International Legal Order and Inter-state Conflict

• In Event: Bringing IR Back in: The International in Conflict Processes

Abstract

How does a country’s external engagement with the international community influence its conflict behavior? Past studies have focused on the pacifying effect of two types of external engagement, participation in inter-governmental organizations (IGOs) and involvement in international trade. Such external engagement has a pacifying effect fundamentally because it enhances connectedness and a greater sense of community (Dorussen and Ward 2008, 2010; Kinne 2012; Lupu and Traag 2013; Lupu and Greenhill 2017). As populist movements seek to withdraw from the international arena, we point to another source of engagement, voluntary international legal commitments, that may also affect peace and caution against wanton departures from international commitments.

We argue that a country’s embeddedness in the international rules-based order influences its conflict behavior, because the process of international law making provides states with a forum to enhance their connectedness and build a community that shares the common language of respect for law and commitment to cooperation. In this process that features communication and persuasion, states debate and signal their foreign policy orientations. A country’s engagement in the international law making process may indicate its identification with particular rules in public international law. It may further signal the country’s commitment to the rules-based order of international society. Such public signal may, to some extent, self-bind a country to peaceful resolution of conflict. More importantly, a public commitment to peace and nonaggression may also dissuade others from picking fights with reputable members of the global society.

Based on this argument, we hypothesize that countries who are deeply involved in international law and who demonstrate a greater commitment to the “law of nations” (Kant 1795) are less likely to engage in violent conflicts. We test this claim using an original dataset that classifies international treaties by their degree of legal obligation to see whether this embeddedness into the international rules-based order reduces involvement in Militarized Interstate Disputes according to version 4.2 of the MID Dataset for conflicts between 1946-2010. Our preliminary analysis supports the hypothesis that states that are deeply embedded in international law are less conflict prone. On a state-level, we find that embedded nations are significantly less likely to engage in militarized disputes and are also less likely to initiate these conflicts, suggesting that the pacific effect is both in the targeting and selection processes that lead to conflict. This effect persists when controlling for factors such as trade, regime type, and military power, reproducing and extending existing models of conflict behavior from the Democratic Peace research program. We plan to add additional tests that analyze the effect of legal embeddedness in a directed-dyad context.

This paper contributes to the existing scholarship in a number of important ways. First, by demonstrating the pacifying effect of states’ involvement in and commitment to the international legal order, our work complements existing research demonstrating the effect of democracy, economic interdependence, and international organizations in reducing militarized disputes (Boehmer, Gartzke, and Nordstrom 2004; Pevehouse and Russett 2006; Lupu and Greenhill 2017). We develop a novel measure of a country’s embeddedness in international law by differentiating treaties that are basic versus those that require significantly greater obligations and observing a country’s commitment to these substantive and more demanding types of treaty instruments (Hafner-Burton, Mansfield, and Pevehouse 2015).

Secondly, we broaden the understanding of international law by showing that a country’s involvement in and commitment to international law matter in more ways than previously perceived. There exists a voluminous body of scholarship on the effect of international law in diverse issue areas, but studies about the effect of international law on war and peace are far fewer. Contributing to a vibrant scholarship on the effect of international law on various aspects of conflict behavior (Morrow 2007, Huth, Croco, and Appel 2013, Fuhrmann and Lupu 2016), we examine how commitment to international law may reduce the probability that states involve in violent conflicts.

Finally, we join a growing scholarship to uncover how a country’s external engagement may have indirect effects on its conflict behavior. Building on the recent literature on the networked nature of international politics in terms of IGO participation (Lupu and Greenhill 2017) and trade involvement (Kinne 2012; Lupu and Traag 2013, we examine a different network featuring states’ participation in international law and analyze how a country’s embeddedness in international law, rather than its ratification of a particular treaty, may have a pacifying effect.

Authors

• Xinyuan Dai, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• Duu (Jason) Renn, Messiah University