Explanations of the International Community Deadlock in Bosnia and Herzegovina

La Bosnie-Herzégovine est sous supervision internationale depuis 1995. Les principaux acteurs de cette communauté internationale soit l’Union Européenne (UE) et le Bureau du Haut-Représentant à la Communauté Internationale (OHR) ont exprimé à de nombreuses reprises leur intention de transformer la mission internationale en s’éloignant du pouvoir discrétionnaire du OHR en le remplaçant par la perspective d’intégration offerte par l’UE. Malgré les bonnes intentions, cette transition semble être dans une impasse. Depuis 2006, l’organisation et la distribution des responsabilités au sein de la communauté internationale sont restées inchangées. Ce mémoire s’intéresse à ces deux principaux acteurs et à leur rôle dans l’impasse. L’objectif est de tester trois cadres d’analyse soit le rationalisme, le constructivisme et la complexité des régimes pouvant expliquer cette impasse. En se basant sur des interviews avec des experts et des représentants des deux institutions, ce mémoire explore dans quelle mesure et dans quels contextes chaque cadre d’analyse est apte à expliquer le comportement des acteurs.

A Comparative Study on Internationalization and the Role of International Offices at Selected Middle Eastern and German Universities

Internationalization of higher education has become one of the most important policies for institutions of higher education worldwide. Though universities are international by nature, the need for intensified quality activities of international nature has promoted internationalization to be under spotlight of researchers, administrators and policy makers and to be an area for research. Each institution follows its certain way to govern its international affairs. Most Universities, especially in the 'Developed World' started to plan it strategically. This study explores the meanings and importance of internationalization especially that it means different things to different people. It also studies the rationales behind internationalizing higher education. It focuses on the four main prevailing rationales; political, cultural/social, economic/financial, and academic on both national and institutional levels. With the increasing need to strategically plan, the study explores internationalization strategies in terms of how to develop them, what are their approaches and types, and their components and dimensions. Damascus University has witnessed an overwhelming development of its international relations and activities. Therefore, it started to face a problem of how to deal with this increasing load especially that its International Office is the only unit that deals with the international issues. In order to study the internationalization phenomenon at Damascus University, the 2WH approach, which asks the what, why, and how questions, is used and in order to define the International Office's role in the internationalization process of the University, it studies it and the international offices of Kassel University, and Humboldt University in Germany, The University of Jordan, and Al Baath University in Syria using the 'SOCIAL' approach that studies and analyses the situation, organization, challenges, involvement, ambitions, and limitations of these offices. The internationalization process at the above-mentioned Universities is studied and compared in terms of its meaning, rationales for both the institution and its academic staff, challenges and strategic planning. Then a comparison is made among the international offices of the Universities to identify their approaches, what led to their success and what led to their failure in their practices. The aim is to provide Damascus University and its International Office with some good practices and, depending on the experiences of the professionals of the case-studies, a suggested guidance to the work of this Office and the University in general is given. The study uses the interviews with the different officials and stakeholders of the case-studies as the main method of collecting the information in addition to site visits, studying their official documents and their websites. The study belongs to qualitative research that has an action dimension in it since the recommendations will be applied in the International Office. The study concludes with few learned lessons for Damascus University and its International Office depending on the comparison that was done according to a set of dimensions. Finally a reflection on the relationship between internationalization of higher education and politics, the impact of politics on Middle Eastern Universities, and institutional internationalization strategies are presented.

Another Waltz? Methodological rhetoric and practice in theory of international politics

Although Theory of International Politics is a standard-bearer for explanatory theory in international relations (IR), Waltz’s methodology has been subject to numerous quite disparate analyses. One reason why it has proved hard to pin down is that too little attention has been paid to how, in practice, Waltz approaches real-world problems. Despite his neopositivist rhetoric, Waltz applies neorealism in a notably loose, even indeterminate, fashion. There is therefore a disjunction between what he says and what he does. This is partly explained by his unsatisfactory attempt to reconcile his avowed neopositivism with his belief that international politics is characterized by organized complexity. The inconsistencies thus created also help to make sense of why competing interpretations of his methodology have emerged. Some aspects of his work do point beyond these particular methodological travails in ways that will continue to be of interest to IR theorists, but its most enduring methodological lesson may be that rhetoric and practice do not necessarily fit harmoniously together.

Of Law, Lawlessness, and Sovereignty : Multinational Peacekeeping and International Law

Laws of war have been carefully defined by individual nations’ own codes of law as well as by supranational bodies. Yet the international scene has seen an increasing movement away from traditionally declared war toward multinational peacekeeping missions geared at containing local conflicts when perceived as potential threats to their respective regions’ political stability. While individual nations’ laws governing warfare presuppose national sovereignty, the multinational nature of peacekeeping scenarios can blur the lines of command structures, soldiers’ national loyalties, occupational jurisdiction, and raise profound questions as to which countries’ moral sense/governmental system is to be the one upheld. Historically increasingly complex international relations have driven increasingly detailed internationally drafted guidelines for countries’ interactions while at war, yet there are operational, legislative, and moral issues arising in multinational peacekeeping situations which these laws do not address at all. The author analyzes three unique peacekeeping operations in light of these legislative voids and suggests systematic points to consider to the end of protecting the peacekeepers, the national interests of the countries involved, operational matters, and clearly delineating both the objective and logical boundaries of a given multinational peacekeeping mission.

Economic relations of Brazil and the United States and the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative

Includes bibliography

Is there a ‚Depth versus Participation‘ Dilemma in International Cooperation?

Much of the International Relations literature assumes that there is a “depth versus participation” dilemma in international politics: shallower international agreements attract more countries and greater depth is associated with less participation. We argue that this conjecture is too simple and probably misleading because the depth of any given cooperative effort is in fact multidimensional. This multidimensionality manifests itself in the design characteristics of international agreements: in particular, the specificity of obligations, monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, dispute settlement mechanisms, positive incentives (assistance), and organizational structures (secretariats). We theorize that the first three of these design characteristics have negative and the latter three have positive effects on participation in international cooperative efforts. Our empirical testing of these claims relies on a dataset that covers more than 200 global environmental treaties. We find a participation-limiting effect for the specificity of obligations, but not for monitoring and enforcement. In contrast, we observe that assistance provisions in treaties have a significant and substantial positive effect on participation. Similarly, dispute settlement mechanisms tend to promote treaty participation. The main implication of our study is that countries do not appear to stay away from agreements with monitoring and enforcement provisions, but that the inclusion of positive incentives and dispute settlement mechanisms can promote international cooperation. In other words, our findings suggest that policymakers do not necessarily need to water down global treaties in order to obtain more participation.

Agents, Trustees, and International Courts: Nomination and Appointment of Judicial Candidates in the WTO Appellate Body

Scholars have increasingly theorized, and debated, the decision by states to create and delegate authority to international courts, as well as the subsequent autonomy and behavior of those courts, with principal–agent and trusteeship models disagreeing on the nature and extent of states’ influence on international judges. This article formulates and tests a set of principal–agent hypotheses about the ways in which, and the conditions under which, member states are able use their powers of judicial nomination and appointment to influence the endogenous preferences of international judges. The empirical analysis surveys the record of all judicial appointments to the Appellate Body (AB) of the World Trade Organization over a 15-year period. We present a view of an AB appointment process that, far from representing a pure search for expertise, is deeply politicized and offers member-state principals opportunities to influence AB members ex ante and possibly ex post. We further demonstrate that the AB nomination process has become progressively more politicized over time as member states, responding to earlier and controversial AB decisions, became far more concerned about judicial activism and more interested in the substantive opinions of AB candidates, systematically championing candidates whose views on key issues most closely approached their own, and opposing candidates perceived to be activist or biased against their substantive preferences. Although specific to the WTO, our theory and findings have implications for the judicial politics of a large variety of global and regional international courts and tribunals.

The Design of International Trade Agreements: Introducing a New Dataset

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have been proliferating for the last twenty years. A large literature has studied various aspects of this phenomenon. Until recently, however, many large-N studies have paid only scant attention to variation across PTAs in terms of content and design. Our contribution to this literature is a new dataset on the design of trade agreements that is the most comprehensive in terms of both variables coded and agreements covered. We illustrate the dataset’s usefulness in re-visiting the questions if and to what extent PTAs impact trade flows. The analysis shows that on average PTAs increase trade flows, but that this effect is largely driven by deep agreements. In addition, we provide evidence that provisions that tackle behind-the-border regulation matter for trade flows. The dataset’s contribution is not limited to the PTA literature, however. Broader debates on topics such as institutional design and the legalization of international relations will also benefit from the novel data.

The Nature of the State in Afghanistan and Its Relations with Neighboring Countries

Since the formation of Afghanistan, its nature as a Pashtun state has affected all its international relations. On the other hand, the fact that it was originally established as a buffer state between Britain and Russia still governs its national integration. In this article I examine Afghanistan's relations with its neighbors through an investigation of its history and the present conditions of its borders with its southern, western and northern neighbors. My aim is to obtain an overall perspective of Afghanistan's relations with its neighbors, historically decisive elements, and the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1954-55 and U.S.-R.O.C Relations

On September 3, 1954, Chinese artillery began shelling Quemoy (Jinmen), one of the Kuomintang-held offshore islands, setting off the first Taiwan Strait Crisis. This paper focuses on the crisis and analyzes the following three questions: (1) What was the policy the U.S. took towards the Republic of China (R.O.C), especially towards the offshore islands, to try to end the Taiwan Strait Crisis? (2) What were the intentions of the U.S. government in trying to end the Taiwan Strait Crisis? And (3) how should U.S. policy towards the R.O.C. which led to solving the Taiwan Strait Crisis be positioned in the history of Sino-American relations? Through analysis of these questions, this study concludes that the position the U.S. took to bring an end to crisis, one which prevented China from “liberating Taiwan” and the Kuomintang from “attacking the mainland,” brought about the existence of a de facto “two-China” situation.

The effects of international politics on oil-exporting developing countries

International politics affects oil trade. But does it affect the oil-exporting developing countries more? We construct a firm-level dataset for all U.S. oil-importing companies over 1986-2008 to examine how these firms respond to changes in "political distance" between the U.S. and her trading partners, measured by divergence in their UN General Assembly voting patterns. Consistent with previous macro evidence, we first show that individual firms diversify their oil imports politically, even after controlling for unobserved firm heterogeneity. We conjecture that the political pattern of oil imports from these individual firms is driven by hold-up risks, because oil trade is often associated with backward vertical FDI. To the extent that developing countries have higher hold-up risks because of their weaker institutions, the political effect on oil trade should be more significant in the developing world. We find that oil import decisions are indeed more elastic when firms import from developing countries, although the reverse is true in the short run. Our results suggest that international politics can affect oil revenue and hence long-term development in the developing world.

Chairship system and decision making by consensus in international agreements : the case of ASEAN

How are different positions reconciled under decision making by consensus in international agreements? This article aims to answer this question. Consensus rule provides each participant a veto, which risks resulting in non-agreement. Taking ASEAN as a case study of international organizations that have adopted consensus rule as the main decision-making procedure, this article presents the chairship system as an analytical scheme to examine how different positions are or are not reconciled under consensus rule. The system is based on conventional knowledge regarding the chair in international conference, which can be defined as an institution where the role of the chair is taken by one member state in an international organization and plays a role in agenda-setting. The agenda-setting power given to the chair varies across organizations. This article assumes that the chair in ASEAN is given a relatively strong agenda-setting power to enable the chair to reach agreements and bias such agreements in its own favor.