My research focuses on how international institutions and law promote international cooperation from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. I investigate issues related to multilateralism, treaty making, and preferential trade. A significant part of my work addresses the broad impact of international cooperation through multilateral treaties. My current research efforts concentrate on dispute settlement under preferential trade agreements and the conceptualization and measurement of power in IR.
Dispute Settlement under Preferential Trade Agreements
This project addresses the procedures and practices of dispute settlement among trading parties. It explores how the institutional design of trade agreements affects the occurrence, escalation, and resolution of disputes. While we have substantial insights into how trade disputes arise and are settled under the World Trade Organization (WTO) umbrella, we know much less about how trade disputes are handled outside the multilateral framework – in bilateral, plurilateral, or regional trade agreements. I am currently compiling a data set on the occurrence of disputes outside of the WTO system, their settlement practices, and levels of escalation.
Concepts and Measurement of Power in International Relations
Power is a central though contested concept in global political economy, and a recurrent theme in my research. To this end, I explore the variety of power concepts and measurements used by contemporary international relations scholars. While there have been significant conceptual advances in theorizing power, these have not been sufficiently reflected in empirical work which remains mired in conventional uses of military and economic indicators of power. This project takes advantage of theoretical progress to develop a broader empirically-oriented analysis of different concepts of power. Combining traditional content analysis with computational text analysis, I investigate evolving approaches to power in six major international relations journals over time. The goal is to promote cross-fertilization among existing approaches and to develop proposals for improving the use of power in empirically oriented international policy analysis.
Karolina Milewicz 