Compliance and Defiance with International Law

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Scholars of international cooperation have devoted considerable attention to examining how and why states comply with international commitments. A core mechanism in this literature is that states comply in order to avoid the negative reputational and material consequences associated with violating an international law, rule, or norm. The papers in this panel argue that the identification and interpretation of violations is itself a political process. Ambiguity over international rules and nationalist domestic sentiment create space for strategic maneuvering by non-compliant governments. For example, a state may violate the normative spirit, if not the law, of an international agreement, or re-contextualize a violation as in keeping with alternative international rules. Other states may observe non-compliant behavior but opt not to label it as such in order to protect the institutional status quo. Even the public identification of non-compliance may lead to domestic backlash that reinforces the violating government.

The papers in this panel apply this new lens to the study of compliance in the issue areas of human rights and international security. Buzas shows how states violate human rights norms in shadow of technical legality, drawing on detailed case study evidence from France and the Czech Republic. Morse and Pratt argue that states can challenge judgments of non-compliance issued by international organizations by citing competing domestic or international principles. Carnegie and Carson examine the choice to classify ambiguous events as violations, positing a trade-off between the strength and scope of the regime. They find evidence for this tradeoff in a case study of India's 1974 "peaceful nuclear explosion." Terman and Gruffydd-Jones illustrate how even when an international body attempts to “name and shame” non-compliant behavior, this process may backfire by creating domestic backlash in support of the violating government. Together, these papers suggest that the relationship between international rules and compliance is more complex than previously theorized, and they offer important new insights for moving the compliance research agenda forward.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 17: International Collaboration

Individual Presentations

• Evasion: Violating International Norms in the Shadow of Legality - Zoltan I. Buzas, Drexel University

• Compliance and Contestation: Avoiding Reputation Costs in IOs - Julia C. Morse, University of California, Santa Barbara; Tyler Pratt, Yale University

• Embracing Ambiguity: Classification, Rule Violations, and International Politics - Allison Carnegie, Columbia University; Austin Carson, University of Chicago

• Don’t Tell Us What to Do: Human Rights Shaming and Nationalist Backlash - Rochelle Layla Terman, University of Chicago; Jamie Gruffydd-Jones, University of Kent

Chair

• Erik Voeten Georgetown University

Discussant

• Thania Sanchez American Civil Liberties Union