International Disorganization: Anarchy, Compliance, and Incoherence in Global Governance

• In Event: Compliance and Defiance with International Commitments

Abstract

The absence of a supranational government creates at least two problems for international law. The first is the well-known enforcement problem: with no global executive to sanction non-compliance, violations often go unpunished. The second is the coherence problem: lacking a consistent procedure for codifying and coordinating rules, states may craft a tangled mass of disjointed and conflicting international obligations. While the enforcement problem has been a major preoccupation of international relations scholars for decades, coherence has received comparatively little attention. This paper unpacks the concept of rule coherence, explores its effect on state compliance, and measures dynamic trends in coherence in the post-war era. I analyze the text of more than 7,000 multilateral treaties to illustrate the increasing incoherence of the international legal system. I then probe the effect of incoherence using a survey experiment that tests whether the presence of parallel and conflicting rules reduces the reputational costs of violating international law. Together, these results suggest that incoherence poses a significant challenge that is likely to increase as international institutions become more diverse and fragmented.

Author

• Tyler Pratt, Yale University