Geopolitical Rivalry and Fragmentation in the International Legal Order

• In Event: Security Organizations in Evolving Global and Regional Orders

Abstract

How does geopolitical rivalry between rising and declining states affect the international legal order? Thirty years ago, scholars debated whether international regimes would endure or collapse “after hegemony.” Since then, states have constructed a large and robust set of international institutions in many issue areas, making a wholesale return to unilateralism almost unthinkable. This trend does not mean that shifts in the distribution of power are inconsequential for the international legal order, however. I argue that shifts in power – most importantly, the rise of China and the relative decline of the United States – undermine the coherence of international legal regimes. Rather than threatening the principle of multilateralism, US-Chinese geopolitical competition generates incoherence and fragmentation, as the body of international treaty law reflects a series of parallel but uncoordinated legal regimes. I measure legal fragmentation using a novel dataset containing the text of over 60,000 multilateral treaties. I draw on a newly developed network model, the dynamic mixed membership stochastic blockmodel, to analyze the network of treaties and their coordinating text. Results demonstrate that the intensity of US-Chinese rivalry is associated with less coordination and more conflict in the international legal order.

Author

• Tyler Pratt, Yale University