Emilie M. Hafner-Burton

• PhD
• Managing Director at University of California, San Diego

Illiberal regimes have become central players in international organizations. In this introduction to the special issue, we provide a unified framework for understanding their effects. We start by outlining the theoretical foundations of this work, focusing first on why regime type matters for international cooperation. We then show how differing m...

A large and growing number of international organizations (IOs) are made up and governed by illiberal or outright authoritarian regimes. Many of these authoritarian IOs (AIOs) formally adopt good governance mandates, linking goals like democracy promotion, anti-corruption policies and human rights to their broader mission. Why do some AIOs adopt go...

iCourts is a research center for international courts and international law at the Faculty of Law in Copenhagen. The purpose of this book is to show how the establishment, operation and ambitions of a research center can impact a whole field of research.

Many international development organizations (IDOs) have officially mandated anti-corruption criteria for aid selectivity. Substantial debate remains over whether corruption deters aid and whether anti-corruption rules are effectively implemented. We argue that the extent to which both corruption and anti-corruption mandates factor into IDO allocat...

Political corruption is a massive barrier to economic development and good governance. International institutions have become leaders in the effort to combat the problem. A growing number of such institutions have crafted official anticorruption rules, procedures and policies designed to deter the abuse of power within their membership and within i...

Since their emergence in the late eighteenth century, doctrines of universal individual rights have been variously criticized as philosophically confused, politically inefficacious, ideologically particular, and Eurocentric. Nevertheless, today the discourse of universal human rights is more internationally widespread and influential than ever. In...

This article introduces a Thematic Section and theorizes the multiple ways that judicializing international relations shifts power away from national executives and legislatures toward litigants, judges, arbitrators, and other nonstate decision-makers. We identify two preconditions for judicialization to occur—(1) delegation to an adjudicatory body...

Political corruption is rampant in—and destructive to—many parts of the world. A growing number of international organizations (IOs) claim to address the problem by encouraging good governance norms and rules, such as anti-corruption standards and practices. Whether membership in IOs dampens corruption, however, is unclear. Our central argument is...

A growing number of developed country governments link good governance, including human rights, to developing countries’ access to aid, trade, and investment. We consider whether governments enforce these conditions sincerely, in response to rights violations, or whether such conditions might instead be used as a veil for protectionist policies, mo...

The Behavioral Revolution and International Relations - Volume 71 Issue S1 - Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Stephan Haggard, David A. Lake, David G. Victor

Why would leaders engage in international cooperation if they believe that their own government might default from their commitments? Some suggest that when leaders do so, they are essentially trying to profit from false promises-from making international commitments that they likely cannot, or will not, actually fulfill. In contrast, others expect...

It is often assumed that government-sponsored election violence increases the probability that incumbent leaders remain in power. Using cross-national data, we show that election violence increases the probability of incumbent victory, but can generate risky post-election dynamics. These differences in the consequences of election violence reflect...

Public emergencies such as civil wars, natural disasters, and economic crises test the theoretical and practical commitments of international human rights law. During national crises, international law permits states to suspend many human rights protections in order to safeguard national security. States frequently overstep the limits of this autho...

There is heated debate over the wisdom and effect of secrecy in international negotiations. This debate has become central to the process of foreign investment arbitration because parties to disputes nearly always can choose to hide arbitral outcomes from public view. Working with a new database of disputes at the world's largest investor-state arb...

As international governance is taking on increasingly more difficult and demanding topics, firms and governments have radically expanded the use of international courts to resolve complex legal disputes. In their effort to become more legitimate and effective, these bodies have adopted a wide array of reforms aimed at promoting transparency. Using...

Scholars agree that international law works in part by empowering activists and have elaborated activist-focused theories particularly in the domains of environment and human rights. Some theories emphasize accountability—that law helps activists coerce, punish, and deter offenders. Others emphasize that law helps to foster dialogue that leads to t...

Transparency can have a large impact on whether the work of international legal institutions such as tribunals is seen as legitimate as well as the ability of governments to manage the domestic audience costs of adjusting to international norms. International investment arbitration offers a special opportunity to study transparency because nearly a...

Uncertainty about a state’s own capacity to comply with an international agreement makes countries wary of international cooperation. There are a variety of possible explanations. That screening effect could result from the decision to avoid the costs associated with formal institutional enforcement. Alternatively, it could result from fear of info...

Only a few decades ago, companies rarely sought to influence America‘s human rights policies — and by extension, international human rights institutions — around the globe. Today, publicly traded companies are responsible for 65 percent of all lobbying dollars on America‘s human rights legislation, and proportionate to other interest groups they sp...

Significance Humans frequently act contrary to their self-interest and reject low offers in bargaining games. Some evidence suggests that elites, however, are much more rational and self-interested, but this hypothesis has never been directly tested in bargaining games. Using a unique sample of US policy and business elites, we find the opposite. C...

Why do some decision makers prefer big multilateral agreements while others prefer cooperation in small clubs? Does enforcement encourage or deter institutional cooperation? We use experiments drawn from behavioral economics and cognitive psychology—along with a substantive survey focused on international trade—to illustrate how two behavioral trai...

Why do governments abuse human rights, and what can be done to deter and reverse abusive practices? This article examines the emerging social science on these two questions. Over the last few decades, scholars have made considerable progress in answering the first one. Abuse stems, centrally, from conflict and institutions. Answers to the second qu...

Hafner-Burton, Emilie and James Ron. (2012) The Latin Bias: Regions, the Anglo-American Media, and Human Rights. International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1111/isqu.12023 © 2012 International Studies Association Media attention is unevenly allocated across global human rights problems, prompting anger, frustration, and recrimination in the internati...

Abstract will be provided by author.Why do countries join international human rights institutions, when membership often yields few material gains and constrains state sovereignty? We argue that entering a human rights institution can yield substantial benefits for democratizing states. Emerging democracies can use the “sovereignty costs” associate...

In the last six decades, one of the most striking developments in international law is the emergence of a massive body of legal norms and procedures aimed at protecting human rights. In many countries, though, there is little relationship between international law and the actual protection of human rights on the ground. Making Human Rights a Realit...

This article examines how government-sponsored election violence influences the ability of incumbent leaders to win elections and remain in power. We argue that election violence is a costly tradeoff for governments. When used in the pre-election period, up to and including election day, government-sponsored election violence against opposition sup...

When are governments most likely to use election violence, and what factors can mitigate government incentives to resort to violence? How do the dynamics of election violence differ in the pre- and post-election periods? Our central argument is that an incumbent’s fear of losing power as the result of an election, as well as institutionalized const...

The discipline of political science has developed an active research program on international institutions. Among its top ranks are scholars who study the development, operation, spread and impact of international legal doctrine and organizations – also matters of great interest to the legal community. Meanwhile, a growing number of public internat...

Central to international cooperation in many issue-areas is enforcement: the act or process of compelling obedience to international agreements by force or persuasion. Whether focused on transaction costs, domestic politics or forces such as structure and culture, most explanations for states’ preferences for institutionalized enforcement mechanism...

International relations theories have largely ignored the role of individual people who play key roles in treaty design and participation; instead, that scholarship assumes that other factors, such as treaty enforcement, matter most. We use experiments drawn from behavioral economics and cognitive psychology — along with a substantive survey focuse...

Growing experimental evidence in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics is shaping the way political science scholars think about how humans make decision in areas of high complexity, uncertainty and risk. Nearly all those studies utilize convenience samples of university students, but insights from that work may not be directly applicable t...

There is growing evidence that preferential trade agreements (PTAs) provide strong institutional incentives to prevent international conflict among member states, often creating the conditions of trust that can help prevent militarized aggression. We provide an approach to the study of how international institutions influence conflict behavior that...

This article provides a roadmap for understanding the points of agreement and contention that characterize contemporary empirical scholarship on international human rights legal regimes. It explores what the statistical research teaches us about why states participate in these regimes; knowledge of how these regimes operate; and their relationship...

Several prominent human rights treaties attempt to minimize violations during emergencies by authorizing states to “derogate”—that is, to suspend certain civil and political liberties—in response to crises. The drafters of these treaties envisioned that international restrictions on derogations and international notification and monitoring mechanis...

This article examines and explains the adoption of gender mainstreaming by the European Union (EU), and traces its implementation in five issue-areas of EU policy: Structural Funds, employment, development, competition, and science, research and development. The EU decision to adopt gender mainstreaming, as well as its variable implementation acros...

Global media attention is unevenly allocated across human rights problems and conflicts worldwide, leading to tension, anger and frustration in the international system. In recent years, scholars have made great progress in explaining these variations, focusing on factors such as the strength of transnational ties, local conditions for activist mob...

The discipline of political science has developed an active research program on international institutions. Among its top ranks are scholars who study the development, operation, spread and impact of international legal doctrine and organizations – also matters of great interest to the legal community. Meanwhile, a growing number of public internat...

Access, brokerage, and efficiency are all acknowledged as important sources of political influence, but are seen as conceptually distinct. Yet all of them result from the distribution of ties (patterns of association) that link together actors in networks. These ties, whether material (like financial transactions) or social (like friendship), deter...

International organizations (IOs) have moved increasingly in recent years to adopt cross-cutting mandates that require the “mainstreaming” of particular issues, such as gender equality or environmental protection, across all IO policies. Successful IO performance with respect to such mandates, we hypothesize, is determined in large part by the use...

Two big assumptions fuel current mobilization against and policy discussions about the U.S. war on terror and its implications for human rights and international cooperation. First, terrorism creates strong pressures on governmentsespecially democraciesto restrict human rights. Second, these restrictions are not only immoral and illegal, but also c...

A traditional view of power in politics is that it comes from the possession of important resources. The relative possession of resources is thought to provide actors such as people, organizations, and states with means of coercion or influence over others. This traditional view is highly limiting, since power also comes from ties (patterns of asso...

International relations research has regarded networks as a particular mode of organization, distinguished from markets or state hierarchies. In contrast, network analysis permits the investigation and measurement of network structures emergent properties of persistent patterns of relations among agents that can define, enable, and constrain those...

Over the past two decades, human rights language has spread like wildfire across international policy arenas. The activists who sparked this fire are engaged in two different campaigns. The first is comparatively modest, involving the persuasion of tens of thousands of global elites such as journalists, UN officials, donors, and national political...

Abstract Why do countries join international human rights institutions, when membership often yields few

Preferential trade agreements have become common ways to protect or restrict access to national markets in products and services. The United States has signed trade agreements with almost two dozen countries as close as Mexico and Canada and as distant as Morocco and Australia. The European Union has done the same. In addition to addressing economi...

This article adopts a "Network as Structure" perspective to consider the rise and evolution of structural power inequalities in the international political economy; in it, we contrast inequalities in social power between states that result from relative possession of social capital due to density of ties through preferential trade agreements (PTAs)...

This article argues that international regime complexity has shaped Europe's politics of human rights trade conditionality by creating opportunities for various types of "forum shopping," and, consequently, that some of the most significant politics of human rights enforcement have occurred in an entirely separate issue area – trade – which are bei...

Over the past two decades, human rights language has spread like wildfire across international policy arenas. The activists who sparked this fire are engaged in two different campaigns. The first is comparatively modest, involving the persuasion of tens of thousands of global elites such as journalists, UN officials, donors, and national political...

The European Union, like many other international organizations and governments, committed itself during the 1990s to the "mainstreaming" of gender issues across all policy areas at all stages in the policy process. Nonetheless, more than a decade after the Union's initial commitment, this commitment has not led to consistent and effective implemen...

is a popular strategy to enforce international human rights norms and laws. Nongovernmental organizations, news media, and international organizations publicize countries' violations and urge reform. Evidence that these spotlights are followed by improvements is anecdotal. This article analyzes the relationship between global naming and shaming eff...

Does the dramatic rise of the number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) worldwide make economic sanctions more likely through increasing the leverage of the powerful and pitting states against each other in competition (power) or less likely through increasing the benefits of trade, resolving disputes, and promoting like-minded communities (pl...

This special issue seeks to move forward the development of an empirical research agenda that takes seriously the complexity of how international organizations (IOs) function and the need to study that complexity at all levels of analysis by using robust research tools. We advocate for a broad empirical research approach that molds and sharpens the...

International organizations (IOs) today are not just growing in number, they are also undertaking expanded mandates to include more and more cross-cutting issues in governance, including most notably the "greening" of public policy and the "mainstreaming" of gender, race, disability and other policy concerns across all units of the IO and across th...

Cox & Drury broaden the democratic peace literature from the domain of militarized conflict to economic sanctions. Their analysis of economic sanctions data from 1978 through 2000 finds that democracies are more likely to enact sanctions but are less likely to do so against other democracies. In this article, their analysis is extended in three dif...

This study explores, with quantitative data analyses, why nation-states with very negative human rights records tend to sign and ratify human rights treaties at rates similar to those of states with positive records. The study's core arguments are (1) that the deepening international human rights regime creates opportunities for rights-violating go...

Abstract: The European Union, like many other international organizations and governments, committed itself during the 1990s to the mainstreaming of gender issues across all policy areas at all stages in the policy process. Nonetheless, more than a decade after the Union’s initial commitment, this commitment has not led to consistent and effective...

Conflict and Compliance: State Responses to International Human Rights Pressure. By Sonia Cardenas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 188p. $65.00 cloth. Norms protecting human beings from rights violations are growing, and international human rights pressures, like laws and sanctions, more and more escort them. But states are a...

International human rights language has swept across the landscape of contemporary world politics in a trend that began in the 1970s, picked up speed after the Cold War's end, and quickened yet again in the latter half of the 1990s. Yet, while this human rights 'talk' has fundamentally reshaped the way in which global policy elites, transnational a...

International human rights treaties have been ratified by many nation-states, including those ruled by repressive governments, raising hopes for better practices in many corners of the world. Evidence increasingly suggests, however, that human rights laws are most effective in stable or consolidating democracies or in states with strong civil socie...

Regional and global intergovernmental organizations have grown both in number and scope, yet their role and effectiveness as conflict managers is not fully understood. Previous research efforts have tended to categorize organizations solely by the scope of their membership, which obscures important sources of variation in institutional design at bo...

for their feedback. The German Marshall Fund of the United States provided generous funding during the drafting of this paper. The usual caveat applies. 2 ABSTRACT In recent years there has been a proliferation of international institutions, as well as renewed attention to the role that forum-shopping, nested and overlapping institutions, and regim...

A growing number of international relations scholars argue that intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) promote peace. Existing approach esemphasize IGO membership as an important causal attribute of individual states, much like economic development and regime type. The authors use social network analysis to show that IGO memberships also create a d...

This paper concerns the rise and evolution of structural inequality in world politics created by the global network of IOs. We take as our starting point the assumption, widely disregarded in political science,that organizations create social networks. In the same way that firms organize corporate networks of relations or that schools organize soci...

A growing number of studies provide quantitative evidence that economic globalization encourages government protection of human rights: trade and investment advance civil and political rights and encourage governments to refrain from violations of the right to life, liberty, and the security of the person. Other studies provide evidence that global...

The fatigue behavior of lead zirconate stannate titanate (PZST) ceramics prepared by spark plasma sintering (SPS) was investigated. Polarization and strain hysteresis loops were monitored. The material shows a high resistance to fatigue because of bipolar electric cycling. Both maximum strain and switchable polarization first show a fatigue stage 0...

The authors examine the impact of the international human rights regime on governments' human rights practices. They propose an explanation that highlights a "paradox of empty promises." Their core arguments are that the global institutionalization of human rights has created an international context in which (1) governments often ratify human righ...

A growing number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have come to play a significant role in governing state compliance with human rights. When they supply hard standards that tie material benefits of integration to compliance with human rights principles, PTAs are more effective than softer human rights agreements (HRAs) in changing repressive...

This article seeks to explain the variable implementation of gender mainstreaming as a `policy frame' over time and across various international organisations (I.O.s). In the years since the U.N. Fourth World Women's Conference in Beijing (1995),mainstreaming has been endorsed and adopted by a wide range of international organisations, and we compa...

In this article, we seek to explain both the origins of gender mainstreaming as a `policy frame' in International Relations, as well as the variable implementation of mainstreaming over time and across various international organizations. We emphasize that in the years since the UN Fourth World Women's Conference in Beijing (1995), mainstreaming ha...

This article seeks to explain the variable implementation of gender mainstreaming as a 'policy frame' over time and across various international organisations (I.O.s). In the years since the U.N. Fourth World Women's Conference in Beijing (1995), mainstreaming has been endorsed and adopted by a wide range of international organisations, and we comp...

Abstract will be provided by author.Two big assumptions fuel current mobilization against and policy discussions about the U.S. war on terror and its implications for human rights and international cooperation. First, terrorism creates strong pressures on governments — especially democracies — to restrict human rights. Second, these restrictions ar...

for their feedback. The German Marshall Fund of the United States provided generous funding during the drafting of this paper. The usual caveat applies. 2 ABSTRACT In recent years there has been a proliferation of international institutions, as well as renewed attention to the role that forum-shopping, nested and overlapping institutions, and regim...

Abstract will be provided by author.

for their feedback. The German Marshall Fund of the United States provided generous funding during the drafting of this paper. The usual caveat applies. 2 ABSTRACT In recent years there has been a proliferation of international rules, laws and institutional forms in world politics. This has triggered attention to the role that forum-shopping, neste...

We believe that such knowledge stems from sensitivity to the political implications of policy decisions, an understanding of how to generate coalitions and alliances, and an appreciation for how conflicts are created and resolved. A politically skilled analyst is able to enter a situation and identify the key actors, what their concerns and goals w...

Abstract will be provided by author.