Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: State sovereignty is at root a set of rules about institutional boundaries that divide political and territorial space. Institutional boundaries permit actors to organize the world around them into categories and groups and to establish arenas of authority or jurisdiction. In this paper, I suggest that the boundaries of external and internal sovereignty have become more permeable over the course of the past 150 years as a result of the blurring of the boundaries of international humanitarian and human rights law. The changes in institutional boundaries demarcating human rights and humanitarian law have reconfigured states? authority to organize domestic and interstate affairs. I argue that these changes have made the boundary of state sovereignty more permeable in two ways. First, they have reduced the legitimate scope of all states? internal sovereignty. On the one hand, states appear to be increasingly subjecting themselves to a reduced sphere of exclusive sovereign authority and to greater international accountability. On the other, states have expanded their claims to domestically adjudicate cases that have traditionally been beyond the boundary of sovereign immunity. Second, the change in boundaries of international humanitarian and human rights law has given individual human beings the legal authority to confront states. As a result, individuals have much greater ability to access national and international courts to seek redress for acts committed by state officials. This shift allows new actors to take on rights and responsibilities once the sole domain of states, and subsequently to limit the authority of states domestically as well as globally. These changes and their consequences are explored through historical analyses of the humanitarian and human rights regimes and the recent political struggles over the Pinochet case and the International Criminal Court.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this paper I test whether political institutions of checks and balances can restore investor confidence in leftist governments’ perceived creditworthiness. Investors tend to be averse to left-wing governments because historically leftist governments have frequently relied on expansionary macroeconomic policies and infringed on the property rights of investors. However, governments may improve the negative perception of from investors by the help of institutional and policy arrangements that reduce political and policy uncertainty and promote investor confidence. I specifically test the effects of veto players on country creditworthiness. Theoretically, veto players may or may not improve country creditworthiness: a larger number of veto players make policy changes more difficult, thus may provide greater policy stability; on the other hand, veto players in leftist governments may be perceived as a policy gridlock that locks in policies that are unfavorable to investors. Using sovereign credit ratings data of more than 100 developed and developing countries, I find that there is an inverted-U shaped relationship between political constraints and sovereign credit ratings among the leftist governments in the developing world; that is, there is a positive relationship between veto players and credit ratings as one moves from very few to a moderate number of veto players, but after reaching a certain level of veto points the relationship turns negative. On the other hand, there seems to be no significant association between the number of veto players and sovereign credit ratings among leftist governments in the developed world.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines two major risks to foreign investors: default on sovereign debt and expropriation of foreign direct investment, which we refer to collectively as "sovereign theft." Using a series of formal models, we analyze how the incentives to engage in sovereign theft vary with the state of the economy, the risk aversion of political leaders, and the nature of punishments for default and expropriation. We then document patterns of sovereign theft and foreign investment across much of the twentieth century. Our research, based on a new data set, reveals a striking asynchronicity: defaults and expropriations have occurred in alternating---rather than coincident---waves. Our fi…ndings shed new light on cooperation and conflict in the international economy.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Crime and vigilantism in South Africa is generally seen as an antidote to the breakdown of formal law. Both are constituted outside the state and emerge when the new social contract has been broken i.e. when the state can no longer provide security. This paper argues that there is often an intimate relationship between vigilante formations and state structures. It explores this apparent paradox through public discourses on crime and the emergence of vigilante groups. It suggests that vigilantism has to be analysed as attempts to promulgate a new legal-political order and although vigilantism is constructed outside the formal legal-political order of the state any easy separation is difficult to maintain in practice. This is explored in the context of the Amadlozi, a vigilante group operating in the townships of Port Elizabeth, South Africa. The paper also proffers some ideas on sovereignty and its relationship to vigilante formations.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this paper I will explore how international financial markets display different reactions to the partisanship of governments across countries. The partisan hypothesis asserts that left-leaning governments are associated with higher inflation, greater government debt and government consumption, and higher tax rates, which are the features that investors generally dislike. I expect that the partisanship of governments in developed countries does not matter to the markets, whereas it significantly affects the markets when it comes to developing countries.The reason is that the markets are confident that leftist governments in developed countries know that they have to cater to the interests of the markets; those in developing countries might be less pragmatic and more ideological. More importantly, investors usually lack good information concerning political certainty of developing countries. Therefore, it is likely that left party governments in developing countries may send negative messages to the markets because of their partisan label. Given these assumptions, I propose two possible situations where left-leaning governments in developing countries fare better: first, other things being equal, those leftist governments in developing countries with a relatively longer history of having access to international capital markets are likely to have higher credit ratings, because they are more exposed to the investors; second, the shorter the duration of democratic regime the lower credit rating a leftist government may have, because left parties in new democracies might be more ideological or extreme in order to strongly appeal to their supporters. I will use the sovereign credit ratings data by Institutional Investor and Euromoney (ranging from 1980 to 1999) to conduct statistical analyses on the effects of partisanship on credit ratings.