Research indicates that if third parties provide assistance to sanctioned states, the sanctions are less likely to be successful. However, the scholarship on the profile of sanctions busters and their motivations remains underdeveloped. Drawing on the realist and liberal paradigms, this piece develops two competing theories to account for third-party sanctions-busting. The hypotheses drawn from these theories build upon existing work on sanctions, the political determinants of international trade, and the effects of indirect interstate relationships. A quantitative analysis develops a new measure to identify sanctions-busting behavior for a dataset covering 77 sanctions cases from 1950 to 1990. The liberal and realist explanations are then tested. The results offer strong support for the liberal theory of sanctions-busting and less support for the realist theory. In particular, the analysis reveals a counter-intuitive finding that a sender's close allies are more likely to sanctions-bust on the target's behalf than are other states.

Why do governments and rebel groups employ child soldiers in some internal armed conflicts but not in others? This study argues that child soldiers can be viewed as a military innovation that governments and rebel groups have differing costs and incentives in employing. It is hypothesized that longer, bloodier conflicts, disputant capacities, and the presence of democratic institutions significantly influence whether child soldiers are used by one or both parties during internal armed conflicts. The effects of these factors are statistically analyzed, uncovering new insights into global patterns of child soldier usage by governments and rebel groups.

Despite clear expectations that sanctions busters undermine the effectiveness of economic sanctions, most empirical studies of the phenomenon fail to find that they significantly affect sanctions outcomes. One explanation for these puzzling results is that past studies have almost all relied on Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliott's (1990) dichotomous, timeinvariant ''black knight'' variable to operationalize the occurrence of sanctions-busting. This piece develops a more nuanced account of how the timing, quantity, and nature of sanctions-busting trade affects sanctions' outcomes and codes a new set of sanctions-busting variables that capture these distinctions. Two competing accounts of sanctionsbusting are tested in the analysis, one that asserts that only politically motivated sanctions busters (i.e., black knights) negatively affect sanctions' success and one that asserts that commercially and politically motivated sanctions busters jointly undermine their success. These rival accounts are tested using a competing risks analysis of 96 episodes of US-imposed sanctions from 1950 to 2006. The results indicate that while black knights alone do not make sanctions more likely to fail, in conjunction with commercially-motivated sanctions busters they do exercise a potent, negative effect on sanctions' success. These findings have important implications for how third party responses affect sanctions outcomes.Why do economic sanctions so often fail to achieve their objectives? The international cooperation a sender state receives in imposing sanctions against a state and the support a target state receives in resisting them constitute two potentially important explanations. While the comparative effectiveness of bilateral versus multilateral sanctions is one of the central debates within the sanctions literature, much less attention has been paid to how sanctions-busting affects sanctions outcomes-and the findings in that area have been mixed. This is puzzling because spoiler states often figure prominently in qualitative case studies of why economic sanctions failed to work in high-profile cases like the United States' sanctions against Cuba. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union served as Cuba's chief sanctions-busting patron-providing it with billions of dollars worth of subsidies and assistance. Following the Soviet Union's collapse, firms from Canada,

State competition for international status takes a variety of forms, but most are linked to states’ related pursuits of economic and/or military power. The Olympics offer a unique venue for states to compete with one another in a forum whose consequences do not directly spill over into either realm. Instead, states compete against one another for Olympic medals—a currency with no other international political value beyond the prestige that can be obtained with them. Leveraging a theoretical framework nested in Social Identity Theory, we develop a set of hypotheses to explain how states can be attributed international status as a result of their performance in the Olympic Games and via playing host to them. Using a linear hierarchical method of analysis, we evaluate the impact of participation in the Summer Olympics on the status attributed to members of the international system from 1960 to 2012. Our findings indicate that states whose performance exceeds expectations and smaller-sized countries that play host to the Olympic Games disproportionately gain status from their participation in the sporting regime.