Whether it is called an assembly, a conference, or something else, there is in most if not all international organizations an organ, for which the United Nations General Assembly is the prototype, in which the entire membership is represented. The importance of these bodies is generally acknowledged. Constitutionally, they usually have final authority in such matters as the appointment of the executive officer, the election of smaller organs, the adoption of the budget, and the determination of overall policy. Few studies of an international organization or of the interaction between a state or a group of states and an international organization can neglect the assembly of the organization under scrutiny.

The Andean Common Market, the most recent attempt at regional integration in Latin America, differs from the other Latin American efforts both in the factors that prompted its formation and in the support it had when it was established. More importantly, it differs in its terms and provisions, providing for a higher level of integration than any other Latin American effort. Several of its features—a common policy on foreign investment, regional planning and coordination in such fields as industry and agriculture, a quasi–supranational secretariat — make it an innovative approach to integration in Latin America. Numerous factors enhance the integrative potential of Andean integration. Among these are relatively favorable ratings on several of the neo–functional variables of regional integration. These indicators suggest that the effort may attain its objectives and perhaps even set an example to be followed by other economic groupings among Latin American countries. Still, projections about the future of the Andean Common Market must remain mixed. Some negative factors exist within the movement that could, if they triumph over the positive factors, lead to the same stagnation that now characterizes LAFTA and the CACM.

The evolution in Romania of a governing system of socialist patrimonialism, as opposed to one of collective rule by counterbalancing elites, accounts for both the country's early and extensive contact with the international capitalist economy and its belated but sharp reaction to international economic disruptions. In the absence of powerful alternative political elites or policies, the socialist nationalist ideology of Nicolae Ceausescu defined the country's “multilateral development” and its deviant foreign policy. Ceausescu's manipulation of the system strengthened his hold during the time of rapid economic development and undermined the country's capacity to react promptly or moderately to economic shocks. Events in Poland, especially the rise of Solidarity, complicated Romanian adjustment; but on balance, the adjustment to external economic forces reinforced rather than eroded Ceausescu's socialist patrimonialism.

A hierarchical regional system may be defined as a regional international system composed of a single Great Power and a number of relatively small states. This article attempts to clarify the conditions under which member states of a hierarchical regional system, including both the great-power regional hegemon and the relatively small powers, seek to influence the salience that boundaries have for such a system. Scholars and policymakers alike may use several criteria in defining the boundaries of a regional system: 1) A system may be delimited geographically; 2) marked discontinuities in transactional interchanges (language, trade patterns, communication flows) may serve to set it off from the general international system as may common membership in formal international organizations; 3) boundaries may similarly be established by emphasizing behavioral criteria, i.e., by identifying norms especially pertaining to conflict management and resolution which are specific to a group of states. Unless otherwise specified, I employ the last definition throughout this article.

While debate continues on whether the foreign policies of small states are1 or are or not generically different from those of large states, little has been written explicitly about the association of size of donors with the quality of their foreign aid. This essay hypothesizes that the aid policies of small states will differ from those of large states in ways that may be measured empirically, just as Plischke, East, Sawyer, and Hermann have demonstrated with quantitative data that the general foreign policy behavior of small states varies significantly from that of large ones. More particularly, it is hypothesized that small states give higher quality aid, and give it relatively more generously, than large states. This hypothesis is grounded on general impressions—Sweden is widely acknowledged as a “good” donor and the United States an indifferent one—and on extrapolations from small state theory that will be sketched below.

The States parties to this Constitution declare, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations, that the following principles are basic to the happiness, harmonious relations and security of all peoples:

Recent interest in cognitive approaches to international interaction in general and international regimes in particular has not been matched by development in theory and methodology. This article details a systematic “subjective” approach that seeks to meet this need. Its claims are developed through its comparison with the accomplishments and shortcomings of more established approaches to the study of international interaction and, in particular, microeconomic formal theory. The subjective alternative can model both individual subjects and the systems in which they are participating. As such, it offers much more in terms of continuities and connections between agents and system structure than do traditional psychological analyses in international relations. The theoretical arguments proceed in the context of a study of cooperation and conflict over Antarctica and its evolving regimes.

Three different methods are used to estimate the loss and gain in fulfillment of basic needs, for industrial and less developed countries, from possible global transfers of income. Focusing on prospective changes in life expectancy and infant mortality rates, the gain attributable to a given income increment for a person in a very poor country is on the order of seventy-five times greater than the loss to be expected for the average person residing in a rich country. Benefits to the poor are greater if income is distributed relatively equally within poor countries. Income transfers designed to meet basic needs would help to reduce birth rates in poor countries. The prospective gains in basic needs from the transfers are sufficiently large to exceed prospective losses from disruption of the global economy caused by the transfers. Fundamental questions of justice are thus raised.

Rationalization, standardization, and interoperability (RSI) has been an important issue in NATO throughout the 1970s. Increasingly, national political and military leaders have expressed the concern that doctrine, procedures, and materiel should be harmonized more effectively as one means of counterbalancing the Warsaw Pact. However, in the past decade RSI initiatives have been largely unsuccessful. Weapons standardization in NATO depensupon the scope and degree of ideological advocacy for the collaborative security imperative and the influence of economic competition in arms production and sales among the members of the Alliance. An analysis of the disparate views of the member-states and of threecase studies—the MX-1 tank treads, the ribbon bridge, and ROLAND II—indicates that ideological advocacy has been high among international and national elites (if not among subnational elites), but that the increased economic competition following the rise of European defense industries during the last fifteen years has exacerbated national policy differences and decreased the prospects for RSI success.

One of the first of the specialized agencies of the United Nations to become active, the Food and Agriculture Organization has elicited interest beyond the specialized field of agricultural economists. Attempting as it does to solve one of the very basic problems of the world, that of an adequate food supply, the organization represents a significant and hopeful international attempt to create a world in which there may actually exist “freedom from want.” The objectives of FAO, as formally expressed in the preamble to the constitution, read as follows:

“The nations accepting this constitution being determined to promote the common welfare by furthering separate and collective action on their part for the purpose of raising levels of nutrition and standards of living of the people under their jurisdiction, securing improvements in the efficiency of the production of all food and agricultural products, bettering the conditions of rural populations, and thus contributing toward an expanding world economy, hereby establish the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.”

International organizations, it is sometimes said, are always designed to prevent the last war. An analogous problem besets economic institutions. The inability of some existing international economic organizations to deal with the current problems in their domains is all too apparent. Two of the institutional pillars of the postwar Bretton Woods system, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. (GATT), were shaken in 1971 and are still suffering from severe malaise. The political and economic conditions that led to their formation at the end of the Second World War have changed, calling into question the political and intellectual foundation upon which they were constructed. In the aftermath of the 1973 energy crisis, meetings of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and a special session of the General Assembly have been the scene of demands by poor countries for a new economic order, but the meaning of the phrase has been ambiguous and the formula has impeded rather than promoted agreement.

The Red Cross, a transnational movement, has taken action in conflict situations that both conserves the authority of states and also circumscribes state behavior in the name of fundamental human rights. On the one hand, the Red Cross, principally through the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), is cooperative toward states and acts discreetly in matters regarded by states as sensitive. On the other hand, the Red Cross has promoted the law of armed conflict to limit states and has accepted quasi-supranational authority in international armed conflict in the form of the right of automatic ICRC access to certain detainees. On the basis of this right, or sometimes on the basis of bypassing legal issues, the ICRC is able to transcend the “sovereignty” of states (and non-state parties as well). While the Red Cross movement is highly fragmented and encompasses a number of non-cosmopolitan elements, the historical impact of the movement has been to help liberalize the nation-state system, largely through the actions of the ICRC, while reinforcing fundamental authority within that system.

Serious consideration of the role of humanitarian norms and institutions in policymaking does not require the abandonment of an interest-based, rational actor model of policy analysis. However, it does require that scholars focus their attention on international institutional arrangements which are normally overlooked by realists but which may determine the ways in which policymakers match their interests with policy options. The analysis presented here assumes that policies are based on policymakers' calculations of national interests, but it posits that these calculations are affected by incentives and policy options emanating from international norm-promoting institutions. The study attempts to explain how the intervention of an institution of this type led policymakers in two cases to reassess and reinterpret their interests on issues of humanitarian norm compliance.

The English East India Company's “company-state” lasted 274 years—longer than most states. This research note uses new archival evidence to study the Company as a catalyst in the development of modern state sovereignty. Drawing on the records of 16,740 managerial and shareholder meetings between 1678 and 1795, I find that as the Company grew through wars, its claim to sovereign authority shifted from a privilege delegated by Crown and Parliament to a self-possessed right. This “sovereign awakening” sparked a reckoning within the English state, which had thus far tolerated ambiguity in Company sovereignty based on the early modern shared international understanding of divisible, nonhierarchical layered sovereignty. But self-possessed nonstate sovereignty claimed from the core of the state became too much. State actors responded by anchoring sovereign authority along more hierarchical, indivisible foundations espoused by theorists centuries earlier. The new research makes two contributions. First, it introduces the conceptual dynamic of “war awakens sovereigns” (beyond making states) by entangling entities in peacemaking to defend sovereign claims. Second, it extends arguments about the European switch from layered sovereignty to hierarchical statist forms by situating the Company's sovereign evolution in this transformation. Ultimately, this study enables fuller historicization of both nonstate authority and the social construction of sovereignty in international politics.

Recent international relations scholarship has argued that political elites constrain the use of military force by democracies. Despite the persuasiveness of this research, scholars have largely ignored elite dynamics’ ability to constrain the initiation of covert operations. This omission is consequential because scholars of US foreign policy often assume that covert operations serve as a substitute for the overt use of force; secrecy allows leaders to limit information to congressional elites and thus weaken their oversight capabilities. Do elite political dynamics constrain presidents’ ability to act secretly or do they affect the overt use of force only? I argue that elite political constraints—particularly opposition from Congress—extend to the president's ability to initiate covert operations. By examining the trade-off between US military force and CIA-initiated covert operations during the Cold War, I find the likelihood that covert operations are initiated decreases significantly during periods of divided government and that there is no distinguishable trade-off between covert operations and overt military force. The results suggest that constraints on covert operations became more uniform across unified and divided government following congressional oversight reforms in 1975 that reduced the information asymmetry between the majority and minority party. These findings have important ramifications for the nascent literature on back-door bargaining and covert signalling. Because democratic leaders frequently face domestic political costs even when acting in secret, covert operations should allow leaders to credibly convey their resolve.

Recent works on the role of argumentation in international politics have enriched our understanding of the discursive construction of international legitimacy. Many scholars have recognized the pervasiveness and privileged status of legal claims. Building on these insights, I advance the proposition that the international legitimacy of the use of force has legalized. Legalization implies that successful (de-)legitimation depends on the strategic use of international law, and that alternative legitimacy discourses (such as morality) have been marginalized and play a negligible role in the construction of legitimacy. Thus, the use of force is legitimate to the extent that it conforms to international law. I test this “legalization thesis” against the “hard” case of NATO's intervention in Kosovo in 1999. By revisiting the arguments used by state representatives, I show that, as expected in a legalized legitimacy system and contrary to what has become common knowledge about this case, legitimacy was gained through, not despite, international law. I analyze NATO's strategy of legitimation in detail and reconstruct it as a set of seven strategic moves, all of them appealing exclusively to the international legal discourse.

What effect does state violence have on the cohesiveness and fragmentation of insurgent organizations? This article develops a theory of how state violence against civilians affects insurgent cohesion and fragmentation in civil war. It argues that the state-led collective targeting of an armed group's alleged civilian constituency increases the probability of insurgent fragmentation, defined as the process through which insurgent organizations split into distinct entities, each with its own social composition, goals, and leadership. This effect is driven by the interaction of several mechanisms at the individual, group, and organizational levels: state-led collective targeting enlarges the supply of fresh recruits, strengthens the bonds between immediate group members (interpersonal cohesion), and disrupts intra-organizational coordination, strategic unity, and institutional arrangements that underpin the commitment of individual fighters to the organization as a whole (ideological cohesion). The implications of this argument are empirically tested in an analysis of armed groups fighting against their governments between 1946 and 2008. The results suggest that campaigns of massive state violence directed against the civilian constituency of rebel groups increase the overall risk of insurgent fragmentation, a finding that has important implications for the duration and escalation of civil wars.