Governments today are too often unwilling to intervene in global commerce, and international organizations are too often unable to govern effectively. In their place, firms increasingly cooperate internationally to establish the rules and standards of behavior for themselves and for others, taking on the mantle of authority to govern specific issue areas. Are they stepping into the breach to supply needed collective goods? Or are they organizing themselves in order to prevent governments from interfering in their business? This book explores the meaning of this private international...

As the debate over global governance heats up, Approaches to Global Governance Theory offers a guide to this new terrain. The contributors advocate approaches to global governance that recognize fundamental political, economic, technological, and cultural dynamics, that engage social and political theory, and that go beyond conventional international relations theory. We are offered here a guide to this new terrain.

Beginning with a chapter tracing the emergence of global governance analysis in the 1990s, Approaches to Global Governance Theory also responds to alternative theoretical...

This book represents a critical yet constructive reappraisal of the role, and the limits, of the boundaries that define and separate disciplines and subfields in the social sciences, as well as the boundaries that divide distinct research traditions or paradigms in the analysis of international life. It provides an integrative and eclectic examination of the virtues of a more flexible division of labor, a division that facilitates more meaningful communication among scholars of different methodological persuasions investigating similar problems in international life.

Part One addresses...

Why Movements Matter is a provocative account of how the Reagan administration relented to pressures created by international peace movements during one of the most dangerous episodes of the Cold War. Breyman provides the first systematic account of the West German anti-missile movement, among the most important citizen mobilizations of postwar Western history. Contrary to conventional wisdom Breyman offers compelling evidence that peace movements, rather than any escalation of Cold War spending or rhetorical belligerence, hastened the demise of the Cold War.

The product of extensive...

Tracing the forty-year history of negotiations to construct exchange rate regimes in the European Union, Money and Power in Europe emphasizes the role of a state's bargaining power for the formation of rules. In contrast to the prevailing literature's emphasis on domestic factors like sectoral and partisan interests, policy ideas and domestic institutional structures, Matthias Kaelberer highlights the structural conflict of interest between weak and strong currency countries over the rules of monetary cooperation. Strong currency countries, in particular Germany, because they do not face a...

Returning to the fundamentals of political science, namely power and governance, this book studies the relationship between information technologies and global politics. Key issue-areas are carefully examined: security (including information warfare and terrorism); global consumption and production; international telecommunications; culture and identity formation; human rights; humanitarian assistance; the environment; and biotechnology. Each demonstrates the validity of the view now prevalent within international relations research--the shifting of power and the locus of authority away from...

Challenging the standard liberal explanations for international cooperation in the field of international relations, this book contends that despite numerous efforts and the passage of time, our understanding of the cooperative phenomenon remains woefully inadequate. Sterling-Folker argues that widespread explanatory reliance on what constitutes functionally efficient choices in global interdependence is deductively illogical and empirically unsound. The author's approach for explaining international cooperation is comprised of realist and constructivist insights and places the state, rather...

Debating the Global Financial Architecture opens up the contemporary debate surrounding the reform of the "global financial architecture." Economists and political scientists explore the economic and technical content of alternative global financial regimes as well as the political processes through which such changes are negotiated. The contributors, though diverse, jointly fear that rapid removal of the remaining controls on private international financial transactions risks systematic crisis. By initiating a cross-disciplinary discussion, they hope to see the politics of global financial...

This collection brings together an unusually distinguished and diverse group of theorists of global politics, political geography, and international political economy who reflect on the concept of political space. Already familiar to political geographers, the concept of political space has lately received increased attention, arising out of the need for new ways of thinking about and describing the actors, structures, and processes that shape politics and patterns of governance in today's complex, post-Cold War world. The essays explore the frontiers of the field of global politics, and each...

Powerful nations have often assumed a leadership role in international relations by becoming involved in ethnic conflict arising within small states. Recently however, their willingness to do so, at least unilaterally, has diminished. This study focuses on why and how powerful nations have acted together to dampen or forestall the expansion of small state conflicts while limiting potential risks to themselves. Employing a case-study method, Barry H. Steiner distinguishes between two types of collective preventive diplomacy, the insulationist and the interventionist. In the former, powerful...