Transition from war to peace often leads to new challenges. Conflict scholars suggest that these challenges lead groups to be unable to commit credibly and suggest mechanisms for decreasing the fear of being the victim, and increasing the costs, of reneging. However, international law and international political economy scholars debate the utility of making agreements flexible. This paper argues that provisions intended to increase the flexibility of agreements are detrimental to implementation because they operate under the assumption that groups are in a repeated game, and because they can lead to an even more severe commitment problem. Using a newly collected dataset on civil war cease-fire agreements, duration analyses suggest agreements with more flexibility-enhancing provisions exhibit a higher likelihood of violations. Although provisions calling for third-party enforcement – a mechanism for reducing fear and increasing costs – seem to decrease the likelihood of violations, this effect disappears when flexibility-enhancing provisions are considered.

This article explains why there is important variation in the degree of concentration of legislative specialization across legislative parties. Greater concentration of legislative specialization leads parties to concentrate their legislative efforts on a smaller set of policy jurisdictions. Through enhancing their concentration of legislative specialization in certain policy areas, parties might more clearly signal their policy concerns and interests to voters. This study argues and shows that party size alters the concentration of legislative specialization. In particular, I find that a U-shaped curve defines the relationship between party size and the degree of concentration of legislative specialization: niche parties and the largest parties choose higher levels of concentration of legislative specialization.

This article examines the implications of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) centrality in East Asian regionalism. It seeks to address the question of how ASEAN created and maintained its central position in East Asian regionalism by managing regional cooperation in general and institution-building in particular. This article addresses the question by relying on the theoretical concept of productive power and tangible attributes associated with the concept. This article makes three arguments. First, ASEAN maintained its central position in East Asian regionalism by exerting productive power that works in generalized and diffuse social processes and through constitutive social relations. Second, the Association developed and employed specific meanings and norms that constituted the foundation for regional cooperation. Third, ASEAN maintained its central position in the complicated Sino–Japanese rivalry by embedding them in constitutive social relations and avoiding exclusive links with each of the two states.