PS420/520: International Organization

Course Assignments and Extra Credit

NOTE: Graduate students (only) must also write a paper for the course -- links for that assignment are at the bottom of this page!

Extra credit option: Identify a New York Times article related in International Organization

• Student Topics - contrary to what the Syllabus says, you can simply choose your own topic for this extra credit. I will not be assigning topics -- please just select your own. Sorry for the confusion.
• Post your article via this link - add your article link and get credit for the assignment.
• Articles suggested by other students -- read articles identified by other students here.
• This is the ONLY option for extra credit available in this course.

Two Treaty Assignments

To help you understand how international organization actually works, you will have to complete two assignments examining treaties on one of the four main issue areas covered in the course: international security, international political economy, human rights, or environmental protection (communication/corruption will not be covered in this assignment). Treaties (also known as conventions, agreements, accords, protocols, or amendments) are agreements that countries sign with the intention of legally binding themselves to take the actions laid down in the agreement. At the time you do your first assignment, you choose which of these four issue areas you want to work on. You do NOT get to choose which treaties to examine – only which issue area. For each issue area, you must study the assigned treaties. All the material needed for this assignment will be available on the course website.

Assignment #1: Reading a Treaty (length: no more than 1000 words) - 5% of grade

Choose one of the four issue areas in the table below. Read the text of the first treaty and answer the following questions. Do NOT analyze both treaties for your issue area yet, only analyze the one designated for assignment #1. I encourage you to use these questions as the headers for the six parts of your paper.

• Membership: What countries may become a member of this treaty? [Do NOT identify which countries ARE members, only which countries are allowed to become members.]
• Goals: What are the objectives or goals of this treaty?
• Requirements: What are the major requirements that this treaty makes of countries that become members? Although treaties often make many requirements, here you should focus on the core requirements that are the behaviors that countries commit to performing in order to achieve the objectives or goals of the treaty.
• Monitoring: What provisions in the treaty, if any, deal with monitoring whether countries comply with the major requirements of the treaty?
• Responses: What provisions in the treaty, if any, are intended to reward or encourage those who comply or sanction, punish, or prevent violations of the major requirements of the treaty?
• Evidence of success: What evidence would we expect to see in the world if this agreement had its intended effect (i.e., "succeeded")? What should we collect data on to know whether the treaty "worked" or not?\

Assignment #2: Comparing Treaty Texts: Predict which SHOULD work better (length: no more than 1500 words) - 10% of grade

READ the following two readings -- these are linked here.  These are essential reading for doing the assignments well!

• Jacobson, Harold K. and Edith Brown Weiss. 1998. A framework for analysis. Engaging countries: strengthening compliance with international environmental accords. 1-18. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Available HERE.
• Jacobson, Harold K. and Edith Brown Weiss. 1998. Assessing the record and designing strategies to engage countries. Engaging countries: strengthening compliance with international environmental accords. 511-554. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Available HERE.

For this assignment, you must use the two treaties in the table for the issue area you chose for assignment #1.

Re-read the treaty from Assignment #1 and read the second treaty for your issue area. Examine the requirements and structure of the treaty (membership, type of requirements, monitoring, enforcement) to make a prediction of how much you expect each treaty to change the behavior of member countries. Then, write a short paper (less than 1500 words, use word-count on your computer) that compares your predictions about the two treaties’ effects. Use the questions from Assignment #1 to guide your thinking in writing this comparison (you should NOT simply answer these questions about the second treaty but use the questions to compare the first and second treaty as a means of predicting which you would expect to work better).

For this assignment, you SHOULD NOT do any research on what effects the treaty actually had. This assignment requires only that you read the treaties and make PREDICTIONS about which treaty is likely to be more effective. For example, you might argue that one treaty had better monitoring provisions than the other but had worse enforcement provisions and you think that enforcement is unlikely in international affairs anyway, so you predict that the one with better monitoring will be more effective. Or you might argue that one agreement is between European countries and the other between Southeast Asian countries and that the fact that the latter countries have fewer resources would prevent them from complying and so the latter one would be less effective.

In this assignment, you will NOT be graded on whether your prediction is accurate or not. Rather you will be graded on how thoughtful and logical your prediction about the effects of the two treaties are, and which one is more effective, based on the theoretical insights you have learned to date in the class and based on real differences between the texts of the two treaties.

Grad Students Only - Final Paper Links

• Final Paper Assignment
• Checklist for Paper Writing
• Citations and References
• Structuring your Paper