The current international system has been in place since the Treaty of Westphalia. However, states are no longer the only actors in International Relations. Non-governmental organizations, multinational corporations and individuals also take the stage in international relations. This thesis will make use of the English School of International Relations and the reconceptualization of the School introduced by Barry Buzan in From International to World Society? because it offers richer explanatory possibilities for the interaction and role of both state and non-state actors. Using the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the United Nations HIV/AIDS Program (UNAIDS), this thesis will assess Buzan's new model and answer the question that the title of his book asks: Is International Society moving toward a World Society?

One of the most enduring questions for the study of politics relates to what, if any, inde- pendent power international institutions have to affect the behavior of sovereign states. This dissertation addresses this question by examining the politics underlying one supranational judicial body’s exercise of authority—the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Dispute Set- tlement Mechanism (DSM). International courts are strategic legal actors that operate in a highly political context. Politics matter for judicial outcomes—the rulings of courts—but legal constraints moderate the impact of politics in fairly systematic ways. The dissertation specifies the conditions under which one dynamic prevails and demonstrates that power pol- itics do not dominate international judicial interactions. Rather, courts are sensitive to the degree of institutional support they enjoy among the collective membership and a broader set of relevant stakeholders. Collective support for or challenges to a court’s institutional legitimacy—what I call a court’s political capital—affect judicial outcomes more than the preferences of dominant stakeholders. The second chapter develops the dissertation’s theoretical argument, while the third chapter describes the political context within which the WTO’s judicial bodies operate. It applies methods of automated text analysis to an original dataset of all member statements made within the WTO Dispute Settlement Body from 1995-2013 in order to construct measures of the DSM’s political capital. I supplement this evidence with a series of interviews with member representatives and WTO Secretariat officials. The fourth chapter employs original measures of dispute outcomes to identify how WTO panels respond to shifts in the DSM’s political capital. It finds that dispute panels are po- litically savvy, as they tend to signal less deference to national regulatory choices only when the DSM enjoys relatively greater support among the membership as a whole. However, the legal constraints of appellate case law moderate the influence of these political pressures on dispute outcomes. Through their rulings, panels seek to maximize support among their legal and political audiences simultaneously. The fifth chapter turns to the relationship between the Appellate Body (AB) and dis- pute panels. How panels review domestic laws and policy choices can be—and has been increasingly—challenged on appeal by parties. This chapter describes how the AB initially directed panels to engage in searching review of domestic policy choices, but that it has encouraged greater deference to national authorities in recent years. It identifies when the AB reverses panel findings on these grounds, with a focus on when it takes into account views expressed by governments. The final chapter turns to the impact of the WTO’s judicial authority on state behavior, specifically compliance with its judgments. Employing original measures of dispute judg- ments and compliance outcomes, this chapter demonstrates that the WTO’s judicial bodies use the content of their rulings to ease the domestic political costs of trade policy changes, thereby acting as ‘partners in compliance’ with a government’s executive branch. Yet the extent to which these strategies successfully facilitate swifter implementation is conditional on the domestic politics of compliance. The political cover provided within adverse rul- ings has no observable impact on the fact or timing of compliance for disputes that can be implemented through executive action alone. However, relatively greater validation of a trade measure does increase the probability of compliance and swifter implementation when legislative action is required. This suggests that the WTO’s judicial bodies successfully fa- cilitate compliance through the content of their rulings, thereby improving the effectiveness of the dispute settlement system. / Government

Does greater certainty about an adversary’s attributes cause peace? What states believe they can secure through force dictates the diplomatic settlements they will accept. In prevailing accounts which preclude assessment errors, certainty promotes peace as states can readily identify agreements preferable to war. Yet, empirically, high-certainty assessments often contribute to bargaining failure, rather than success. This dissertation resolves the tension. Assessments are not objectively given; leaders must form them through subjective processes. Consistent with behavioral studies, leaders are often more certain than available information warrants. Incorporating these overprecision errors, I show certainty can increase the risk of war. Hence, the relationship between certainty and war is conditional. Whether estimates are overprecise depends on the information leaders receive from advisers who have specialized expertise due to a division of labor. Failure to tap into this expertise generates overprecise estimates. This is particularly likely when leaders fail to gather information pertinent to an adversary’s political (versus military) attributes by marginalizing a state’s diplomats—such as US State Department officials. Bureaucracies affect state behavior through the substantive expertise they provide, not through parochial preference divergences which dissipate during crises. To test the argument I construct a measure of certainty using an original corpus of declassified security documents from US Cold War crises. Quantitative tests using the measure demonstrate that State Department officials provide assessments with less certainty than counterparts and the relationship between certainty and conflict is conditional on the State Department’s role. When State Department officials are heavily involved, certainty leads to peace; when marginalized, certainty is likely due to overprecision and leads to war. Case studies of the Bay of Pigs and Iraq War assess implications that elude quantitative testing. Presidents marginalized diplomats, privileging CIA estimates in 1961 and Pentagon estimates in 2003. Each agency offered high-certainty estimates over political attributes affecting conflict outcomes: popular uprisings in Cuba and stability in post-Saddam Iraq. Overprecision is not a matter of hindsight as marginalized advisers invoked greater uncertainty before hostilities commenced. Integrating behavioralist and rationalist approaches offers greater explanatory power in quantitative tests and provides insights into historical cases that are puzzling for extant theories. Moreover, the dissertation shows that certainty is not strictly welfare enhancing and flags policy conditions conducive to assessment errors and costly foreign policy blunders. / Government

This study examines the foreign policy decisions of Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan in the complex international relations environment of the Caspian Sea region. Specifically, this investigation attempts to answer how regional and global international relations are affected due to the decisions made by these two small energy-rich Caspian Sea countries straddling the saltwater basin. Additionally, Russia has demonstrated that it considers the Russian near abroad to be under its sphere of influence and the future plans that Moscow may have for the region are uncertain. China, the West, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Iran, India, Israel, and Georgia all play a role too, and from this cauldron of interests the leaders of the two Caspian Sea countries must choose their path. Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan are playing delicate balancing acts within their increasingly complex foreign affairs environments. Moreover, each of these two countries is slowly moving in an opposite direction, Turkmenistan is meandering to the East while Azerbaijan continues to look to the West with certain caveats. Conflicting goals of global and regional powers make missteps dangerous. A complex model including variables of identity, geography, resource, and legacy path dependency explains the actions of west-facing Azerbaijan and isolated Turkmenistan. Thus far Turkmenistan has ably negotiated to improve its circumstance as it drifts towards China. Azerbaijan is in a more precarious position and a future conflict is a possibility.

This study aims to understand why the Scottish National Party (SNP) accelerated to prominence after the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. Specifically, this study seeks to answer the following question: To what extent does the European Union (EU) influence the Scottish independence movement and does this trend support the theory of New Medievalism? Data drawn from interviews with members of the 4th Scottish Parliament, comments made by former First Minister Alex Salmond, and scientific polling tend to show that the EU’s increasing institutional powers have facilitated the modern Scottish independence movement’s growth by mitigating the Scottish people’s fears of independence from the UK. However the data also demonstrates that the SNP’s election victory in 2011 was not just an indication of Scottish nationalism, but was a result of the SNP’s competence in government. This investigation concludes that as the EU centralizes power in supranational bodies the process of New Medievalism is working its course by dissolving Westphalian nation states. This process is revealed in the rise of the modern Scottish nationalist movement as well as other subnational independence movements in EU member states. The culmination of this movement was the rise of the SNP and the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.

No description available.

This thesis deals with the role of patents in the transfer of technology and industrialization of developing countries, with a special focus on the role of pharmaceutical patents and the development of the pharmaceutical industry. In particular, this thesis examines the working of patents and the compulsory licensing system in the case of non-working as well as the compulsory licensing system for pharmaceuticals from the perspective of the Paris Convention and the national patent laws. The following problems are addressed: (1) Whether and under what conditions patents facilitate or hinder access to technology and how they can be made to facilitate access of technology to developing countries in particular in the pharmaceutical sector. (2) Whether the obligation to work the patent and the sanctions that are provided when the patent is not being worked, i.e., compulsory licence and revocation, are adequate and effective in promoting the interests of developing countries for industrialization and (3) Whether compulsory licences can be applied in the interest of public health under different circumstances and if they would help the development of the pharmaceutical industry and the transfer of pharmaceutical technology. These problems will be viewed from the perspective of the international system of patent protection as it is embodied in Article 5A of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property and as it interacts with the various national patent laws of member countries.

This thesis provides a genealogy of security. The first two chapters situate it in relation to the discipline of International Relations and present the approach to develop the genealogy. It is argued that what has enabled the lack of problematization of the concept of security within the discipline is precisely the security project of the discipline itself: the securing of an ontological ground through the deployment of epistemological precepts that pervade the way the discipline is predominantly understood and its evolution is retroactively (re)written. I argue that the discipline itself is enabled by, and is a manifestation of, "sovereign thought"---i.e. a form of knowledge inextricably related to the articulation of the sovereign State as the predominant form of social order in modernity. What is revealed is how the structure of sovereign thought occults its generative principles and enables a framing of issues and problems via objective knowledge while simultaneously masking its role as a frame. It is this deployment of knowledge that enables the naturalization of "security." These first two chapters provide the groundwork and the rationale for the genealogical investigation found in the second part of the thesis. The three following chapters apply this approach to the relationship between the meaning(s) to security and the production of social order. This genealogy is developed by tracing the intimate complicity between the meaning to security and the articulation of social order via alterity. These chapters are constructed around three interregna : the shift from Roman Republic to Empire and the advent of Christianity; the shift from Christendom to sovereign State in the classical age; and the advent of the modern sovereign State and the present mutations of sovereign order. Through this genealogy it is argued that our present articulation of "security" serves as a mechanism of depoliticization in the service of sovereign order increasingly deployed throughout the social above and below statal space. Finally, I argue that it is within the context of modernity and its intimate relation with the advent of democracy that a new horizon of possibility to articulate a counter-discourse to security is opened up.

Cette recherche aborde la problématique du discours sur la mondialisation par rapport à la démocratie. Nous cherchons à savoir quelle est la nature de ce discours? (e.g., idéologique, philosophique, scientifique). Le discours sur la mondialisation est divisé entre deux camps: les pro-mondialisateurs et les anti-mondialisateurs. Les deux discours prétendent qu'ils favorisent la démocratie, or cette dernière ne peut soutenir deux discours opposés. Nous faisons une analyse de deux textes, chacun représentatif d'un camp, pour résoudre le paradoxe et pour identifier la nature et le contenu des deux discours en opposition.

Abstract Not Available.