Countries that ratify human rights treaties voluntarily compromise their sovereignty by subjecting their behavior to externally imposed limits and scrutiny. Why, then, is ratification so prevalent? Using data for over 130 countries between 1966 and 1999, I examine whether the content of the International Human Rights Covenants and the costs associated with their ratification affect levels of commitment. I focus specifically on three theoretical perspectives: realism, world polity institutionalism, and the clash of civilizations.

As democracy has spread over the past three decades to a majority of the world's states, analytic attention has turned increasingly from explaining regime transitions to evaluating and explaining the character of democratic regimes. Much of the democracy literature of the 1990s was concerned with the consolidation of democratic regimes. In recent years, social scientists as well as democracy practitioners and aid agencies have sought to develop means of framing and assessing the quality of democracy. This stream of theory, methodological innovation, and empirical research has three broad motives: first, that deepening democracy is a moral good, if not an imperative; second, that reforms to improve democratic quality are essential if democracy is to achieve the broad and durable legitimacy that marks consolidation; and third, that long-established democracies must also reform if they are to attend to their own gathering problems of public dissatisfaction and even disillusionment. In fact, these latter trends, the broad decline of public confidence in governmental and political institutions, the growing citizen alienation from political parties in particular, and the widespread perceptions that democratic governments and politicians are increasingly corrupt, self-interested and unresponsive are common to many democracies, new and old, and have even led prominent researchers to speak of a "crisis of democracy."

This paper first discusses the current situation in Afghanistan, including ongoing security issues and the status of state institutions. It then focuses specifically on the state of the judiciary, its legal and historical underpinnings. Finally, the paper addresses the key challenges in building a justice system in Afghanistan, and the role of the international community in this process.

Women's human rights lie at the intersection of two intellectual and political movements: gender equality, and multiculturalism. In this chapter I argue that the role and the reach of regional human rights institutions should be expanded so that they participate more fully in developing women's human rights jurisprudence. Regional courts could help to mediate between the human right to be equal and the human right to be different. Regional human rights institutions could provide an important institutional supplement to better adjudicate differences between national and international human rights standards.

Big dams built for irrigation, power, water supply, and other purposes were among the most potent symbols of economic development for much of the twentieth century. Of late they have become a lightning rod for challenges to this vision of development as something planned by elites with scant regard for environmental and social consequences, especially for the populations that are displaced as their homelands are flooded. In this book, Sanjeev Khagram traces changes in our ideas of what constitutes appropriate development through the shifting transnational dynamics of big dam construction.

Khagram tells the story of a growing, but contentious, world society that features novel and increasingly efficacious norms of appropriate behavior in such areas as human rights and environmental protection. The transnational coalitions and networks led by nongovernmental groups that espouse such norms may seem weak in comparison with states, corporations, and such international agencies as the World Bank. Yet they became progressively more effective at altering the policies and practices of these historically more powerful actors and organizations from the 1970s on.

Khagram develops these claims in a detailed ethnographic account of the transnational struggles around the Narmada River Valley Dam Projects, a huge complex of thirty large and more than three thousand small dams. He offers further substantiation through a comparative historical analysis of the political economy of big dam projects in India, Brazil, South Africa, and China as well as by examining the changing behavior of international agencies and global companies. The author concludes with a discussion of the World Commission on Dams, an innovative attempt in the late 1990s to generate new norms among conflicting stakeholders.

Among the constellation of states with interesting constitutional stories to tell, tiny Moldova holds a unique place. It is one of only a handful of countries that has ever switched the structure of its constitutional system midstream without experiencing a democratic breakdown. Whereas some countries, such as Nigeria, have been able to adopt a different kind of constitution following their return to democracy - after a military or authoritarian regime has been swept from power - only a handful have ever managed to change their institutions midstream without experiencing such an intervening crisis.