Essays on the Politics of International Law

Abstract

The three essays in this dissertation examine how diplomatic relations and norms shape the politics of international law and cooperation. The first two chapters examine how treaty withdrawal affects interstate cooperation and the development of international law. Several states have recently withdrawn from multilateral treaties and organizations. These developments have sparked widespread fears about the collapse of international institutions and the unraveling of the rules-based international order. However, using an original dataset built from the League of Nations and United Nations archives, I find that states' reactions to withdrawal are more varied and complex than these fears suggest.

I advance an experiential theory of international cooperation that explains this variation. I ground my theory in the idea that states learn through their direct experiences cooperating with one another. Treaty members experience withdrawal differently than nonmembers in several respects. When a state exits a treaty unilaterally, it damages its diplomatic relations with other treaty members, entangles them in the political and legal fallout of withdrawal, and exposes them to the material costs following from the breakdown of cooperation. Therefore, my theory suggests that exit should undermine treaty members' willingness to cooperate with the withdrawing state in the future but not affect the behavior of nonmembers. I test my theory by combining quantitative methods with case studies and historical evidence. I find that treaty withdrawal prompts a crisis that compels remaining members to negotiate reforms so that the treaty may adapt and survive; however, it also causes treaty members to ratify fewer agreements with the withdrawing state, undercutting cooperation in other policy areas.

The third chapter explores how diplomatic relations shape the politics of human rights. Governments often attempt to pressure human rights-violating states to change their behavior by publicizing their transgressions, a tactic commonly known as naming and shaming. Recent research suggests this tactic can produce backlash and intransigence in targeted states. I argue, however, that when states receive human rights criticism from their allies and geopolitical peers, it can lead them to engage more deeply with human rights laws and norms by prompting them to reciprocate feedback – a process I refer to as constructive ingroup reciprocity.

I test this argument in the context of Universal Period Review, a mechanism at the United Nations Human Rights Council where every state undergoes a review of its human rights practices once every few years. Each review consists of an interactive dialogue in which delegates from other states comment on the human rights record of the state under review. I leverage a natural experiment at UPR to estimate the effect of reciprocity on states' decision to participate in reviews independent of other factors that characterize the relationship between two states. I find that a state receiving criticism from another state affects the recipient state's decision to participate in the other state's following review, but this relationship depends on the states' geopolitical alignment. Geopolitically aligned states tend to act reciprocally, issuing more nuanced, constructive, and policy-specific recommendations to each other over time. In contrast, non-aligned states tend to respond to criticism with disengagement. These findings highlight that human rights criticism does not necessarily produce backlash but can instead lead states to voice more human rights concerns to their peers.