Negotiated Formal Agreements and International Relations

许多西方国际关系观察家认为，一个主要的潜在问题仍然是建立和管理有序的国家间关系。要使互利的经济和文化交流正规化，并确保避免相互破坏的暴力冲突，就需要有相当程度的关系秩序。因此，捍卫和逐步发展现有秩序被视为负责任的治国方略的首要目标。解释不完整的国际秩序是如何维持和变化的，是国际组织中一个突出而活跃的分支领域——制度理论的焦点。制度是一套或多或少相互承认的规则，包括原则、规范和决策程序以及国际协定。符合规则的国际行为在某些情况下可以产生对未来的一致期望，并导致对国家安全的共同承认。本项目在两个方向上进行方法扩展，通过开发利用文本来源的方法，以及通过构建用于分析从适当文本派生的规则数据库的计算方法。首先，正式谈判协议的文本——特别是1972年的《反弹道导弹条约》和1987年的《消除中程和短程导弹条约》（INF条约）——被用作衍生和解释规则的原始材料，这些规则如果得到遵守，将限制美苏之间随后的互动。之所以选择这些协定，是因为它们既载有详细的数量限制，又载有广泛的限制性原则，还因为它们为联合管理协定的执行创造了新的论坛。其次，这些规则用计算机能理解的语言表达，并被组织成一个正式的数据库，类似于数字电子表格，但不包含数字，而是包含许可和禁止的声明。最后，应用计算逻辑语言向数据库提出关于哪些活动符合规则集和哪些活动违反规则集的问题。本文的目标是发展从文本材料中构建规则数据库的方法，以证明国际行为如何与遵守规则或违反规则相关联，从而为超级大国安全关系这一非常重要的领域的后续政权可能性实证分析建立概念和方法基础。

Many Western observers of international relations believe that a major underlying problem remains the creation and management of orderly relations among states. A substantial degree of orderliness in relations is required for regularizing mutually beneficial economic and cultural exchange and for assuring the avoidance of mutually destructive violent conflicts. Defending and incrementally developing an existing order is thus seen to be a prime objective for responsible statecraft. To explain how incomplete international orders endure and change is the focus of a prominent and active subfield of international organization, called regime theory. A regime is a set of more or less mutually acknowledged rules - - including principles, norms and decision-making procedures as well as international agreements. International behavior in conformance with the rules can in some circumstances produce convergent expectations about the future and lead to shared recognitions of national security. This project undertakes methodological extension in two directions, by developing ways to utilize textual sources, and by constructing computational methods for analyzing data bases of rules derived from appropriate texts. First, the texts of formal negotiated agreements -- specifically the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 and the treaty on the elimination of intermediate- range and shorter-range missiles (INF Treaty) of 1987 - - are used as source materials for the derivation and explication of rules which, if adhered to, constrain subsequent interactions between the United States and the Soviet Union. These agreements are selected because they contain both detailed quantitative limits and broad restrictive principles, and because they create new forums for joint management of their implementation. Second, the rules are expressed in a language which a computer can understand and are organized into a formal data base, similar to a numerical spreadsheet but containing not numbers but statements of permission and prohibition. Finally, a computational logic language is applied to pose questions to the data base concerning which activities conform and which violate the rule sets. The objective is to develop methods for constructing a data base of rules from textual materials, to demonstrate how international behavior can be related to rule-compliance or rule-violation, and thus to establish conceptual and methodological foundations for follow-on empirical analysis of regime possibilities in the very important area of superpower security relations.