International Area Studies Review

We address the incidence and correlates of mutual veto institutions by examining a global dataset on power-sharing provisions. Our data show that mutual veto provisions are relatively rare and found mostly in diverse societies that are more highly developed than the world average. We find that mutual veto arrangements must be (a) enforceable, (b) inclusive to pacify all potential spoilers and (c) compatible with the interests and incentives of those groups to which they would apply. Mutual veto provisions often fail to meet one or more of these conditions. They are difficult to enforce, as conflict-prone societies often have ineffectual political institutions and weak administrative capacity. It is difficult to make them incentive-compatible, as incumbent power-holders will not benefit from them. Finally, they are often not credible, as the dominant political coalition would find it in its interest to punish any actual exercise of a veto. These conditions jointly explain the near absence of effective mutual veto regimes outside relatively prosperous polities with well-established political institutions.

This study revisits the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis in order to find the inverted-U relationship between CO₂ emissions and economic growth. It uses a comprehensive cross-national panel dataset containing 90 middle-income countries between 1981 and 2010. This study confirms that a quadratic relationship indeed exists. The turning points are determined at approximately US$8,300 and 9,100, which are consistent in all six models. Additionally, by classifying countries into different income levels or regional groups, this study attempts to find any group-wise discrepancies. Finally, individual countries are examined in order to find the gap between the actual data and their fitted values, which indicates that special attention is required in Eastern Europe and Central Asian countries in order to reduce CO₂ emission problems.

Mainstream International Relations and Foreign Policy Analysis have often concentrated on material factors and actors’ preferences, leaving out ideational dynamics. However, US–Latin American relations in general seem fraught with ideas, narratives and historical references re-articulated from time to time on both sides. In his campaign, Barack Obama announced a fresh start of US–Latin American relations, promising to “restore American leadership in Latin America”, at the same time creating “a new partnership for the Americas”, combining two narratives in US–Latin American policy. “Leadership”, enshrined in the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt corollary, which declared Latin America the “backyard” of the USA, and “Partnership”, related to the Good Neighbor Policy declared by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which aimed at establishing a more equal relation of partners. This discourse shows that inherited traditions and foreign policy narratives are subject to cycles of re-production, re-articulation and subtle change. In order to grasp the relevance of ideas in US–Latin American relations, we advocate a turn towards “ideational approaches” of discursive and constructivist providence. The article first situates “ideas” to key concepts of a more interpretive foreign policy analysis, which focuses on tradition and narratives. As a second step, US–Latin American relations are located within a specific, hegemony-oriented ideational account of foreign policy. Two analytical sketches of crucial cases of recent US–Latin American relations follow, the War on Drugs and the reactions towards the coup d’état in Honduras, showing how ideas were articulated on both the USA and the Latin American side and what role they played. The overall focus of the paper is thus on elucidating the ideational dynamics that underpin the political relations between the USA and Latin America.

As the work environment is changing rapidly, organizations need more adaptable employees who can work creatively, learn new skills and adapt to diverse social contexts and novel environments. Individual differences such as prior experience and self-efficacy have been extensively examined as predictors of adaptive performance. In contrast, the role of cultural intelligence in promoting adaptive performance has been overlooked. The primary goal of this study was to examine cultural intelligence that may account for adaptive performance beyond prior experience and self-efficacy. Moreover, we examined the moderating role of self-efficacy in terms of the relationship between cultural intelligence and adaptive performance. We tested our hypothesis with multisource data in a sample of 132 military personnel assigned in a multinational military organization. Hierarchical regression analysis demonstrated that cultural intelligence, together with self-efficacy and prior experience, was important predictors of adaptive performance. Specifically, cultural intelligence explained additional variance in adaptive performance over and above that of prior experience and self-efficacy. These findings suggested the importance of cultural intelligence as a critical predictor of adaptive performance in multicultural contexts.

Since independence, the guiding principle of Nigeria’s foreign policy and the pursuit of its national interests, in both its bilateral and its multilateral relations, have remained a reflection of its perception of the international environment. A constant feature that has remained central to Nigeria’s foreign policy architecture has been Africa, with preoccupations concerning fighting colonialism, apartheid and the discrimination of black peoples in the African continent and elsewhere in the world. Moreover, in all of those endeavors, Nigeria is argued to have never benefited from its external relations with states and nonstate actors alike. However, in 1988, Nigeria officially announced its commitment to economic diplomacy, a result of the lingering economic crisis and structural adjustment program at the time. This essentially led to not only certain shifts in the analysis of Nigeria’s foreign policy after 1988, but also a recap that also triggered a review of current policies in the Fourth Republic, which raised the following question: can Nigerian foreign policy be said to be consistent with economic development or does it more or less remain altruistic in character and essence? The focus of this article therefore, is first of all, to explore the connection between foreign policy and economic development, and the role that foreign policy should play in guaranteeing a nation’s development. Secondly, the article further examines Nigeria’s foreign policy in the Fourth Republic (from 1999 to 2013) with a view to noting if there has been any critical shift in Nigeria’s African-centered altruistic foreign policy to that of economic well-being and development. Thirdly, the article is a conscious effort to steer (in case of any laxity) Nigeria’s foreign policy toward economic growth and development and the well-being of the citizenry.