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Classic definitions of diplomacy, characterizing it as peaceful interactions among state actors, leave civil society outside the concept. However, the rise of civil society’s participation in global governance in the twentieth century had made diplomacy less an exclusive club than a complex network of relationships only partially controllable by traditional diplomats. This article aims to find patterns in the influence of these comparatively new actors. It first defines civil society and traces its historical emergence, and then argues that civil society organizations are most important at the beginnings and ends of global diplomatic efforts. At the beginning, they are critical for putting new issues on the agenda and shaping the ways those issues are understood. At the end, they help to implement global accords, with their wide presence and loose networking an asset for taking global agreements to the local level. They are less central in the classic stages of diplomatic negotiations between governmental representatives, but their strong presence in other roles now transforms negotiations as well.

The Cuban missile crisis has attracted an unusual degree of scholarly attention as the single most dangerous event in human history. Most commentators agree that it stands as a particularly good example – and possibly the best example – of successful crisis management. Recent scholarship has qualified this assessment in various ways, not least by making clear that it also stands as a particularly good example of the perils of faulty relationship management. Put another way, while US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Chairman Nikita S. Khrushchev managed very successfully to step back from the nuclear brink in October 1962, they found themselves on the brink as a result of profound mutual misunderstanding and ineffective channels of communication. This article discusses the role of diplomacy during the Cuban missile crisis and cites some lessons learnt for diplomacy.

A growing body of scholarship examines the relationship between electoral systems and trade policy. Despite increased attention to electoral institutions, no consensus exists about which system makes politicians most responsive to protectionist demands. Conflicting conclusions about electoral systems’ effects are surprising, because these institutions lie at the heart of democratic politics. This chapter offers several potential reasons for the current impasse. One possibility is that the nature of the electorate mediates the effect of electoral rules on trade policy. Understanding voters’ economic interests and their geographic location may be necessary to comprehend precisely how electoral rules shape trade barriers. Greater attention to mediating factors may help resolve the current debate.

Since at least 1964, public opinion scholars have searched for signs of “constraint” in the American public’s foreign policy attitudes. This chapter reviews these attempts and suggests that the ensuing work has ultimately fallen into two research traditions that have largely been conducted in isolation of one another: horizontal models that portray attitudes as being sorted along multiple dimensions on the same plane and vertical models that imply a hierarchical organization in which abstract values determine specific policy positions. It then offers a new—networked—paradigm for political attitudes in foreign affairs, leveraging tools from network analysis to show that both camps make unrealistically strict assumptions about the directionality and uniformity of attitude structure. The chapter shows that specific policy attitudes play more central roles than existing theories give them credit for and that the topology of attitude networks varies substantially with individual characteristics like political sophistication.

This chapter comments on Graham Allison’s 1971 book, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, a classic that occupies an important place in disciplines ranging from political science and public administration to international relations and business studies. Allison offers a critical analysis of governmental decision-making during the Cuban missile crisis, one of the most challenging crises of the Cold War, through three conceptual lenses: rational actor, organizational behavior, and governmental politics. After a brief introduction on Allison and the broader context in which his work took shape, the chapter considers the continuing relevance of Essence of Decision for scholars in foreign policy and public administration. More specifically, it discusses Allison’s rational actor, organizational behavior, and governmental behavior models and how each of them identifies different explanatory factors for the decisions that were taken regarding the crisis.

The history of Israel is framed by wars. However, the nature of Israel’s wars has changed over time, from mainly infantry-based warfare to modern armor warfare, and from conventional warfare to regular armies clashing with nonstate combatants, known in the professional literature as low intensity conflict (LIC). Conventional warfare took place within a clear and well-defined territory, with relative separation between civilians and soldiers. Low intensity conflict has blurred the battlefield boundaries, and armed operations take place in civilian areas. With these changes, the meaning of victory has changed as well. The decisive military victory that marked the military campaigns of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 is no longer relevant in the LIC battlefield. Conquest of territory and destruction of the enemy’s military forces, the hallmark of victory during the days of the conventional wars, are much less important in a mode of fighting in which the image of being able to continue to inflict damage is much more important.

This chapter reviews the sources of protectionist demands by labor, including the factor endowments and specific factors models, and the conditions under which labor interests are likely be incorporated into trade policy. It then discusses how the expansion of international trade institutions has increased the use of temporary trade barriers and compensation, as alternatives to traditional tools like tariffs, to appease protectionist demands. The chapter examines the implications of recent work in economics, in particular the findings of new new trade theory that trade increases unemployment and inequality in developed and developing countries, for trade cleavages and demands for protection. The chapter concludes by discussing the impact of changing patterns of global production on the political influence of labor and the potential for backlash against globalization as possible directions for further research.

What role does leadership play in facilitating international cooperation in a complex global world beset by a variety of enduring and emerging transnational challenges? Scholars and practitioners alike have pointed to the importance of leadership in surmounting the barriers associated with reaching international agreements and achieving cooperative solutions. This chapter examines the relationship between international cooperation and leadership by critically reviewing the important contributions that have been made concerning the conceptualization of leadership, the motives actors have for engaging in leadership behaviour, the sources of leadership influence, as well as the various modes of leadership that aspirants of international influence can utilize. It also highlights recent research that has focused on the demand side of leadership, leadership recognition, the factors that influence how followers select leaders, and the impact leadership exerts on international cooperation and negotiation outcomes. The chapter closes by pointing to new research frontiers that scholars of international leadership would profit from better addressing in the future, such as the need to increase our knowledge concerning shared leadership and the role of leadership in the post-negotiation and implementation phases of multilateral cooperative endeavours.

This chapter discusses the general context of analyses of leadership of international organizations in political science and the attempt to understand this leadership from the 1950s to the 1970s, when Haas, Cox, and Jacobson elaborated a research programme to see the internal dynamics of international organizations, also paying attention to leadership by the organizations’ executives. During the 1970s and 1980s the interest in formal organizations and leadership diminished. The chapter then reviews more recent analyses of leadership in the United Nations and European Union systems and discusses some promising ways of studying leadership of international organizations by focusing on problem-solving and leadership during implementation.

This article discusses the changes faced by heads of government when determining their foreign policy objectives and, in turn, the challenges and opportunities that these new changes present in fulfilling agendas. The first section introduces the actors and the political institutions that frame their roles and determine the extent of their powers. Drawing on the author’s personal experience as a Canadian foreign minister, the changing diplomatic contexts at the end of the last century and into the twenty-first century are evaluated. Given the roles that individuals play in the practice of diplomacy, the second section introduces some of the changes that have occurred since the end of the Cold War, which can be viewed as both constraints and opportunities to open up pockets of influence within which foreign actors are able to press their issues. These changes are the rise of civil society and the idea of public diplomacy, expanding communications technologies (exemplified most specifically by WikiLeaks), and the prominence of new state powers and summit diplomacy.

Though most assume a settled relationship between security and the state, the degree to which different forms of violence are collective endeavors handled by states has varied over time, affecting who or what it secured, how, and what is understood to be public. In the modern era the control and management of violence were core elements of state practice. We examine recent history to show how globalization initiated debates over security and opened avenues for different claims, both about security and about what is public and private. We trace how interactions among intellectuals, governments, transnational activists, and companies shifted who authorizes security, who provides security, and how legitimate and illegitimate force are distinguished—all public concerns. We conclude by discussing current developments that could reinforce or disrupt these trends and claim again that public–private interactions will shape their impact on future global security practices.

This article examines the rise of the organic foods movement to a position of power and influence around the world. The movement’s rise is attributed to the efficacy of “organic” as a mobilizing frame for a social movement, as well as to the institutional opportunities offered by states and international organizations. The article also discusses the organic foods movement as a model for other social movements seeking to attain transnational status.

The state sponsorship of terrorist groups poses significant risks to international security. Accordingly, a growing body of scholarship focuses on understanding different aspects of the relationship between the patron state, the sponsored terrorist group, and the target state. This chapter first reviews the findings and arguments in this literature, exploring both the theoretical and empirical work over the strategic dynamics of and the effects of state support. Existing research contains numerous insights and provides some counterintuitive advances to our understanding of the different manifestations of sponsorship, the rationale for sponsorship, and the impact of sponsorship on both the terrorist group and the target state. Yet, there is much more work that remains to be done in this field. Specifically, we propose that further study on the connections between sponsorship and other important security issues in world politics is necessary to better understand the broader role that sponsorship plays in international relations. To promote this end, we empirically demonstrate the connection between territorial disputes, the state sponsorship of militant groups, and the onset of interstate conflict. This evidence is preliminary but opens a potentially promising new avenue for research on the effects of state sponsorship of terrorist groups.

The importance of trust in international relations has recently become the subject of a vibrant new agenda of research. However, as this paper shows, trust has always implicitly been at the center of international relations theory. Realism, rationalism and constructivism conceive of trust differently, with enormous substantive implications. After establishing how different understandings about the type and degree of trust that prevail in international relations help structure core debates in the discipline, this paper then turns to showing the role that trust plays in diplomacy and multilateral cooperation. Trust seems necessary for the creation of large multilateral institutions in international relations as well as value-creating diplomacy that allows for win-win outcomes.