Rapid economic growth in emerging economies since the end of the Cold War has driven debate on American 'relative decline'; the relative diminution of US material capabilities with respect to other states. Such relative decline poses potential constraints on US power and has thus manifested itself in arguments over the economic merits of the United States' expansive military commitments. Contributing to this literature, my thesis answers the following question: does American military strategy generate economic benefits? I argue that that there is significant evidence to suggest that US military strategy has influenced international economic relationships in ways beneficial to US national interests. Principally, my analysis shows American military strategy acts as a 'underwriter' for the extant international economic system. I explore two logics associated with this. Firstly, a general 'status quo' logic which sees military power as both a guarantor and promoter of specific structural configurations of the international political economy. And secondly, a more specific 'utility' logic operating on other states either bilaterally or multilaterally. This pathway assumes that US military strategy, particularly its security guarantees, may alter the utility of other states decisions in America's favour. This thesis also shows that specific results often prove far more tentative and circumstantial than commonly articulated by scholars in the literature. Nearly all specific and 'utility' pathways through which the United States is hypothesized to derive economic benefit suffer from foundational generalisability issues, irrespective of methodology. This suggests that specific avenues and instances of US military strategy influencing international economic relationships are not likely to be a reliable or prudent source of future policy making. Rather, the principal political-economic influence to consider is the role US military power plays in underwriting the contemporary American centred international order, which is the prerequisite for other specific pathways to emerge.

Thesis advisor: David A. Deese / Cross-national differences in regulation have become the most significant barrier to international trade. My dissertation attempts to explain why states sometimes choose to reduce these regulatory trade barriers but at other times choose to maintain or increase them. To do this, I examine the international negotiation over regulatory trade barriers in three in-depth case studies, one from each of the three main areas of the international trade in goods: manufacturing, agriculture, and high-technology. The first investigates consumer safety, labor-related domestic content, and environmental regulations in the trade in automobiles in North America and the European Union. The second analyzes mad-cow safety regulations and the trade in beef between the United States and Japan. The third examines intellectual property regulations and the trade in pharmaceuticals between the United States and India. I contend that the best way to explain this variation is by examining the motivations of three sets of actors (businesses, activists, and government officials) and the political bargaining between those three groups. Businesses seek to reduce regulatory barriers when those barriers raise production costs or inhibit market access. They may however choose to end that pursuit if those regulations are cheap to comply with or pursuing their reduction carries major reputational risk. Activists defend regulatory barriers when they perceive those regulations to be the sole effective means to address a societal problem they are concerned about. They may accept a reduction in regulatory barriers if those barriers have low salience or their opposition is bought out through private standards, corporate social responsibility, or some other arrangement in which businesses are not directly regulated by government. Government officials choose whether to side with businesses or activist groups based on their relative prioritization of trade and regulatory independence, their staffing, and whom they identify as their core constituency. Businesses are likely to succeed at reducing a regulatory trade barrier when they can link their desire for that reduction with broader concerns about economic competitiveness while activist organizations are likely to succeed at defending regulatory trade barriers when they can link their desire for maintaining or increasing that barrier with preventing needless death. This dissertation thus adds to the current understanding of international political economy by demonstrating that multinational corporations have less political power than is commonly assumed and by augmenting traditional explanations of trade politics based on economic cleavages through analyzing activists’ engagement in trade politics now that trade politics significantly affects regulations. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

This thesis will look at the international political economy of violence against women. The drastic increase of the case women murder (femicide) in Mexico since 1993 has attracted worldwide attention. It will focus on the influence of international economic institutions (e.g. IMF, World Bank, TNCs) toward the increasing cases of violence against women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. This thesis will use case-study research strategy. Ciudad Juarez will be chosen as the case study because it is one of the largest border city in the Mexico and it can represent border cities in Mexico. The analysis will rely on the Galtung’s definition of violence against women and gender perspective of economic globalization. Violence against women will be consisted of wage exploitation, sexual harassment, pregnancy testing, poor safety standard, and domestic violence. The method for answering the research question is text analysis using secondary data sources. This thesis concludes that international economic institutions have significant roles in the gender-based violence in Ciudad Juárez.

The process of globalization is the subject of heated debate over its impacts on human and state security. In this dissertation, I address its influences on one area of human security - the protection of personal integrity rights. Two questions motivate this project. First, does the globalization process affect the decision-making process of leaders such that there is an alteration in the likelihood that their populations will fall victim to violent forms of state repression? Second, how can the globalization phenomenon best be systematically examined in order to gain a better, generalizable understanding of its complex dynamics and effects on state and human security?I contend that globalization must be disaggregated into its distinct aspects, at different levels of analysis, in order to uncover the complex and even contradictory impacts that it is having throughout the international political economy. I utilize data on 156 lesser developed countries over the period of 1973-2000 to assess the effects of several sub-facets of globalization at both the levels of individual state and systemic integration upon personal integrity rights, as measured by the Political Terror Scale. In terms of levels of state integration, the increasing scope of interdependence between state and non-state actors magnifies the external pressures that leaders must consider when deciding whether or not to employ repressive measures to quell domestic threats. At the system level, globalization may be viewed as an ordering principle, which is expanding a set of rules that alters the propensity of states to engage in violent forms of coercion.The findings in this dissertation indicate that globalization is expanding, with respect to lesser developed countries. Moreover, it significantly influences the likelihood that individuals within these states will fall victim to state repression. However, the complexity and contradictory nature of these effects substantiates my claim that one must disaggregate the concept into its distinct parts. In this manner, this dissertation provides a significant contribution to extending our knowledge of the determinants of state repression as well as the effects of the globalization process. Additionally, it provides a model from which additional influences of globalization may be studied.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the extent to which the BRICS can exert leadership in a world in which sustainability becomes ever more crucial, especially in light of the Sustainable Development Goals presently used to track progress and performance before 2030. Moreover, the focus on sustainability is deemed important to assess the ability of the BRICS to ‘sustain’ their own efforts at transforming global governance vis-à-vis internal and external social, political, economic and environmental fragilities. The study is based on a critical literature review and a host of secondary data of both qualitative and quantitative nature. The quantitative data, gathered from existing sources, assisted in the identification of trends and patterns within the respective BRICS countries regarding their overall sustainability. The qualitative has been used to draw deductions and conclusions regarding trends within the respective BRICS countries. The study concludes that the BRICS struggle in terms of sustainability. This is evident in the triad sustainability analysis of the bloc. The BRICS display varying degrees of weakness across all three spheres of sustainability. By contrast, there are other countries from the Global South that perform much better and could be seen as more credible leaders of a transition in global governance that is truly inspired by new values. These are: Botswana, Chile, Costa Rica and South Korea. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2018. / Political Sciences / MA / Unrestricted

yes / This article supports growing calls to ‘take small states seriously’ in the international political economy but questions prevailing interpretations that ‘smallness’ entails inherent qualities that create unique constraints on, and opportunities for, small states. Instead, we argue that discourses surrounding the ‘inherent vulnerability’ of small states, especially developing and less-developed states, may produce the very outcomes that are attributed to state size itself. By presenting small states as a problem to be solved, vulnerability discourses divert attention away from the existence of unequal power structures that, far from being the natural result of smallness, are in fact contingent and politically contested. The article then explores these themes empirically through discussion of small developing and less-developed states in the Commonwealth and the World Trade Organization (WTO), considering in particular how smallness has variously been articulated in terms of what small states either cannot or will not do.

yes / This themed section takes as its starting point the premise that the body matters in International Political Economy (IPE) and presents four original articles which support and illustrate this ontologically critical and, perhaps, provocative position. Although feminist scholarship has undoubtedly gained a place at the table in IPE, it is curious that one of the most important concerns, and contributions, of feminist IPE – that global capitalism is marked upon, and forged through, bodies – has not emerged as a major preoccupation for the discipline more broadly. In what follows we present what we believe is a strong corrective to that inattention and, in so doing we hope to begin to set out an exploratory agenda for the body to be both foundational and fundamental to contemporary IPE.

From the middle of the 1970s, an increasing amount of scholarly analysis centred around the concept of leadership in international relations at a time when US post-Second World War leadership began to decline. As a major beneficiary of this decline, Japan assumed the mantle of a replacement in the burgeoning field devoted to the study of changes in the international political economy. A major problem became the way in which the study of leadership in international relations became hostage to the singular example of the United States. The conflation between leadership on the one hand, with US interests and responsibilities on the other, rendered much of the analysis flawed. The growing disparities between the supply of international public goods and narrowly conceived US foreign policy interests undermined the overall study of international leadership. Japan, as the country during the 1980s perceived most likely to supplant the US as the largest and most influential capitalist economy, became the centre of interest in this field. This thesis seeks to more comprehensively measure and analyse Japanese leadership in a more contextual and thorough means through the comparative use of case studies between 1960 and 2000. Through noting the differences in country and regional reactions to Japanese foreign policy, this study demonstrates that leadership perceptions are more often than not driven by national self interest rather than an ideal type of responsible leadership.

none

Liberalism can be generally characterized as a political ideology that assumes the rational, self-interested nature of human beings. However, two distinct strands of liberal theory have evolved from this shared construction of the human agent, namely state-oriented and market-oriented liberalism. It will be shown that state-oriented liberalism provides the theoretical core of liberal democratic states, whereas market-oriented liberalism provides the theoretical core for the globalized market economy. This thesis will uncover a profound tension through a discussion of the new constitutional effects of the investor-state regime. Furthermore, this thesis will show that the recent changes of the investor-state regime have failed to resolve the theoretical tension between liberal democracies and the investor-state regime. And finally, this thesis argues that the only way to resolve the tension between the two strands of liberalism is to incorporate liberal democratic principles into the investor-state regime. / Graduate / 0615 / 0616 / matt.stuckenberg@gmail.com