International Relations

FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.

FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.

Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.

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The acceptance of human rights and minority rights, the increasing role of international financial institutions, and globalization have led many observers to question the continued viability of the sovereign state. Here a leading expert challenges this conclusion. Stephen Krasner contends that states have never been as sovereign as some have supposed. Throughout history, rulers have been motivated by a desire to stay in power, not by some abstract adherence to international principles. Organized hypocrisy--the presence of longstanding norms that are frequently violated--has been an enduring attribute of international relations

Political leaders have usually but not always honored international legal sovereignty, the principle that international recognition should be accorded only to juridically independent sovereign states, while treating Westphalian sovereignty, the principle that states have the right to exclude external authority from their own territory, in a much more provisional way. In some instances violations of the principles of sovereignty have been coercive, as in the imposition of minority rights on newly created states after the First World War or the successor states of Yugoslavia after 1990; at other times cooperative, as in the European Human Rights regime or conditionality agreements with the International Monetary Fund.

The author looks at various issues areas to make his argument: minority rights, human rights, sovereign lending, and state creation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Differences in national power and interests, he concludes, not international norms, continue to be the most powerful explanation for the behavior of states.

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Princeton University Press
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Stephen D. Krasner
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Trading relations in Vietnam's emerging private sector are shaped by two market frictions: the difficulty of locating trading partners and the absence of legal enforcement of contracts. Examining relational contracting, we find that a firm trusts its customer enough to offer credit when the customer finds it hard to locate an alternative supplier. A longer duration of trading relationship is associated with larger credit, as is prior information gathering. Customers identified through business networks receive more credit. These network effects are enduring, suggesting that networks are used to sanction defaulting customers.

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The Quarterly Journal of Economics
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What are Russian foreign policy objectives? It depends on whom you ask.

In making assessments of Russia's behavior in the world, it is absolutely

critical that we recognize that Russia today is not a totalitarian state ruled by a

Communist Party with a single and clearly articulated foreign policy of expanding

world socialism and destroying world capitalism and democracy. That state

disappeared in 1991. Rather, Russia is a democratizing state - a weakly institutionalized

democracy with several deficiencies, but a democratizing state

nonetheless. Russia's foreign policy, in turn, is a product of domestic politics in

a pluralistic system.

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Demokratizatsiya
Authors
Michael A. McFaul
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The next time Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin meet at a U.S.-Russian summit,

three kinds of issues will dominate their agenda's arms control, regional conflicts,

and human rights. In fact, these three issues may dominate the agenda of

future U.S.-Russian summits for a long time. Regarding arms control, the Russian

ratification of START II stands as one of the major stumbling points in U.S.-

Russia relations. The two presidents probably will not meet again until this agreement

has been ratified by the Russian parliament. Regarding regional conflicts,

the American and Russian governments have radically divergent positions concerning

trade with Iran. For several years, the United States has objected to the

Russian-assisted construction of nuclear reactors in Iran, yet the Russian Ministry

of Atomic Energy continues with the project. Regarding human rights,

American officials have quite rightly expressed their outrage concerning the passage

of a new draconian law on religion that restricts the freedom of worship of

most "nontraditional" Russian faiths. In reaction to this law, the U.S. Senate has

threatened to end all aid to Russia.

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Demokratizatsiya
Authors
Michael A. McFaul
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Throughout the history of the modern world, domestic regime change- be it democratization, autocratization, decolonization, decommunization, federal dissolution, coups, or revolutions- has often triggered international conflict and war. When a regime changes, decaying institutions from the ancien regime compete with new rules of the game to shape political competition in ambiguous ways. This uncertain text provides opportunities for political actors, both old and new, to pursue new strategies for achieving their objectives, including belligerent policies against both domestic and international foes. In desperation, losers from regime change may resort to violence to maintain their former privileges. Such internal conflicts become international wars when these interest groups who benefited from the old order call upon their allies to intervene on their behalf or strike out against their enemies as means to shore up their domestic legitimacy. In the name of democracy, independence, the revolution, or the nation, the beneficiaries of regime change also can resort to violence against both domestic and international opponents to secure their new gains.

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International Security
Authors
Michael A. McFaul
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The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has grown up along with world politics and has, since 1945, offered a special perspective on issues of peace, security, and global well-being. Now its unique blend of international commentary on the arms race, accessible articles on scientific dimensions of politics, and acute political journalism is presented here in a way particularly suited to students of international relations and security studies. Widely known for his creative work in international affairs education, George A. Lopez joins with the former managing editor of the Bulletin, Nancy J. Myers, to select recent articles best illustrating a wide range of issues on peace and security. The volume editors shape and supplement these articles specifically for classroom use. Each chapter includes several thematically linked articles supplemented with maps, data charts, photos, editorial cartoons, and discussion questions. Completing the package of pedagogical features for the volume is a master chart of key terms and concepts in international relations showing their connection to the articles. This new text-reader zeroes in on the core of any international relations course and brings the controversies alive with informed, international voices and new views on age-old questions about the arms race, peace, security, and the prospects for a post-nuclear world politics.

Features articles from the Bulletin of the Atomic Sientists, a unique teaching resource, selected and edited especially for students of international studies. Provides chapter introductions and thematic overviews by leading IR scholar and teacher linking these articles to core course content. Includes maps, figures, tables, high impact photos, and clever, specially-commissioned editorial cartoons. Presents discussion questions framed to show how text-reader content illuminates IR theory and current events. Offers a master chart of key IR terms and concepts as they appear within the reader. Incorporates a wide diversity of international authors, topics, and perspectives. Combines historical perspective with current events. Unlike other readers, Peace and Security is thematicaly unified and cohesive. prospects for a post-nuclear world politics.

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Rowman and Littlefield, in "Peace and Security: The Next Generation"
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In 1992, a year before his death, Yasusuke Murakami published in Japanese An Anti-Classical Political-Economic Analysis: A Vision for the Next Century (English translation, Stanford, 1996). A work that distilled decades of research and thought by a distinguished economic theorist turned social scientist and philosopher, it sold more than 25,000 copies in Japan despite its highly scholarly nature. The book enjoyed such immediate recognition because it offered a sanguine vision for the community of nations and because Murakami's vision was supported by acute insights on, and seminal analyses of the crucial issues relating to economic growth, equality, peace, and cultural diversity we face at the end of the twentieth century.

This volume presents nine essays - by five political scientists, three economists, and a historian - that critically evaluate the vision and analyses in Murakami's book by focusing on his two key contributions. The first is "polymorphic liberalism," a new type of liberalism that reflects the needs of both developed and developing economies and the realities of the diversity of cultures; the second is "developmentalism," a long-term, multifaceted policy intervention in catch-up economic growth. The volume also contains, as appendixes, two essays that further a more complete understanding of Murakami's book: a brief summary of Murakami's "new economics," his replacement for neoclassical economics, and a discussion of England as the first developmentalist success.

All the essays deal, in one way or another, with Murakami's answers to such questions as: What new world order must be created to best provide peace and security to nations? What shared beliefs or principles can help evolve this new world order that is menaced by regional wars and serious international confrontations caused by political, economic, and ethnic-cultural conflicts? How will the character of industrialization change, and what must we do to best respond to changes that are likely to increase political and economic interdependence among nations? And what roles must the United States, the European Union, and Japan play to secure world peace, to maintain an orderly international trade regime, and to reduce disparity in nations' income and wealth?

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Stanford University Press, in "A Vision of New Liberalism?"
Authors
Stephen D. Krasner
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Since 1993, Russia has achieved a series of important milestones regarding the articulation of the rules of the game for political and economic competition. Since the popular approval of a new constitution in December 1993, which gave a great deal of power to the president, the division of powers between the executive and legislative branch has been both formalized and respected by actors in both institutions. While critics of this superpresidential system are many, none of these opponents of the new institutional order are prepared to take to the streets to change it. On the contrary, budgets have been passed, governments approved, and laws enacted in a relatively "normal" and peaceful process.

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Center for International Security and Arms Control in "Cooperative Business Ventures between U.S. Companies and Russian Defense Enterprises", David Bernstein, ed.
Authors
Michael A. McFaul
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Since the collapse of communism and commensurate disappearance of containment as the organizing principle of American foreign policy, U.S. foreign policymakers have lacked a unifying framework for interpreting the international system or a grand strategy for guiding U.S. actions in this system. Lacking a grand strategy, American motivations and objectives in international affairs often seem ambiguous, confused, if not slyly

sinister, to outside observers.

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United States Army War College in "The United States and Russia into the 21st Century"
Authors
Michael A. McFaul
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U.S. President Bill Clinton won the debate on foreign policy in this year's presidential campaign. He won it by avoiding it. Foreign policy issues have been so remote to this election campaign that Jim Lehrer, the moderator of the presidential debates, had to beg the audience for a foreign policy question.

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Moscow Times
Authors
Michael A. McFaul
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