International Area Studies Review

The 1990s agreements that created the International Space Station (ISS) described the effort as a partnership of equals, a joint venture between organizations that remained independent in terms of many procedures, norms, goals, and the assumptions underlying these factors. As a result, successful joint ISS operations required the participants, most notably the American and Russian space programs, to reconcile different procedures, norms, and training regimes, as well as the beliefs that underlie these practices. Drawing on a combination of operational experience, first-hand observation, and interviews, this paper focuses on how the two programs reduced conflict and engendered cooperation. It also uses the ISS experience to consider how future joint efforts can be designed to minimize conflict between international partners.

Are levels of sexual violence committed by government security forces in a country prior to conflict predictive of levels of sexual violence in that country during conflict? Most of the scholarship on sexual violence focuses on the phenomenon during armed conflict, and in general the assumption made by these scholars is that conflict exacerbates the sexual violence problem. Cross-sectional analysis appears to support this assertion; however, we argue that the comparison group used by cross-sectional analyses is inappropriate for answering the question of whether conflict impacts the amount of sexual violence in a country. Instead, we propose that the appropriate comparison is between peacetime levels of sexual violence and conflict levels of sexual violence for the same country. To test this relationship, we employ data on sexual violence committed by government security forces in a sample of 170 countries for the time period 1999–2011, using a measure similar to that from Butler, Gluch, and Mitchell. Then, we use a variety of descriptive and inferential statistical tests to examine the relationship between conflict from the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset and the level of sexual violence in a country. We find that for cases with variation in conflict across our time period, pre-conflict levels of sexual violence are predictive of conflict levels but, contrary to the common assumption, the prediction is no change in the level of sexual violence for most cases.

This article draws on a sample of recent legislative elections held in 43 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa in order to empirically estimate and explain the levels of party system nationalisation. The analysis demonstrates that the overall level of party system nationalisation in Africa is relatively low, but in this respect, Africa displays little difference from other developing regions of the eastern hemisphere. Within the set of explanatory variables, an important role is played by ethno-linguistic fractionalisation. However, the explanatory power of this factor is rather limited. A model of party system nationalisation, including electoral system effects, party system fragmentation and political regime characteristics, such as authoritarianism and presidentialism, is proposed and empirically validated. The model demonstrates that while the joint impact of the identified explanatory factors is strong and consistent, none of them can be singled out as the crucial determinant of party system nationalisation in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Two Islamic actors in Turkey have transformed the state’s strict control of the religious field (laicism). While the National Outlook Movement, the “mother-movement” of the governing Justice and Development Party, did so through its “participation” in party politics, the Gülen Movement, Turkey’s most powerful Islamic movement that operates hundreds of schools and a major media network, contributed to this transformation through its “non-participation” in party politics as a social movement, providing an alternative to laicist establishments outside of institutional channels. These two movements, by following different political paths, have embodied different opportunities for and challenges to Turkish democratization. To understand their influence in Turkish politics today, this article will adapt a “method of difference” and ask what explains these two Islamic movements’ variation in regards to party politics and what the consequences of this variation are for Turkish politics. Based on qualitative fieldwork in Turkey, this article will argue that both movements have made their decisions about party politics by strategically and differently evaluating the political opportunities/threats of party politics in light of their varying ideological priorities and organizational needs, and that these strategic decisions have transformed the movements themselves and the Turkish regime altering the laicist status quo between them.

Several authors have studied the factors that influence a firm’s export performance, but few have addressed the relationship between industry characteristics and export intensity. The objective of the present study was to analyze the impact of industry characteristics on a firm’s export intensity, the latter a measure commonly used to assess export performance, seeking to add empirical evidence to this relatively neglected research area. Based on a sample of 19,504 Portuguese manufacturing firms, 7,930 of which were exporting, during the period 2010–2013, and using panel data estimation, the empirical results show that some industry characteristics (labor productivity, export orientation, concentration), as well as characteristics of the firm (labor productivity, size and age of the firm) are important determinants of a firm’s export intensity. It is concluded in particular that a firm’s export intensity is positively affected by the export orientation of the industry, as well as by the firm’s labor productivity, confirming the belief that firms and governments need to direct their policies towards increased productivity in order to improve competitiveness in foreign markets. It is argued that, in order to enhance the positive effects of these policies, the policies should be directed towards industries with the highest export focus.