H. Richard Friman

Informal economies, immigrant entrepreneurship and drug crime in Japan

With few exceptions, criminal entrepreneurship has been excluded from the broader scholarly and political debates over immigrant business. Drawing on the case of illicit drug markets in Japan, I argue that entrepreneurship has increased during the 1990s, though not to the extent claimed in the public debate over immigrant criminality. Immigrant entrepreneurship patterns in the illicit drug trade appear to be shaped by the resources of different migrant groups and, more importantly, by interrelated and shifting opportunity structures found in Japans formal, informal and criminal domains.

Side-payments versus security cards: domestic bargaining tactics in international economic negotiations

The literature on international economic cooperation has devoted relatively little attention to domestic bargaining tactics and their determinants. Recent scholarship has tended to stress the utility and frequency of side-payments while discounting other prominent bargaining tactics and a broader understanding of tactical choice. This article argues that policymakers choose among domestic bargaining tactics to garner support when faced with situations in which other government officials or societal interest groups block the ratification of international economic agreements. Focusing on offers of side-payments and attempts at issue redefinition, the articles findings suggest that differences in domestic resistance to proposals of material compensation and in external security threat may explain choices between those tactics in domestic bargaining.

The great escape? Globalization, immigrant entrepreneurship and the criminal economy

Scholars have long posited that an ethnic division of labour influences the opportunity structures faced by immigrants, relegating them to the margins in the formal, informal and criminal economies. Opportunity structures, however, are embedded in broader economic contexts and, as argued by the globalization literature these contexts appear to be undergoing a striking change. This articles explores the extent to which dynamics of economic globalization have altered the ethnic division of labour in the core sector of the criminal economy – the illicit drug trade. A plausibility probe of patterns of immigrant participation in the illicit drug sector in Japan, Germany and the US reveals that rather than altering the nature of ethnic divisions of labour in the criminal economy, globalization appears to be reinforcing existing patterns of selective marginalization and empowerment.

Rocks, hard places, and the new protectionism: textile trade policy choices in the United States and Japan

Why have advanced industrial countries responded with different types of protectionist policy to postwar international competition and the resulting societal pressure for state action? In contrast to the across-the-board tariff wars of the 1930s, postwar protectionism is a patchwork of tariffs, unilateral and nonunilateral quotas, administrative restrictions, state subsidies, and production cartels. Arguments based on international economic structure, international regimes, statist approaches, and domestic structure all appear to have difficulty in accounting for divergent trade policy choices. This article introduces a more nuanced identification and integration of the international and domestic sources of the new protectionism. An examination of textile trade policy in the United States and Japan reveals that when state policymakers face conflicting international constraints and domestic pressure over the use of overt types of protectionist policy, the greater the domestic pressure, the more overt the policy response.

International pressure and domestic bargains

Japanese drug control policy has been relatively underexplored by the prominent literature on the international drug trade. This article reveals that, although adopted largely in response to U.S. pressure, recent Japanese regulations on money laundering related to the drug trade, and their predecessors, have been primarily shaped by domestic political dynamics.

Conclusion: Exploring the Politics of Leverage

State and nonstate actors turning to combinations of public identification and condemnation of normative noncompliance and threats and implementation of material sanction to try to influence target behavior have become a prominent dimension of international politics. Charged with unpacking conventional approaches to naming and shaming, the preceding chapters have identified policy instruments, causal mechanisms, and contextual factors shaping the effectiveness of name, shame, and sanction. In this final chapter, I draw on these contributions to derive a framework for analysis of naming and shaming. I argue for a focus on the politics of leverage: the ways in which actors combine instruments of name, shame, and sanction to purposefully influence the behavior of targets and the conditions under which these combinations are more likely to be effective.

Introduction: Unpacking the Mobilization of Shame

On 21 August 2013, the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad launched chemical weapons against opposition forces operating out of key Damascus suburbs, killing an estimated 1,429 people “including at least 426 children” (US Assessment 2013). The Obama administration condemned the attack as a clear violation of international norms and a crime against humanity by the al-Assad regime. The administration’s efforts to mobilize a coordinated international military response quickly stalled. The UN Security Council remained paralyzed by Russian and Chinese support for the al-Assad regime. Traditional US allies also failed to step forward. Most notably, the British parliament rejected Prime Minister David Cameron’s motion to join with the United States. Opposition reflected the legacy of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as questions over US claims over who was actually responsible for the chemical weapons attack (Watt and Hopkins 2013).

From Policy Beliefs to Policy Choices: The Resurgence of Tariff Retaliation in the U.S. Pursuit of Fair Trade

Policymakers hold and seek to act on beliefs concerning trade strategies as well as those concerning trade tactics and instruments. In contrast to prominent hypotheses in the literature, this article argues that constraints placed on specific dimensions of trade policy by societal groups and state institutions appear to play a greater role in shaping the impact of beliefs on policy choices than overall shifts in discretion accorded to policymakers. Insights into the resurgence of the retaliatory tariff in U.S. trade policy during I985-88 are at the interaction of policy beliefs and variation in executive discretion. Although lending support to scholarship focusing on the interaction of ideas and institutions, these findings raise questions concerning prominent claims about the significance of policy beliefs.

Behind the Curtain: Naming and Shaming in International Drug Control

Human rights scholarship explores naming and shaming as an integral means of leverage against noncompliant governments. Transnational advocacy networks utilize public exposure of human rights abuses to try to influence governments, both those who are failing to live up to legal and normative commitments and those that have been standing on the sidelines as abuses are taking place (e.g., Keck and Sikkink 1998; Risse and Ropp 2013; Risse and Sikkink 1999). The results of these efforts have been mixed, leading scholars to explore the conditions under which human rights naming and shaming is more or less likely to be effective (e.g., Franklin 2008; Hafner-Burton 2008; Krain 2012; Lebovic and Voeten 2006; Lebovic and Voeten 2009; Murdie and Davis 2012; Ron, Ramos, and Rodgers 2005).

Behind the Curtain

Excerpt] On August 31, 2004, for the first time, the nation’s mutual fund companies reported how they cast their proxy votes at the public companies in which they invest. The disclosure is the result of Securities and Exchange Commission rules adopted in January 2003, rules that the AFL-CIO first petitioned for in December 2000 and that the mutual fund industry strenuously opposed. This report evaluates how the 10 largest mutual fund families voted when presented with the opportunity to curb CEO pay abuses at a dozen S&P 500 companies in 2004. We chose executive compensation as our benchmark because, in the words of billionaire investor Warren Buffet, “The acid test for reform will be CEO compensation.”