Emilie Marie Hafner-Burton

Network Analysis for International Relations

International relations research has regarded networks as a particular mode of organization, distinguished from markets or state hierarchies. In contrast, network analysis permits the investigation and measurement of network structures -- emergent properties of persistent patterns of relations among agents that can define, enable, and constrain those agents. Network analysis offers both a toolkit for identifying and measuring the structural properties of networks and a set of theories, typically drawn from contexts outside international relations, that relate structures to outcomes. Network analysis challenges conventional views of power in international relations by defining network power in three different ways: access, brokerage, and exit options. Two issues are particularly important to international relations: the ability of actors to increase their power by enhancing and exploiting their network positions, and the fungibility of network power. The value of network analysis in international relations has been demonstrated in precise description of international networks, investigation of network effects on key international outcomes, testing of existing network theory in the context of international relations, and development of new sources of data. Partial or faulty incorporation of network analysis, however, risks trivial conclusions, unproven assertions, and measures without meaning. A three-part agenda is proposed for future application of network analysis to international relations: import the toolkit to deepen research on international networks; test existing network theories in the domain of international relations; and test international relations theories using the tools of network analysis.

Mainstreaming gender in the European Union

This article examines and explains the adoption of gender mainstreaming by the European Union (EU), and traces its implementation in five issue-areas of EU policy: Structural Funds, employment, development, competition, and science, research and development. The EU decision to adopt gender mainstreaming, as well as its variable implementation across issue-areas, can be explained in terms of three factors derived from social movement theory: the political opportunities offered by EU institutions in various issue-areas; the mobilizing structures, or European networks, established among the advocates of gender equality; and the efforts of such advocates to strategically frame the gender-mainstreaming mandate so as to ensure its acceptance by EU policy-makers.

Justice Lost! The Failure of International Human Rights Law To Matter Where Needed Most*

International human rights treaties have been ratified by many nation-states, including those ruled by repressive governments, raising hopes for better practices in many corners of the world. Evidence increasingly suggests, however, that human rights laws are most effective in stable or consolidating democracies or in states with strong civil society activism. If so, treaties may be failing to make a difference in those states most in need of reform — the worlds worst abusers — even though they have been the targets of the human rights regime from the very beginning. The authors address this question of compliance by focusing on the behavior of repressive states in particular. Through a series of cross-national analyses on the impact of two key human rights treaties, the article demonstrates that (1) governments, including repressive ones, frequently make legal commitments to human rights treaties, subscribing to recognized norms of protection and creating opportunities for socialization and capacity-building necessary for lasting reforms; (2) these commitments mostly have no effects on the worlds most terrible repressors even long into the future; (3) recent findings that treaty effectiveness is conditional on democracy and civil society do not explain the behavior of the worlds most abusive governments; and (4) realistic institutional reforms will probably not help to solve this problem.

Power Positions International Organizations, Social Networks, and Conflict

A growing number of international relations scholars argue that intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) promote peace. Existing approach esemphasize IGO membership as an important causal attribute of individual states, much like economic development and regime type. The authors use social network analysis to show that IGO memberships also create a disparate distribution of social power, significantly shaping conflicts between states. Membership partitions states into structurally equivalent clusters and establishes hierarchies of prestige in the international system. These relative positions promote common beliefs and alter the distribution of social power, making certain policy strategies more practical or rational. The authors introduce new IGO relational data and explore the empirical merits of their approach during the period from 1885 to 1992. They demonstrate that conflict is increased by the presence of many other states in structurally equivalent clusters, while large prestige disparities and in-group favoritism decrease it.

International Human Rights Law and the Politics of Legitimation: Repressive States and Human Rights Treaties

This study explores, with quantitative data analyses, why nation-states with very negative human rights records tend to sign and ratify human rights treaties at rates similar to those of states with positive records. The studys core arguments are (1) that the deepening international human rights regime creates opportunities for rights-violating governments to display low-cost legitimating commitments to world norms, leading them to ratify human rights treaties without the capacity or willingness to comply with the provisions; and (2) that among repressive regimes, autonomous ones that are less constrained by domestic forces are more likely to ratify human rights treaties as symbolic commitment, because these sovereigns are free to entertain high levels of decoupling between policy and practice, while constrained governments are more reluctant to incite domestic (and foreign) oppositions and interest groups. The combined outcome is that repressive states ratify human rights treaties at least as frequently as non-repressive ones — particularly those repressive states that have greater autonomy. Our cross-national time-series analyses provide supportive evidence for these arguments.

Right or Robust? The Sensitive Nature of Repression to Globalization

A growing number of studies provide quantitative evidence that economic globalization encourages government protection of human rights: trade and investment advance civil and political rights and encourage governments to refrain from violations of the right to life, liberty, and the security of the person. Other studies provide evidence that globalization promotes government repression of human rights: the arbitrary arrest, torture, forced disappearance, or extra-judicial killing of citizens, activists, or dissidents by state security forces under the control of ruling state elites. This article employs a variant of Extreme Bounds Analysis in order to analyze the robustness of this growing body of important but contradictory inferences. It argues that (1) we can make robust empirical claims about the relationship between certain trade and investment indicators and government repression, but shows that (2) cumulative knowledge across studies nevertheless remains limited by the sensitivity of many indicators to conditioning sets of information. This problem stems from vaguely specified theoretical mechanisms linking economic processes to government repression and is of potentially great consequence for scholarship seeking to explain the causes of human rights violations, in particular, and the effects of economic globalization, in general.

Making Human Rights a Reality

Preface ix Research xiii Introduction xv 1 The Problem of Human Rights 1 Part I The Calculus of Abuse 19 2 Contexts 21 3 Rationales 29 Part II International Law 41 4 The International Human Rights Legal System 44 5 Scholarly Perspectives 67 6 Practitioner Perspectives 86 7 System Reform 116 Part III A Stewardship Strategy 135 8 The Status Quo 138 9 Nongovernmental Organizations 151 10 National Human Rights Institutions 164 11 Triage 176 12 Making More of Law and Power 193 Notes 199 Index 267

Power or Plenty How Do International Trade Institutions Affect Economic Sanctions

Does the dramatic rise of the number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) worldwide make economic sanctions more likely through increasing the leverage of the powerful and pitting states against each other in competition (power) or less likely through increasing the benefits of trade, resolving disputes, and promoting like-minded communities (plenty)? The authors offer the first systematic test of these propositions, testing hypotheses on sanctions onset using a data set of episodes from 1947 through 2000. In favor of the plenty argument, increases in bilateral trade do decrease sanctioning behavior; in favor of the power argument, an increase in the potential sanctioners GDP or centrality in the network of all PTAs make sanctioning much more likely. However, mutual membership in PTAs has no direct effect on the propensity of states to sanction each other.

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on International Law and International Relations: The State of the Art

POLITICAL SCIENCE RESEARCH ON INTERNATIONAL LAW: THE STATE OF THE FIELD By Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, David G. Victor, and Yonatan Lupu* The discipline of political science has developed an active research program on the devel- opment, operation, spread, and impact of international legal norms, agreements, and institu- tions. Meanwhile, a growing number of public international lawyers have developed an interest in political science research and methods. 1 For more than two decades, scholars have been call- ing for international lawyers and political scientists to collaborate, and have suggested possible * Emilie M. Hafner-Burton and David G. Victor are Co-directors of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation and Professors at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, San Diego. Yonatan Lupu is a lawyer and a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at UCSD. We thank participants in the “mapping the field” project at the laboratory for detailed research on what political science has learned in various issue areas—including Karl Kruse, Mihaela Papa, Michael Plouffe, and Hallie Stohler. For com- ments on earlier drafts, we thank participants at the UCLA Law School faculty seminar and participants at a review meeting on December 10, 2010, at UCSD—including Kenneth Abbott, Tim Bu¨the, Peter Cowhey, Peter Goure- vitch, Stephan Haggard, Miles Kahler, Robert Keohane, Daniel Klerman, Barbara Koremenos, David Lake, Kat- erina Linos, Edward Mansfield, Lisa Martin, Helen Milner, Jon Pevehouse, Eric Posner, Tonya Putnam, Duncan Snidal, Alan Sykes, and Michael Tomz. Thanks also to Nicole Deitelhoff, Martha Finnemore, and Ann Towns for comments on our second draft, to Linda Wong for editorial assistance, and to Greg Shaffer and Tom Ginsburg for sharing an early draft of their related article, which appears in this same issue of the Journal. Some of these legal works that draw, in part, on political science methods and concepts look across many sub- stantive areas of law and focus on topics such as the role of law in managing economic relations, the effectiveness of law, legitimacy, and game-theoretic perspectives. See, e.g., Jeffrey L. Dunoff & Joel P. Trachtman, Economic Anal- ysis of International Law, 24 Y ALE J. I NT ’ L L. 1, 3 (1999); J ACK L. G OLDSMITH & E RIC A. P OSNER , T HE L IMITS OF I NTERNATIONAL L AW (2005); Jack Goldsmith, Sovereignty, International Relations Theory, and International Law, 52 S TAN . L. R EV . 959 (2000) (book review); Claire R. Kelly, Realist Theory and Real Constraints, 44 V A . J. I NT ’ L L. 545 (2004); Richard A. Falk, The Relevance of Political Context to the Nature and Functioning of Inter- national Law: An Intermediate View, in T HE R ELEVANCE OF I NTERNATIONAL L AW : E SSAYS IN H ONOR OF L EO G ROSS 133 (Karl W. Deutsch & Stanley Hoffmann eds., 1968); J UTTA B RUNN E ´ E & S TEPHEN J. T OOPE , L EGIT - IMACY AND L EGALITY IN I NTERNATIONAL L AW : A N I NTERACTIONAL A CCOUNT (2010); John K. Setear, An Iterative Perspective on Treaties: A Synthesis of International Relations Theory and International Law, 37 H ARV . I NT ’ L L.J. 139 (1996); Jens David Ohlin, Nash Equilibrium and International Law, 96 C ORNELL L. R EV . 869 (2011). Some legal studies, drawing on political science methods and concepts, examine the functioning of legal machinery. See, e.g., John K. Setear, Responses to Breach of a Treaty and Rationalist International Relations Theory: The Rules of Release and Remediation in the Law of Treaties and the Law of State Responsibility, 83 V A . L. R EV . 1 (1997). A large and growing body of legal literature, drawing from political science, focuses on particular issue areas, most notably human rights. See, e.g., Oona A. Hathaway, Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference?, 111 Y ALE L.J. 1935 (2002); Laurence R. Helfer, Overlegalizing Human Rights: International Relations Theory and the Commonwealth Caribbean Backlash Against Human Rights Regimes, 102 C OLUM . L. R EV . 1832 (2002). In addition, a large literature addresses the environment. See, e.g., Jutta Brunne´e & Stephen J. Toope, The Chang- ing Nile Basin Regime: Does Law Matter?, 43 H ARV . I NT ’ L L.J. 105 (2002); Eyal Benvenisti, Collective Action in the Utilization of Shared Freshwater: The Challenges of International Water Resources Law, 90 AJIL 384 (1996); Jonathan Baert Wiener, Global Environmental Regulation: Instrument Choice in Legal Context, 108 Y ALE L.J. 677 (1999). Trade law is one among various other areas drawing on political science scholarship. See, e.g., G. Richard Shell, Trade Legalism and International Relations Theory: An Analysis of the World Trade Organization, 44 D UKE L.J. This article is reproduced with permission from the January 2012 issue of the American Journal of International Law

A Social Science of Human Rights

Why do governments abuse human rights, and what can be done to deter and reverse abusive practices? This article examines the emerging social science on these two questions. Over the last few decades, scholars have made considerable progress in answering the first one. Abuse stems, centrally, from conflict and institutions. Answers to the second question are more elusive because data are scarce and the relationships between cause and effect are hard to pin down. Lively debates concern the effectiveness of tools such as military intervention, economic policy, international law, and information strategies for protecting human rights. The evidence suggests that despite the explosion of international legal instruments, this strategy has had impact only in special circumstances. Powerful states play central roles in protecting human rights through sanctions, impartial military intervention, and other tools – often applied unilaterally, which suggests that there is an ongoing tension between the legitimacy of broad multilateral legal institutions and narrower strategies that actually work. The best approaches to managing human rights depend on the political organization of the abuser. Where strong centralized organizations are the problem, the best strategies alter the incentives of leaders at the top; where abuse arises from disarray, such as during civil war or fragile democratic transition, the key tasks include reducing agency slack and making organizations stronger and more accountable.