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Concentrating on "the how of International Relations", this article deals in its first half with three major issues in scientific methodology : 1) importance of the scientific mode in acquiring and transmitting knowledge, and also rendering it more policy-relevant; 2) methods of forecasting international events and their evaluation; 3) different routes to theory-building : induction, deduction, analogy, gaming and computer simulation. The second half of the paper substantiates this methodological survey by presenting some findings from the Correlates of War Project that has been going on at the University of Michigan for two decades. The emphasis is on the rigorous identification of the phenomenon (War) and on the presentation of data on different factors at different levels of analysis correlated with its incidence.

This paper proceeds from the premise that profound changes have transformed the structure of world politics and that, consequently, a new, transnational paradigm of the global system needs to be developed. All the existing paradigms are found to be incapable of handling the proliferation of actors, the declining capacities of governments, the mushrooming of subgroup loyalties, the growing demands of the Third World, and the expansion of the range of issues on the global agenda - to mention only the most salient of the transformations that have rendered world politics both more decentralized and more complex. What is needed, it is argued, is a model organized around micro units of analysis that are common to both the new and old actors, issues, and structures and that thus form the foundation of the many new macro aggregations which have come to share the world stage with governments and international organizations.After developing a conception of four types of aggregational processes through which micro parts are converted into macro wholes, the analysis focuses on two types of transnational roles as worthy of consideration as the basic micro units of the new paradigm. The two types are designated as primitive and derivative roles. The former refers to roles in macro units that would not exist if their activities did not span national boundaries (the multinational corporation is an example), while the latter refers to roles in macro aggregations that do not depend on transnational interactions for their existence even though performances in them to have transnational consequences (examples are farmers, parents, and car drivers, who are both active and inadvertent participants in, respectively, today's global food, population, and energy issues).Whatever the issue involved, and irrespective of whether they are primitive or derivative, all transnational roles can be located on a legitimacy-authority continuum and seen as varying between two extremes, one which gives exclusive priority to the citizen role in a nation-state and the other which accords exclusive loyalty to the transnational role. The tourist and the terrorist are offered as examples of roles at the two extremes of this important continuum.

AbstractRight-wing extremism in the United States is examined in relation to the continual upheavals that have shaken the American social structure. Historical analysis of these movements reveals a striking parallelism between the convulsions American political life is undergoing presently, and periods of the past that were similarly marked by waves of religious and racial fanaticism. The author establishes the regularity with which extremist movements arise, and emphasizes the recurrent themes of prejudice and supposed conspiracies that are present in the explanations given by such movements for the social changes America has undergone and continues to undergo. He sheds light also on the conditions that lead to the emergence of right-wing movements, and attempts to explain the fact that most of them declined rapidly, whereas the factors that gave rise to them appear as constants of the American political scene.

AbstractFlorence Murray (1894-1975) had a long and successful career as a medical missionary in Korea. Yet her first term in the Japanese colony (1921-1927) was a troubled one. Her difficulties arose in large part from her strong commitment to new western standards of medical professionalism in a setting where evangelization and, in the case of women doctors, a separate spheres approach, had previously been given priority in missionary medicine. This commitment is best understood as an outcome of the fusing of values derived from her stereotypically “Presbyterian” upbringing and her professional training rather than as a straightforward instance of secularization. It also provides the most useful context for understanding her changing orientalist discourse.

A growing trend in US rural (and urban) development policy is the formation of flexible manufacturing networks, interlinked firms patterned after European industrial districts in Denmark and Italy. This paper examines the experience of several such networks in the United States, in rural and in urban areas, in order to evaluate their performance and effects on member firms. Detailed interviews with firms in such networks indicate that networks are most useful for firms and very small firms (micro-enterprises). The networks as institutions promote inter-firm interaction and collective learning in their regions. In addition, the networks provide services to member firms. It appears that networks which become embedded in their region tend to provide more for their member firms than do less well-integrated networks.Embeddedness is indicated by the involvement and financial (and other) support or local institutions and of influential residents, especially community entrepreneurs. In only a few regions where no network operates, firms are able nearly to substitute for a network by means of active informal networking on their own with firms from outside the locality. In most regions, some public-policy « push » seems to be needed to foster networking among firms in the local area.

Keywords: Réseau, PME, Fabrication, Coopération, Politique locale, États-Unis

ABSTRACTFollowing the demise of the Bretton Woods system, the poor predictive value of traditional elasticity models of exchange rates rekindled interest in the theoretical relationship between exchange rates and prices of internationally traded goods. This paper provides a critical survey of the emerging theoretical and empirical literature in exchange rate pass-through with the objective of offering guidance for future research.