Threat and Exit in International Agreements

• In Event: International Organizations: Bureaucracy and Behavior

Abstract

A state can use a variety of tools to attempt to reach its goals within an international agreement, especially when its goals no longer align with the agreement's goals. These tools include partial compliance or noncompliance, threatening to exit, exit, and even reentry to the agreement. Examples include the U.S. and Israel withdrawing from UNESCO in 2018; the Parties to the Nauru Agreement threatening to exit the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission in 2017; the Philippines’ exit from the International Criminal Court in 2019; and Iceland’s exit from the International Whaling Commission in 1992, which was followed by reentry in 2002. In this way, exiting an international agreement can be part of a state’s strategy when the state’s preferences no longer align with those of the agreement. This paper considers the conditions under which a state chooses to exit an international agreement, given its other less costly alternatives. Threat of exit is considered within a state’s options, as well as states’ other choices of noncompliance and partial compliance. I present a formal model that includes a state’s use of exit threat, other actors’ responses to that threat, and costs relative to other states’ expected actions. I test the model through quantitative analysis of a 1945 to 2014 international agreement exit dataset.

Author

• Faon Crystal, University of Illinois