted that this new law would “change agricultural policy [in the United States] more fundamentally than any law in sixty years.”

International relations scholars have tended to focus on realism's common features rather than exploring potential differences. Realists do share certain assumptions and are often treated as a group, but such a broad grouping obscures systematic divisions within realist theory. Recently, some analysts have argued that it is necessary to differentiate within realism. This article builds on this line of argument. The potential, and need, to divide realism on the basis of divergent assumptions has so far been overlooked. In this article I argue that realism can be split into two competing branches by revealing latent divisions regarding a series of assumptions about state behavior. The first branch is Kenneth Waltz's well-known neorealist theory; a second branch, termed here “postclassical realism,” has yet to be delineated as a major alternative but corresponds with a number of realist analyses that cohere with one another and are incompatible with Waltzian neorealism.

As the twentieth century draws to a close, one can find sharply contrasting views among leading scholars on almost every key issue in positive international political economy. How strong are international as opposed to domestic influences on policy? How important are issues of national security (”high politics”) versus economic considerations(”low politics”)? What role do institutions—international and domestic—play in influencing and constraining the behavior of governments? Why is international cooperation rare but not unheard of? The list goes on and on.