International legalization refers to the idea that states voluntarily accept legal constraints in certain issue areas. Although the phenomenon of international legalization has become increasingly prominent in world affairs, its growth has been uneven. The purpose of this project is to perform a systematic examination of international legalization by providing an empirical survey of conventional international governmental organizations (IGOs). Due to the lack of a supranational sovereign government, most activity in the international system is not very legalized. IGOs are the most legalized international institutions. They are created by international agreements of states and they include substantive rules that states must follow as well as procedural rules that allow institutions of the organization to conduct its functions. These IGOs exhibit a wide variation in legalization. This observation raises a question as to what can account for this variation? The first step in approaching this task is to build upon the concept of legalization and develop a measure of legalization that is applicable to IGOs. An analysis of the constitutional mandates of these organizations reveals certain characteristics in their respective texts that can be used to create an index of legalization that will allow for a comparison of legal structures across organizations. The next step is to evaluate hypotheses deriving from functionalism, collective action, realism, and neoliberal institutionalism to explain the variation in these observations. These hypotheses are based upon potential explanations at the organizational and at the state level. Using evidence from descriptive data and appropriate methodologies, the findings of the project reveals that the number of members in an organization is an influential characteristic in regard to the level of IGO legalization. It also indicates that the wealth of a member state is also a positively related factor to whether a state will be a party to a highly legalized IGO agreement.

This research investigates environmental policy in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In particular, the analysis focuses on the Border Environment Cooperation Commission's (BECC) ability to facilitate sustainability in the region. Although BECC exerts some positive effects, in general, policy design flaws combined with administrative weaknesses limit the Commission's capacity to promote sustainability. The research divides into three main sections. The first section provides an overview of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and justifies the method to analyze the region's public policy. The overview portrays boom-and-bust development pathologies that lead to social, political, economic, environmental hardships. This analysis also presents several regional characteristics--policy oriented social networks, binational institutions, and an ethic of place--that serve sustainability. The methodological overview focuses on policy design theory. According to design theory, effective public policy requires a close fit between the solution and problem contexts and the policy design. The second section evaluates the solution and problem contexts. These contextual analyses include a detailed discussion of sustainability, the problematic nature of public policy in borderlands, and specific characteristics of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Several criteria for U.S.-Mexico borderlands sustainability are developed based on these contextual analyses. The third section describes and evaluates BECC's performance. The specific focus is devoted BECC's institutional and policy designs and its major program areas. The research concludes with an overview of empirical and theoretical implications and a presentation of policy prescriptions to build BECC's capacity to facilitate sustainability.

This dissertation examines the conceptualization, promotion and diffusion of the norm of population control at international and domestic levels, as well as adoption and implementation in Egypt. It also offers a critique of mainstream constructivism, an increasingly popular analytical approach to norm diffusion. Constructivists present convincing evidence that nonstate actors change state preferences through the promotion and diffusion of norms, or "shared expectations about appropriate behavior held by a community of actors" (Finnemore 1996, 22). To emphasize the independent influence of social factors, and to downplay material factors, however, constructivists select cases in which norm diffusion occurred before state sponsorship. Constructivist research answers the question, 'How are norms diffused in the absence of material constraint?' Aside from its censorship of material factors, additional constructivist shortcomings include its proclivity for examining only liberal or progressive norms, and its inattention to domestic political process and elites' broader decision-making options. This dissertation demonstrates that diffusion of the norm of population control depended on a combination of material and social factors related to an alliance among strange bedfellows, namely the United States and allied donors and INGOs, UN agencies, populationist and liberal feminist NGOs, and international financial institutions. In this case, the 'norm cascade' of formal state adoptions of population control followed formal social and material support by the United States and, subsequently, the United Nations. This research seeks to demonstrate that relationships of social and material inequality strongly condition the norms that are selected or rejected by international society and states, and the ways in which opponents conceptualize and mobilize for change. The case of population control suggests interesting answers to a different question, namely: How and why are certain international norms, and not others, successfully promoted, diffused and adopted by states? This dissertation also examines the mechanics of norm mutation, or efforts by the international women's health movement to substitute the original population control paradigm, family planning, with the new reproductive health paradigm. This new paradigm was adopted at the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), and the final chapter examines the current prospects for paradigm change in Egypt.

In this dissertation, I attempt to improve upon previous studies of globalization and human rights by employing several strategies. First, I employ an interdisciplinary theoretical analysis that draws on disparate literatures from political science, economics, international law, and feminist studies. Second, I use a methodology known as multiple imputation to deal with missing data problems that have plagued previous studies. Third, I test for the differential effects of globalization, economic development, and democracy on the achievement of female and male socio-economic rights in order to understand the degree to which these variables affect the dependent variables of female and male infant mortality, life expectancy, literacy, primary school enrollment, and economic activity rates. Overall, the main findings in this dissertation shed light on inequities of men and women as empirical categories in the context of globalization, economic development and democratization. There are two main findings of this study: (1) There is a statistically significant difference between the achievement of socio-economic rights for women and men in the context of globalization; and, (2) The differential effects of globalization, economic development, and democratization on female and male socio-economic rights are varied but in general all three of these independent variables tend to have more positive effects on the achievement of women's socio-economic rights relative to men's.

This thesis employs the critical insights of poststructuralism, postcolonial scholarship, and Third World feminisms to intervene in feminist scholarship on women and war. It is argued that gender and political violence are mutually constituted and therefore there can be no assumed relationship of women to war. This study's primary focus was to trace discursive representations of gender, violence, citizenship, and nation in Sandinista Nicaragua and the United States during the Reagan presidency. Textual analysis of three cultural areas: memoirs and testimonials, murals, and newspaper articles was used to explore dominant constructions of gender as they intersected with Sandinista nationalism and imperialist U.S. foreign policy. The process of mutual constitution of gender and political violence are then examined in the specific cases of Nicaragua and the U.S. It is concluded that discursive constructions of gender were essential to the politics of both Nicaraguan revolution and U.S. imperialism.

Since the early 1980s, significant changes have occurred in the field of international telecommunications. This thesis examines how changes in the telecommunications environment have affected inter-system coordination procedures and what the future application of these procedures may be. The historical background and organizational structure of INTELSAT are discussed in order to obtain a better understanding of the issue. The inter-system coordination procedures in the INTELSAT Agreements, including examples of coordinations that have been completed, are examined. Three main changes in international telecommunications that have affected INTELSAT are discussed: private satellite systems and deregulatory changes; fiber optic cable systems; and technical constraints as the result of increasing orbital congestion. In turn, the possible future of inter-system coordination procedures is analyzed in the light of the new strategic plan INTELSAT has adopted as a response to the changing environment.

This dissertation analyzes the rise of conservatism in American politics from 1948 to 1968, paying special attention to the impact of the civil rights movement and race on postwar political realignments. Unlike previous studies, which have concentrated chiefly on domestic policy issues such as court-ordered desegregation, busing programs, welfare, and taxation, this work focuses on debates over U.S. foreign policy. It considers topics such as the development of an international human rights ideology, the growing force of revolutionary nationalism, and the progress of decolonization to than the emergence of a distinctively conservative vision for American power in the world. As the dissertation argues, a natural symmetry existed between political responses to the African American freedom struggle and views on U.S. foreign relations in a rapidly decolonizing world; civil rights opponents easily projected their beliefs about racial difference into the global arena, and, although many national conservative leaders worked to distance themselves from the open defenders of racial segregation, they unreservedly asserted that the Asian, Arabic, and African residents of newly decolonized states were not entitled to the same rights as Europeans or North Americans. The dissertation thus offers a new interpretation of the role of race in modern conservatism. This study contains three parts: Part I suggests that what traditionally has been called "massive resistance"---the white South's opposition to integration after the 1954 Brown decision---might be better understood as a broader dissent from the emerging global ideology of human rights. Part II uses the Cold War's arrival in Africa to suggest how decolonization fused the politics of race and the politics of U.S. foreign policy, creating common ground for segregationists and national-security conservatives. Part III describes the evolution of a conservative philosophy on American power in the world, which rejected calls to demonstrate sympathy with anticolonial movements and instead advocated unequivocal support for Western Europe and anticommunist states like South Africa. Throughout, the dissertation contends that ostensibly color-blind positions on U.S. foreign policy in reality rested on a narrow, exclusionary interpretation of democratic freedoms and human rights.

Between 1945 and 1961, U.S. clubwomen launched a series of civic campaigns to educate Americans about the United Nations. Drawing on their older traditions of domesticating politics, conservative and liberal clubwomen from around the nation became community-level foreign affairs interpreters. This project explores the ways the foreign affairs activism of four organizations---the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the Daughters of the American Revolution, Women United for the United Nations, and the Minute Women of the U.S.A.---contributed to the popular resonance of foreign affairs in the postwar period and nurtured a growing political divide among American clubwomen. Postwar clubwomen across the political spectrum promoted the idea that women could shape their nation's foreign policy by learning about international affairs. In the process, these women developed competing visions for America's relationship to the world, which they advocated in their community education campaigns. These rival campaigns injected the UN into the everyday lives of American citizens and pitted clubwomen against one another, training a generation of club activists. Beginning with clubwomen's initial support for the United Nations, this project traces the changes in their foreign affairs perspectives and programs over the postwar period. Confronted with the Cold War and the anticolonial movement, conservative clubwomen increasingly billed the UN as a threat to America and sought to police the boundary between the domestic and the foreign, while liberal clubwomen embraced the connection between the two and labeled the UN an agent of both American foreign policy and global peace. Changes in American society, especially the civil rights movement, bled into discussions of foreign affairs, encouraging conservative women to blame internationalism for what they viewed as unwelcome shifts in the status quo and liberal clubs to segregate their foreign affairs work increasingly from controversial domestic reform campaigns. Ultimately, some clubwomen adopted a centrist liberal perspective and some joined a conservative political counterculture. In both cases, foreign affairs work served as postwar clubwomen's political training ground. By positing international awareness as a viable civic project, American women's clubs made the United Nations central to postwar political culture and to their own political identities.

We address international economic sanctions from a bargaining perspective and explain the variation in states' decisions to employ economic coercion, in the objectives they pursue through it, and in the level of political concessions they are able to extract. The connection between military and economic coercion is examined first. Using a formalized bargaining model, we show that credible war options are of critical importance in determining whether economic coercion will be used and what distributional impact it might have. Evaluating the model's empirical implications reveals that state choices to initiate economic coercion and what coercion level to set indeed depend on both military and economic factors. We next show that the sanctions literature has not devoted sufficient attention to the strategic considerations behind state decisions to engage in economic coercion. We develop a non-cooperative game-theoretic model that endogenizes decisions to engage in economic coercion and what level of concessions to demand from the target. The model suggests that economically powerful challengers are more likely to engage in economic coercion, but, paradoxically, are not more likely to succeed because they also tend to demand greater concessions. Since the occurrence, type, and outcome of economic coercion are all endogenously determined, we estimate them simultaneously when testing the model's empirical implications. The empirical findings confirm that increasing senders' economic advantage indirectly worsens their success prospects. Our central conclusion is that ignoring either the military context of economic coercion or the strategic choices that precede it can result in misleading inferences about its effectiveness.

The purpose of this thesis is to discover the effects of Soviet interventions on overall voting patterns in the General Assembly of the United Nations. Specifically, it endeavors to study how U.N. voting changed after the Soviet invasions into Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979. The hypotheses of this study state that violations of the norm of national self-determination by the USSR (i.e. the interventions) will lead to less cordial relations between the Soviet Union and other nations. Countries classified as neutral during the periods prior to each invasion as well as members of the non-aligned movement are separated from the other nations of the U.N. for special study. Regression analysis of General Assembly Roll Call data shows that only in the case of Hungary did any change in voting behavior take place.