Foreign conflict behavior data covering long periods of time are urgently needed for the scientific investigation of international conflict. Except in the case of the most violent behavior, war, such data in aggregate form generally are not available to researchers.

With the reluctant retirement of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union entered a new phase of collective leadership. Past experience with such periods has led many Western specialists to expect that the collective leadership pattern will lead to the emergence of a single leader, who will hold preponderant power and who will seek to consolidate and strengthen that power, ultimately acquiring something approaching dictatorial authority. The assumptions of this “conventional wisdom” (to borrow a phrase from John Galbraith) are that (i) there is something inherently unstable in a collective leadership pattern, given Soviet conditions; (2) the personal ambitions and power drive of Soviet leaders prevent, in the long run, their acceptance of a situation of shared power; and (3) historical evidence of past breakdowns of collective leadership is applicable to present conditions.

The study of political leadership has undergone a shift of focus in recent years. Since the late 1960s, political scientists have been increasingly interested in the question of exactly how the persons identified as leaders influence the political process. Two recent studies are critically examined: Paige's, based on a systems or macrolevel approach, concerns itself mainly with leadership as a phenomenon within the context of a political system which acts upon it and upon which it impinges; Burns's, based on a sociopsychological or microlevel approach, emphasizes the interaction between leaders and followers as an engagement of persons with diverse predispositions and motivations. The authors focus on different aspects of the same general set of phenomena, but they share a common goal. Both seek a vehicle on which to move toward a general theory that explains how leadership acts as a causative phenomenon in a polity. The clarification of their differences and complimentariness offers new opportunities for further research, theoretical or descriptive.

Globalization blurs the traditional distinction between high and low politics, creating connections between previously discrete issue areas. An important existing literature focuses on how states may intentionally tie policy areas together to enhance cooperation. Building on recent scholarship in historical institutionalism, the authors emphasize how the extent of political discretion enjoyed by heads of state to negotiate and implement international agreements varies across issue areas. When policy domains are linked, so too are different domestic political configurations, each with its own opportunity structures or points of leverage. Opening up the possibility for such variation, the article demonstrates how actors other than states, such as nonstate and substate actors, use the heterogeneity of opportunity structures to influence negotiations and their institutional consequences. The authors examine the theory's purchase on international cooperation over intelligence, privacy, and data exchange in the transatlantic space in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the revelations made public by Edward Snowden in 2013. The findings speak to critical international relations debates, including the role of nonstate actors in diplomacy, the interaction between domestic and international politics, and the consequences of globalization and digital technologies for the relationship between international political economy and security.

In an examination of the ecological correlates of the Vietnamese insurgency, Edward Mitchell suggests the existence of some disquieting relationships between certain indicators of land tenure arrangements and insurgent activities. Briefly, he finds that the degree of control that the Government of the Republic of Vietnam exercises at the provincial level is positively associated with inequality. Areas that appear to have the most unequal land tenure arrangements are precisely those over which government control is greatest.

The term “statecraft” is used here in a sense which is stronger than that of “diplomacy” as used, for example, by Harold Nicolson. In its present meaning it includes the construction of strategies for securing the national interest in the international arena, as well as the execution of these strategies by diplomats. In a day when the world is being divided between two great power blocs, when neutrality is becoming increasingly more difficult to maintain, when statecraft is invading the economic and cultural aspects of social existence, as well as the political and military, when most great problems of domestic life must be reconsidered with regard to their bearing on the international situation, few, if any, can doubt its importance. The successful or unsuccessful conduct of statecraft may settle the fate of our way of life; and, given the possibilities of modern war, it may, in a deeper sense, settle the question of whether any type of civilized life, ours or the Soviets', can survive.

The idea of a European political and economic union is more popular and is being taken more seriously in the United States than in Europe. The American attitude has been well expressed in the “Declaration of Policy” of “The Foreign Assistance Act of 1948” by which Congress enacted the European Recovery Program. One section of that act reads:

In 1959, the tenth anniversary of the Communist take-over in China, Howard Boorman reviewed Western scholarship on Chinese politics in an essay subtitled “Some Remarks on Retarded Development.”1 Although a good deal has taken place in Western rese0arch since that time—and the Chinese Communists have, through their actions, generated considerably more subject matter—I am inclined to give my essay the same subtitle. Many books and articles on China have been published since 1959, but social science analysis has neither “staged a take-off” nor begun “the drive to maturity,” to borrow two of W. W. Rostow's terms. In fact, in my opinion social science has yet to achieve “the preconditions for take-off” from which it can begin to theorize about China.

International agreements perform functions worthy of the closest attention of the student of international affairs. They are a principal tool of diplomacy and the aim of most negotiations. Many such agreements are not intended to create legal relationships, and the demarcation line between legally binding agreements and other consensual relationships is correspondingly hazy and uncertain. International agreements have not, however, received in recent times nearly the degree of attention devoted in international studies to “force” and “power.” This is so despite the fact that they generally reflect the participants' power calculations and shared expectations. They are an essential mode of guidance and regulation in international relations, helping to shape decisions and claims sometimes even in the course of armed conflicts. International agreements loom large in the actual experience of statesmen, jurists, and military men—their conclusion, their application, and their breach represent complex political decisions with frequently serious outcomes leading to shifts in power relationships.

It is becoming increasingly evident, if it is not clear already, that one of the most critical problems in the overall modernization of the developing countries is political development. In South Vietnam, in the Congo, in Brazil, in Indonesia—all over the underdeveloped world, the capacity of countries to cope with their own problems, and consequently the stance of the United States toward these nations, turns in varying degrees on the successes or failures of the political system.

Scholars have usually understood the problem of democratic consolidation in terms of the creation of mechanisms that make possible the avoidance of populist excesses, polarized conflicts, or authoritarian corporatist inclusion that undermined free politics in much of postwar Latin America. This article makes the case that, under contemporary liberal economic conditions, the nature of the challenge for democratization has changed in important ways. Earlier problems of polarization had their roots in the long-present statist patterns of economic organization. By contrast, under free-market conditions, democratic consolidation faces a largely distinct set of challenges: the underarticulation of societal interests, pervasive social atomization, and socially uneven political quiescence founded in collective action problems. These can combine to undermine the efficacy of democratic representation and, consequently, regime legitimacy. The article utilizes data from the Latin American region since the 1970s on development, economic reform, and individual and collective political participation to show the effects of a changing state-economy relationship on the consolidation of democratic politics.

In the field of comparative Communist studies theory seems to have lagged behind reality. Until a few years ago we tended to think of Communist polities in terms of uniformities oriented around the concept of a totalitarian model that permeated all Communist systems more or less the same way and to the same degree. Although it was recognized that there were cultural differences and variations in the levels of development, these factors were not assigned great weight in modifying and transforming Communist polities. On the contrary, the very possibility of a transformation was assigned a low probability.

Occidental nations had distinct images of India long before they recognized the new republic ten years ago. To Herodotus and his contemporaries India was the scene of fabled wonders; to devout Christians in the Middle Ages it was the likely site of Paradise; and to the learned of later enlightened centuries it was above all the abode of superior wisdom. In fact, nothing about India seems to have attracted Western scholars so much as the religions and philosophies that originated in the subcontinent millennia ago. The fundamental principles of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism were analyzed and exposed with scholarly care during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Western minds, increasingly convinced of the essential “materialism” of their own heritage, made a steady pilgrimage to the repositories of the great spiritual truths that India held.

The last several decades have each been broadly characterized by one or two central economic questions. In the 1920's the central problem was international capital transfers, or reparations and war debts; in the 1930's, the international spread of unemployment and destabilizing speculation; in the late 1940's, after the war, reconstruction; in the 1950's, defense economics and growth.

Not only can we identify them; it is on the whole fair to say that the central problems of the 1920's, 1930's, and 1940's have been solved. International capital transfer is accomplished by preventing war debts from accumulating, paying limited reparations in kind, and furnishing the capital needed for reconstruction, and in part for economic growth, as grants or on liberal loan terms.

The USSR placed on the agenda of the Big Three wartime conference at Yalta in February 1945 the question of the Turkish Straits. Of this 200-mile natural channel, less than 60 miles—the Bosphorus coming from the Black Sea and the Dardanelles going to the Aegean—are true straits, joined by the inland sea of Marmara. Ever since 1841 the transit of naval vessels through the Straits has been regulated by international agreement. The latest regime was established by a convention signed at Montreux in July 1936, authorizing Turkey to remilitarize the strategic waterway and, if it were “threatened with imminent danger of war” or actually engaged in war (Articles 20 and 21), to permit or disallow at its discretion the passage of warships through the narrows.

The U.S. Catholic bishops' pastoral letter on war and peace argues that nuclear deterrence is conditionally morally acceptable. Their concluding message is therefore not an exhortation to nuclear pacifism. The author argues, first, that the bishops' conditional moral acceptance of deterrence does not follow from their premises and the evidence presented to them; second, that this justification of deterrence, even if consistently arrived at, does not sanction current U.S. deterrence policy; third, that the conditions the bishops place on deterrence are incompatible with the type of deterrence they attempt to justify; and fourth, that there is no serious attempt currently being made to meet these conditions. The moral obligation that follows for those who take the bishops' principles seriously is nuclear conscientious objection.

The long-standing understanding of the British 1832 Reform Act as an elite response to a revolutionary threat has been given renewed prominence in recent work on the political economy of democratization. But earlier episodes of popular revolt in Britain led to elite unity rather than elite concessions. This article argues that the absence of effective elite closure against parliamentary reform in the early 1830s was the result of an extended process of state reform that had the effect of gradually reducing the capacity of the monarchy. This deprived the crown of patronage required for the construction of an antireform coalition, while also mollifying the reformers' fears that mass mobilization would invite repression and with it the recalibration of theconstitution in favor of the monarchy. Therefore, while pressure from below was indeed critical to the passage of parliamentary reform, its contribution was mediated by institutional changes that, over time, weakened the sources of resistance to change and rendered reformist elites more amenable to the necessary reliance on the threat of force. This case study thus establishes that change at critical junctures can be subject to the influence of incremental institutional change occurring in relatively settled periods.

The intelligentsia in Poland, as in all rapidly changing societies, is regarded as a leading social force and is observed with interest by sociologists, political scientists, and journalists. However, both in Poland and elsewhere the term “intelligentsia” has several connotations and refers to a variety of social groups and occupations, as does the term “intellectuals,” which is sometimes used as an equivalent. In Webster's International Dictionary we find the following definition: “Intelligentsia.—Informed intellectual people; the educated or professional group, class, or party;—often derisive.” The Oxford Dictionary defines the term as “That part of a nation that aspires to independent thinking.” It seems to me that these two definitions represent the main trends in the use of this word.