This activity comes after students are to have listened to a lecture (slides) on international institutions, specifically the impact they have on patterns of armed conflict. The first half focused on peacekeeping, which works better (under some conditions) than many...
This activity comes after students are to have listened to a lecture (slides) on how international institutions promote cooperation. In that lecture, I presented the epiphenomenal critique, which I...
Editor’s Note: this is an abbreviated version of a post that originally appeared on my personal blog. In my previous post, I articulated one way international institutions can deter bad behavior. In...
Editor’s Note: this is an abbreviated version of a post that originally appeared on my personal blog. How can international institutions foster cooperation given that they lack enforcement...
A strong correlation between cooperation and membership in international institutions is not enough to establish that international institutions cause cooperation.  If we're to claim that institutions matter, we need to at least identify mechanisms by which institutions might promote cooperation among actors who would otherwise be disinclined to cooperate with one another.  The mere fact that such mechanisms can be articulated does not itself tell us whether the correlation is causal, but it lends a certain measure of plausible to causal interpretations that would otherwise be lacking....
My Theories of International Relations course spent this week discussing Rousseau, a theorist whose relevance to international relations is a little unclear at first glance. Hobbes and Locke have been -- if badly -- imported into the canon of IR theory, largely through the use of their definitions of the state of nature as accounts of the international system. Individuals in Hobbes' state of nature, famously, lead lives that are "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short," as they are perpetually on guard against someone else's killing them; IR realists often use this as a description of...
The judicial organ of ECOWAS has found the government of Niger guilty of failing to prevent slavery within its borders. "The landmark ruling, the first of its kind by a regional tribunal now sitting in Niamey, Niger’s capital, ordered the government to pay about $19,000 in damages to the woman, Hadijatou Mani, who is now 24.Slavery is outlawed throughout Africa, but it persists in pockets of Niger, Mali, Mauritania and amid conflicts like the one in northern Uganda. Antislavery organizations estimate that 43,000 people are enslaved in Niger alone. Ms. Mani’s experience was typical of the...