Domestic Institutions,Trade Disputes,and the Monitoring and Enforcement of International Law

Why do some governments participate more actively in the enforcement of international law than others? In the context of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)/World Trade Organization (WTO), I argue that domestic institutions – and, specifically, the electoral rule – can account for these differences. Interest groups are frequently harmed when foreign governments violate international law and have compliance information, but they lack access to formal enforcement mechanisms, such as dispute settlement bodies. I identify two complementary effects of domestic institutions. Where domestic institutions increase the government’s responsiveness to interest groups, the government is more likely to enforce international law on their behalf. In turn, because they expect that rule violations are more likely to be enforced, interest groups are more willing to contribute to the monitoring of international law. Hence, interest groups are more likely to provide the information necessary for enforcement, and governments are more likely to be aware of rule violations and to provide enforcement. Empirical evidence from the GATT/WTO is consistent with these propositions.     

Controlling the Police in Buenos Aires: A Case Study of Horizontal and Social Accountability

The article analyses the interaction between various forms of accountability on the basis of a case study of responses to the Federal Police of Argentina's practice of framing innocent victims. The failure of classic agencies of balance to establish accountability was compensated in this case by the creation of an ad hoc agency of oversight, an investigative commission established by the Attorney General, that interacted with social agents of accountability. The analysis points to the ambivalent role of the media in both supporting and exposing illegal police practices and shows that the cooperation between the commission and social actors was crucial to its success.     

刑罚配置的双重基准——一个基于刑法微观层面的诠释

从刑法微观层面而言,刑罚轻重的配置应立足于双重基准:即刑法所保护价值的重要程度和行为人对立态度的有无及其程度。一方面,刑法所保护价值即犯罪客体的不同直接制约刑罚的轻重,在同类型犯罪中,刑罚轻重则深受对刑法所保护价值造成的损害程度的影响;另一方面,凡体现行为人对立态度及其程度的因素如犯罪故意、犯罪过失、犯罪动机、犯罪目的、中止犯、自首犯、立功犯、胁从犯、累犯等均为直接制约刑罚配置的要素。     

John Locke,the state of nature and terrorism

This paper examines John Locke's political theory in order to see if it can offer any important insights into how to deal with international terrorism. The paper begins by outlining the central aspects of Locke's social contract theory and the way that Locke thinks that it is mirrored in international relations. A general definition of ‘state of nature’ and ‘legitimate common authority’ is offered that is then applied to both civil conflict and international terrorism. The situation that nation-states find themselves in with respect to international terrorist organisations is then analysed in terms of these concepts. The United Nations and the European Union are then examined in order to see if they fulfil the criteria of legitimate common authority necessary to deal with international terrorism in a just and unbiased manner.     

Domestic actors and liberalization: a case study of internal and external pressures in Moi's Kenya

The diffusion of political and economic liberalization to countries all across the world over the last 30 years has raised questions about the influence of domestic and international actors. Most scholars have given credit to international actors such as the USA, Western European countries, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank for the spread of liberalization or any political openness and/or market-oriented reform. Their external-actors-focused explanations have been almost exclusively at the expense of domestic actors. They have essentially viewed domestic actors as simply receivers of liberalizing change or incapable of initiating reform. As a result, international development policies and programs have tended to focus on what these external actors can do to force other countries to liberalize. While recognizing the influence of these external actors, this article reverses this emphasis and notes that the focus should be on internal actors and factors, primarily social movements/groups and opposition political polities that are agitating for reform. This article is a case study on Kenya that shows how domestic factors and actors pressured the Moi government to embrace reform starting in the 1980s.     

Bargaining Between Rebel Groups and the Outside Option of Violence

Although military cooperation among rebel groups in multi-party civil wars could help rebels defeat or extract concessions from an incumbent government, violent conflict among rebel groups is empirically prevalent. Why do rebel groups in multi-party civil wars choose to fight one another? This article models the strategic dilemma facing rebel groups in multi-party civil wars as an alternating-offer bargaining game of incomplete information with an outside option. The game-theoretic model explores the relationship between the status quo distribution of power among rebel groups, the costs of fighting, and the likelihood that one rebel group will opt to unilaterally end bargaining over a set of goods, such as access to supply routes, natural resources, and control over civilian populations. We show that the likelihood of violent conflict between rebel groups is lowest when the status quo distribution of benefits reflects the existing distribution of power.     

Studying a negative external actor: Russia's management of stability and instability in the ‘Near Abroad’

The literature on transition and democratization was for long dominated by internal explanatory factors such as economic performance, civil society, institutions, etc. Only recently have external actors' democratizing efforts – like those of the US and the EU – been systematically incorporated. But the perspective remains too constrained, since only ‘positive’ external actors are considered, while possible ‘negative’ actors are left aside. This article attempts to rectify some of the imbalance. First, an analytical framework that can be used to analyse both positive and negative external actors is proposed. Then, the framework is put into use through an analysis of the negative effects of Russia's foreign policy in the so-called ‘Near Abroad’. It is argued that two general effects take shape: the ‘policy of managed stability’ and the ‘policy of managed instability’. Both are weakening the democratic perspectives in the post-Soviet area, so I argue that Russia's foreign policy in the ‘Near Abroad’ is a, hitherto, underestimated and badly understood ‘negative’ factor in the literature on transition and democratization in the post-Soviet space.     

Democratic sanctions meet black knight support: revisiting the Belarusian case

Democracy promotion through economic sanctions has become commonplace. Previous studies argue that an important challenge to the effectiveness of democratic sanctions is the contravening support of black knights. However, these studies underestimate conflicting interests between the target and its black knight. In this paper, I propose a bargaining model for understanding how targets obtain support from black knights. The target’s main source of bargaining power is its threat to defect from the black knight and obtain support from an international rival. However, the credibility of this threat decreases with democratic sanctions because they hinder cooperation with a likely source of support, namely the sender. Therefore, targets take steps towards democracy to improve their bargaining position relative to the black knight. To probe my argument, I conduct a deep single case study of EU sanctions against Belarus between 2004 and 2016 with Russia as a black knight. Sanctions should have no effect in this paradigmatic case of black knight support. Yet, there is substantial evidence that democratic sanctions have increased the cost of electoral fraud and state repression in Belarus. This indicates that the conflicting interests of targets and their black knights provide windows of opportunity for democracy promotion.     

The Politics of 'Eurocratic' Structure and the New European Agencies

The establishment of agencies at the European level is one of the most notable recent developments in EU regulatory policy. This article examines how politics has shaped the design of EU regulatory agencies. Building on the American politics literature on delegation, the article explains how principal-agent concerns and political compromise have influenced agency design in the EU context; shows how conflicts between the EU's primary legislative actors - the Council and the Parliament - and its primary executive actor - the Commission - have influenced the design of new bureaucratic agencies; and discusses how the growing power of the European Parliament as a political principal has changed the politics of agency design.     

The Commonwealth of Nations and the EU after the ‘Global’ Crisis: Rethinking Post-2015 ‘Global’ Development?

Abstract

The continuing ‘global’ crisis has accelerated divergences between regions, especially between the ‘rising’ global South, the European Union (EU) of the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) and Cyprus, which belongs to both the Commonwealth and the EU. This article studies the emerging ‘vertical’ divergences between the EU and the global South, especially around the so-called Economic Partnership Agreements, and the parallel ‘horizontal’ divergences among Anglophone, Francophone (the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie) and Lusophone (the Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa) Commonwealths, with their inheritance of emulation and competition. It focuses on the possibilities of enhanced human/citizen security to propose an analysis that challenges established perspectives and points towards prospects for Commonwealth ‘schools’ of international relations/development.