The peaceful end of the Cold War brought about an amazing transformation of international politics, and at the heart of the change was a struggle over new and old ideas, contends Jeffrey Checkel in this absorbing book. He explores political change in the late Soviet period and in post-Soviet Russia and offers fascinating theoretical insights into the effect of ideas on state behavior.

These essays originally appeared as a special issue of the journal International Organization (59, 4, Fall 2005). The collection represents a shift in research on international institutions, from a preoccupation with showing that institutions mattered in world politics to a more recent exploration of the processes, mechanisms, and conditions under which they matter. The emphasis is resolutely eclectic. Rationalism is the social theory of choice for some contributors; others are more comfortable with social constructivism. Still others combine the two. Employing numerous theories, methods, and...

Why are hopes fading for a single European identity? Economic integration has advanced faster and further than predicted, yet the European sense of 'who we are' is fragmenting. Exploiting decades of permissive consensus, Europe's elites designed and completed the single market, the euro, the Schengen passport-free zone, and, most recently, crafted an extraordinarily successful policy of enlargement. At the same time, these attempts to de-politicize politics, to create Europe by stealth, have produced a political backlash. This ambitious survey of identity in Europe captures the experiences of...

Civil wars are the dominant form of violence in the contemporary international system, yet they are anything but local affairs. This book explores the border-crossing features of such wars by bringing together insights from international relations theory, sociology, and transnational politics with a rich comparative-quantitative literature. It highlights the causal mechanisms framing, resource mobilization, socialization, among others that link the international and transnational to the local, emphasizing the methods required to measure them. Contributors examine specific mechanisms leading...

Advances in qualitative methods and recent developments in the philosophy of science have led to an emphasis on explanation via reference to causal mechanisms. This book argues that the method known as process tracing is particularly well suited to developing and assessing theories about such mechanisms. The editors begin by establishing a philosophical basis for process tracing - one that captures mainstream uses while simultaneously being open to applications by interpretive scholars. Equally important, they go on to establish best practices for individual process-tracing accounts - how...