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The 2010 WikiLeaks release of 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables has made it eminently clear that there is a vast gulf between the public face of diplomacy and the opinions and actions that take place behind embassy doors. This book offers unprecedented access to the inner workings of a foreign ministry, and shows us how diplomacy is conducted on a day-to-day basis. Approaching contemporary diplomacy from an anthropological perspective, the book examines the various aspects of diplomatic work and practice, including immunity, permanent representation, diplomatic sociability, accreditation, and issues of gender equality. It shows that the diplomat working abroad and the diplomat at home are engaged in two different modes of knowledge production. Diplomats in the field focus primarily on gathering and processing information. In contrast, the diplomat based in his or her home capital is caught up in the seemingly endless production of texts: reports, speeches, position papers, and the like. The book leaves the reader with a keen sense of the practices of diplomacy: relations with foreign ministries, mediating between other people's positions while integrating personal and professional into a cohesive whole, adherence to compulsory routines and agendas, and, above all, the generation of knowledge. Yet even as they come to master such quotidian tasks, diplomats are regularly called upon to do exceptional things, such as negotiating peace.

Despite public favorability towards international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), most of these groups toil in total obscurity. A very few INGOs, active in human rights promotion, humanitarian relief, and environmental protection, do secure widespread authority in the form of deference from multiple audiences engaged in global politics. Having achieved this status as a “leading INGO,” however, they are trapped. To maintain their status and placate their many audiences, these leading INGOs advance incrementalist proposals and achieve “vanilla victories” - palatable to a wide array of audiences, but also unremarkable. Meanwhile, other INGOs’ strategies are similarly shaped by their status: they are free to issue harsh condemnations and advance radical proposals, but these generally get ignored. Stroup and Wong offer the first exploration of the vast differences among INGOs in their authority, and then explore how status shapes INGO strategies as they seek to influence states, corporations, and one another.

This book challenges the notion that political activism has gone beyond borders and created a global or transnational civil society. Instead, at the most globally active, purportedly cosmopolitan groups in the world, international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) organizational practices are deeply tied to national environments, creating great diversity in the way these groups organize themselves, engage in advocacy, and deliver services. The book offers detailed profiles of these “varieties of activism” in the United States, Britain, and France. These three countries are the most popular bases for INGOs, but each provides a very different environment for charitable organizations due to differences in legal regulations, political opportunities, resources, and patterns of social networks. The book's comparisons of leading American, British, and French INGOs reveal strong national patterns in INGO practices, including advocacy, fund-raising, and professionalization. These differences are quite pronounced among INGOs in the humanitarian relief sector and are observable, though less marked, among human rights INGOs. The book finds that national origin helps account for variation in the “transnational advocacy networks” that have received so much attention in international relations. For practitioners, national origin offers an alternative explanation for the frequently lamented failures of INGOs in the field: INGOs are not inherently dysfunctional, but instead remain disconnected because of their strong roots in very different national environments.

Are the best international agreements products of mutual understanding? The conventional wisdom in economics, sociology, and political science is that accurate perceptions of others' interests, beliefs, and ideologies promote cooperation. Obstacles to international cooperation therefore emerge from misperception and misunderstanding. This book challenges this conventional wisdom by arguing that when nations wrongly believe they share a mutual understanding, international cooperation is actually more likely, and more productive, than if they had a genuine understanding of each other's position. Mutual understanding can lead to breakdowns in cooperation by revealing intractable conflicts of interest, identity, and ideology. Incorrectly assuming a mutual understanding exists, in contrast, can enhance cooperation by making actors confident that collaborative ventures are in both parties' best interest and that both parties have a reliable understanding of the terms of cooperation. The book shows how such constructive misunderstandings allowed for cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union between 1972 and 1979. During détente, the superpowers reached more than 150 agreements, established standing consultative committees, regularly held high-level summit meetings, and engaged in global crisis management. The turn from enmity to cooperation was so stark that many observers predicted a permanent end to the Cold War. Why did the superpowers move from confrontation to cooperation? The book's theory of the role of misunderstanding in cooperation provides an explanation that is significantly different from liberal institutionalist and constructivist approaches. This book's central claim is that states can form what French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing called “a superb agreement based on complete misunderstanding.”.

In shaping the institutions of a new country, what interventions from international actors lead to success and failure? This book's investigation into Kosovo, based on national survey data, interviews, and focus groups, leads to some surprising answers. It highlights efforts to build the police force, the central government, courts, and a customs service. The book finds that central administration and the courts, which had been developed under local authority, succumbed to cronyism and corruption, challenging the premise that local “ownership” leads to more effective state bureaucracies. The police force and customs service, directly managed by international actors, were held to a meritocratic standard, fulfilling their missions and winning public respect. On the other hand, local participation and contestation supported democratic institutions. When international actors supported the demobilization of popular movements, they undermined the ability of the public to hold elected officials accountable.

An unprecedented new international moral and legal rule forbids one state from hosting money stolen by the leaders of another state. The aim is to counter grand corruption or kleptocracy (“rule by thieves”), when leaders of poorer countries loot billions of dollars at the expense of their own citizens. This money tends to end up hosted in rich countries. These host states now have a duty to block, trace, freeze, and seize these illicit funds and hand them back to the countries from which they were stolen. This book asks how this anti-kleptocracy regime came about, how well it is working, and how it could work better. Although there have been some real achievements, the international campaign against grand corruption has run into major obstacles. The vested interests of banks, lawyers, and even law enforcement often favor turning a blind eye to foreign corruption proceeds. Recovering and returning looted assets is a long, complicated, and expensive process. The book calls for better policing, preventative measures, and use of gatekeepers like bankers, lawyers, and real estate agents. It also recommends giving nongovernmental organizations and for-profit firms more scope to independently investigate corruption and seize stolen assets.

This book explores the politics of officially expressed emotion on the international stage, looking at the ways in which state actors strategically deploy emotional behavior to shape the perceptions of others. Examining diverse instances of emotional behavior, the book reveals that official emotional displays are not simply cheap talk but rather play an important role in the strategies and interactions of state actors. Emotional diplomacy is more than rhetoric; as the book demonstrates, its implications extend to the provision of economic and military aid, great-power cooperation, and even the use of armed force. The book provides the theoretical tools necessary for understanding the nature and significance of state-level emotional behavior and offers new observations of how states seek reconciliation, strategically respond to unforeseen crises, and demonstrate resolve in the face of perceived provocations. It investigates three specific strands of emotional diplomacy: those rooted in anger, sympathy, and guilt. The book provides new insights into the 1995–1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis, the post-9/11 reactions of China and Russia, and relations between West Germany and Israel after World War II. The book's arguments can be extended to further cases ranging from Sino-Japanese relations to diplomatic interactions in Latin America. The book offers a unique take on the intersection of strategic action and emotional display, offering a means for making sense of why states appear to behave emotionally.

This book explores the belief held by foreign policy elites in much of Southeast Asia—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, and Vietnam—that the United States is a relatively benign power. It argues that this belief is an important factor underpinning U.S. preeminence in the region, because beliefs inform specific foreign policy decisions and form the basis for broad orientations of alignment, opposition, or nonalignment. Such foundational beliefs, however, do not simply reflect objective facts and reasoning processes. The book argues that they are driven by both interests—in this case the political and economic interests of ruling groups in Southeast Asia—and illusions. The book shows how the information landscape and standards of professional expertise within the foreign policy communities of Southeast Asia shape beliefs about the United States. These opinions frequently rest on deeply biased understandings of national history that dominate perceptions of the past and underlie strategic assessments of the present and future. Members of the foreign policy community rarely engage in probabilistic reasoning or effortful knowledge-testing strategies. This does not mean that the beliefs are insincere or merely instrumental rationalizations. Rather, cognitive and affective biases in the ways humans access and use information mean that interests influence beliefs; how they do so depends on available information, the social organization and practices of a professional sphere, and prevailing standards for generating knowledge.

Why are some international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) more politically salient than others, and why are some NGOs better able to influence the norms of human rights? This book shows how the organizational structures of human rights NGOs and their campaigns determine their influence on policy. Drawing on data from seven major international organizations—the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Médecins sans Frontières, Oxfam International, Anti-Slavery International, and the International League of Human Rights—the book demonstrates that NGOs that choose to centralize agenda-setting and decentralize the implementation of that agenda are more successful in gaining traction in international politics. Challenging the conventional wisdom that the most successful NGOs are those that find the “right” cause or have the most resources, the book shows that how NGOs make and implement decisions is critical to their effectiveness in influencing international norms about human rights. Building on the insights of network theory and organizational sociology, the book traces how power works within NGOs and affects their external authority. The internal coherence of an organization, as reflected in its public statements and actions, goes a long way to assure its influence over the often tumultuous elements of the international human rights landscape.

The collapse of the bipolar international system near the end of the twentieth century changed political liberalism from a regional system with aspirations of universality to global ideological dominance as the basic vision of how international life should be organized. Yet in the last two decades liberal democracies have not been able to create an effective and legitimate liberal world order. This book suggests that this is connected to major tensions between two strains of liberalism: a “Liberalism of Imposition” affirms the universal validity of liberal values and is ready to use any means to secure the worldwide expansion of liberal principles. A “Liberalism of Restraint” emphasizes non-intervention, moderation, and respect for others. The book presents a discussion of how tensions in liberalism create problems for the establishment of a liberal world order. It provides an unusually skeptical liberal statement, perhaps the first to appear since the era of liberal optimism—based in anticipation of the end of history—in the 1990s. The book identifies major competing analyses of world order and explains why their focus on balance-of-power competition, civilizational conflict, international terrorism, and fragile states is insufficient.

Recent U.S. foreign policy has depended heavily on the use of negative inducements to alter the behavior of other states. From public browbeating through economic sanctions to military invasion, the last few presidents have chosen to use coercion to advance U.S. interests when dealing with adversaries. In this respect, as this book notes, the United States differs from many of its closest allies: Canada has long maintained diplomatic relations with Cuba, and several of the European democracies have continued diplomatic engagement with governments that the United States considers pariah regimes. This book outlines the efficacy of and the benefits that can flow from positive rather than negative engagement. The book observes that threats and punishments may be gratifying in a symbolic sense, but that they haven't affected the longevity or the most objectionable policies of the regimes against which they are directed. Might positive inducements produce better results? The book examines two major models of positive inducements: the exchange model, in which incentives are offered in trade for altered behavior, and the catalytic model, in which incentives accumulate to provoke a thorough revision of the target's policies and priorities. It examines the record with regard to long-term U.S. relations with Cuba, Libya, and Syria, and then discusses the possibility that positive inducements might bring policy success to current relations with Iran and North Korea.

Why do some issues and threats—diseases, weapons, human rights abuses, vulnerable populations—get more global policy attention than others? How do global activist networks decide the particular causes for which they advocate among the many problems in need of solutions? According to this book, the answer lies in the politics of global issue networks themselves. Building on surveys, focus groups, and analyses of issue network websites, the book concludes that network access has a direct relation to influence over how issues are ranked. Advocacy elites in nongovernmental and transnational organizations judge candidate issues not just on their merit but on how the issues connect to specific organizations, individuals, and even other issues. The book describes three case studies of emerging campaigns to show these dynamics at work: banning infant male circumcision; compensating the wartime killing and maiming of civilians; and prohibiting the deployment of fully autonomous weapons (so-called killer robots). The fate of each of these campaigns was determined not just by the persistence and hard work of entrepreneurs but by advocacy elites' perception of the issues' network ties.

Mediation has become a common technique for terminating violent conflicts both within and between states; while mediation has a strong record in reducing hostilities, it is not without its own problems. This book highlights its long-term limitations. The result of this approach to peacemaking is often a fragile peace. With the intervention of a third-party mediator, warring parties may formally agree to concessions that are insupportable in the long term and soon enough find themselves at odds again. The book examines this argument using two data sets and traces it through several historical cases: Henry Kissinger's and Jimmy Carter's initiatives in the Middle East, 1973–1979; Theodore Roosevelt's 1905 mediation in the Russo-Japanese War; and Carter's attempt to mediate in the 1994 North Korean nuclear crisis. It also draws upon the lessons of the 1993 Arusha Accords, the 1993 Oslo Accords, Haiti in 1994, the 2002 Ceasefire Agreement in Sri Lanka, and the 2005 Memorandum of Understanding in Aceh. The book concludes that a reliance on mediation risks a greater chance of conflict relapse in the future, whereas the rejection of mediation risks ongoing bloodshed as war continues. The trade-off between mediation's short-term and long-term effects is stark when the third-party mediator adopts heavy-handed forms of leverage, and, the book finds, multiple mediators and intergovernmental organizations also do relatively poorly in securing long-term peace. It finds that mediation has the greatest opportunity to foster both short-term and long-term peace when a single third party mediates among belligerents that can afford to wait for a self-enforcing arrangement to be reached.

A generation ago, not a single country had laws to counter money laundering; now, more countries have standardized anti-money laundering (AML) policies than have armed forces. This book investigates whether AML policy works, and why it has spread so rapidly to so many states with so little in common. It asserts that there are few benefits to such policies but high costs, which fall especially heavily on poor countries. It tests the effectiveness of AML laws by soliciting offers for just the kind of untraceable shell companies that are expressly forbidden by global standards. The book demonstrates that it is easier to form untraceable companies in large rich states than in small poor ones; the United States is the worst offender. Despite its ineffectiveness, AML policy has spread via three paths. The Financial Action Task Force, the key standard-setter and enforcer in this area, has successfully implemented a strategy of blacklisting to promote compliance. Publicly identified as noncompliant, targeted states suffered damage to their reputation. Subsequently, officials from poor countries became socialized within transnational policy networks. Finally, international banks began using the presence of AML policy as a proxy for general country risk. Developing states have responded by adopting this policy as a functionally useless but symbolically valuable way of reassuring powerful outsiders. Since the financial crisis of 2008, the G20 has used the successful methods of coercive policy diffusion pioneered in the AML realm as a model for other global governance initiatives.

Why does soft power conflict management meet with variable success over the course of a single mediation? This book asserts that international conflict management is almost never a straightforward case of success or failure. Instead, external mediators may reduce communal tensions at one point but utterly fail at another point. The book uses a “nested security” model of conflict management, which holds that protracted ethnic or ideological conflicts are rarely internal affairs, but rather are embedded in wider regional and/or great power disputes. Internal conflict is nested within a regional environment, which in turn is nested in a global environment. Efforts to reduce conflict on the ground are therefore unlikely to succeed without first containing or resolving inter-state or trans-state conflict processes. Nested security is neither irreversible nor static: ethnic relations may easily go from nested security to nested insecurity when the regional or geopolitical structures that support them are destabilized. The book argues that regional security regimes are ideally suited to the management of internal conflicts, because neighbors that have a strong incentive to work for stability provide critical hard-power backing to soft-power missions. The theory is tested against two regional security regimes in Central and Eastern Europe.

In most post-conflict countries nongovernmental organizations are everywhere, but their presence is misunderstood. This book investigates the unintended outcomes of what it calls the NGO boom in Bosnia and Kosovo. The book argues that when international actors try to rebuild and reconstruct post-conflict countries, they often rely on and look to NGOs. Although policymakers and scholars tend to accept and even celebrate NGO involvement in post-conflict and transitioning countries, they rarely examine why NGOs have become so popular, what NGOs do, or how they affect everyday life. After a conflict, international NGOs descend on a country, local NGOs pop up everywhere, and money and energy flow into strengthening the organizations. In time, the frenzy of activity slows, the internationals go home, local groups disappear from sight, and the NGO boom goes bust. Instead of peace and stability, the embrace of NGOs and the enthusiasm for international peacebuilding turns to disappointment, if not cynicism. For many in the Balkans and other post-conflict environments, NGOs are not an aid to building a lasting peace but are part of the problem because of the turmoil they foster during their life cycles in a given country. This book will be useful to practitioners and policymakers interested in improving peacebuilding, the role of NGOs in peace and development, and the sustainability of local initiatives in post-conflict countries.

Each phase of Arab–Israeli peacemaking has been inordinately difficult in its own right, and every critical juncture and decision point in the long process has been shaped by U.S. politics and the U.S. leaders of the moment. This book tracks the American determination to articulate policy, develop strategy and tactics, and see through negotiations to agreements on an issue that has been of singular importance to U.S. interests for more than forty years. In 2006, the Study Group on Arab–Israeli Peacemaking was formed, a project supported by the United States Institute of Peace, to develop a set of “best practices” for American diplomacy. The Study Group conducted in-depth interviews with more than 120 policymakers, diplomats, academics, and civil society figures and developed performance assessments of the various U.S. administrations of the post-Cold War period. This book, an objective account of the role of the United States in attempting to achieve a lasting Arab–Israeli peace, is informed by access to key individuals and official archives.

In November 2007 the southern Bosnian city of Mostar was rocked by two days of violent clashes between Croat and Bosniak youth. It was not the city's only experience of ethnic conflict in recent years. Indeed, Mostar's problems are often cited as emblematic of the failure of international efforts to overcome deep divisions that continue to stymie the postwar peace process in Bosnia. Yet not all of Bosnia has been plagued by such troubles. Mostar remains mired in distrust and division, but the Brcko District in the northeast corner of the country has become a model of what Bosnia could be. Its multiethnic institutions operate well compared to other municipalities, and are broadly supported by those who live there; it also boasts the only fully integrated school system in the country. What accounts for the striking divergence in postwar peacebuilding in these two towns? This book argues that a conjunction of four factors explains the contrast in peacebuilding outcomes in Mostar and Brcko: The design of political institutions, the sequencing of political and economic reforms, local and regional legacies from the war, and the practice and organization of international peacebuilding efforts in the two towns. Differences in the latter, in particular, have profoundly shaped relations between local political elites and international officials. Through a grounded analysis of localized peacebuilding dynamics in these two cities the book generates a powerful argument concerning the need to rethink how peacebuilding is done—that is, a shift in the habitus or culture that governs international peacebuilding activities and priorities today.

This book explains how regional rivals make peace and how outside actors can encourage regional peacemaking. Through a qualitative empirical analysis of all the regional rivalries that terminated in peace treaties in the twentieth century—including detailed case studies of the Franco-German, Egyptian–Israeli, and Israeli–Jordanian peace settlements—the book concludes that efforts to encourage peacemaking that focus on changing the attitudes of the rival societies or democratizing the rival polities to enable societal input into security policy are unlikely to achieve peace. Prior to a peace treaty, the book finds, peacemaking is driven by states, often against intense societal opposition, for geostrategic reasons or to preserve domestic power. After a formal treaty has been concluded, the stability of peace depends on societal buy-in through mechanisms such as bilateral economic interdependence, democratization of former rivals, cooperative regional institutions, and transfers of population or territory. Society is largely irrelevant to the first stage but is critical to the second. The book draws from this analysis a lesson for contemporary policy. Western governments and international organizations have invested heavily in efforts to promote Israeli–Palestinian and Indo-Pakistani peace by promoting democratic values, economic exchanges, and cultural contacts between the opponents. Such attempts to foster peace are likely to waste resources until such time as formal peace treaties are concluded between longtime adversaries.

International treaties, conventions, and organizations to protect refugees were established in the aftermath of World War II to help people who were escaping targeted persecution by their own governments. However, the nature of cross-border displacement has transformed dramatically since then. Threats such as environmental change, food insecurity, and generalized violence force massive numbers of people to flee states that are unable or unwilling to ensure their basic rights, as do conditions in failed and fragile states that cause human rights deprivations. Because these reasons do not meet the legal understanding of persecution, the victims of these circumstances are not usually recognized as “refugees,” preventing current institutions from ensuring their protection. This book develops the concept of “survival migration” to highlight the crisis in which these people find themselves. Examining flight from three of the most fragile states in Africa—Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Somalia—the book explains variation in institutional responses across the neighboring host states. There is massive inconsistency. Some survival migrants are offered asylum as refugees; others are rounded up, detained, and deported, often in brutal conditions. The inadequacies of the current refugee regime are a disaster for human rights and gravely threaten international security. This book outlines these failings, illustrates the enormous human suffering that results, and argues strongly for an expansion of protected categories.