January 2015

International Law as Behaviour Symposium: Epistemic Cooperation

[Tim Meyer is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Georgia School of Law.] For the last several decades, the central problem in much institutionalist scholarship has been how to design what I refer to as credible commitment regimes. Such regimes establish, or create fora in which states can later establish, substantive rules of conduct to coordinate state behavior across an increasingly wide range of issues. On the assumption that rational, self-interested states will cheat on these conduct rules if it is in their interest to do so, credible commitment regimes also create enforcement mechanisms to alter state incentives. Monitoring, verification, and dispute resolution mechanisms publicize violations, authorize retaliation, and in some instances award monetary damages. For example, the WTO agreements establish rules on the kinds of limits states may place on international trade. The WTO also creates the Dispute Settlement Body, which serves as a vehicle to further clarify the content of those rules, publicize violations, and reduce the cost of retaliation by defining when it is legally permissible. Below the radar, however, a class of international agreements have emerged that seek to coordinate state behavior through the production and regulation of information, rather than the creation of credible commitments. Following a robust literature on epistemic communities, I refer to these international regimes as epistemic institutions or epistemic agreements, and the phenomenon as epistemic cooperation. In its purest form, epistemic cooperation does not legally require states to take action on the regulated issue. Instead, it merely requires them to produce and share information with each other. The aim is to encourage states to coordinate their activities based on this information, rather than based on a legal rule made credible through international institutions. Examples of epistemic institutions that work in this way abound.

International Law as Behavior Symposium: TIME’S UP – Deadlines as Behavior in International Law

[Jean Galbraith is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School] One mechanism through which international law regulates the behavior of states and other actors is deadlines.   Although little studied, deadlines appear throughout international law, especially in treaty regimes. Drawing on a future book chapter, in this post I describe some of the roles played by deadlines in international law. I also consider what insights research on the use of deadlines in domestic contexts might have for good and bad ways to use deadlines in international law.

Uses of Deadlines in International Law

Deadlines occur throughout international legal practice. We find them in the negotiation of treaties; in relation to the signature and ratification of treaties; in the provisions of treaties; in exchanges among nations and other actors regarding international legal obligations; and in the functioning of international organizations and tribunals. Deadlines can have quite different international legal effects. Some deadlines are purely political, such as many deadlines in negotiations. Other deadlines set limits on access to legal opportunities, like the date a treaty closes for signature. Still other deadlines mark the legal boundary between compliance and non-compliance with obligations under international law, such as substantive or reporting deadlines written into treaties. For examples of these different kinds of deadlines, consider the Chemical Weapons Convention. Negotiating deadlines were used during its creation. Its entry-into-force date served as the date that the Convention closed for signature, triggering several last-minute signatures. This date also served as a symbolic deadline that galvanized the advice-and-consent process in the U.S. Senate. The content of the Convention itself is also laden with deadlines. To take one prominent example, the Convention requires parties to complete destruction of their chemical weapons within ten years of the Convention’s entry into force – with the possibility of an additional extension of up to five years. The United States and Russia have overshot this deadline and are therefore in violation of their obligations. Finally, deadlines feature in the work of the international organization created by the Chemical Weapons Convention (the OPCW), as with its recent use of deadlines in relation to Syria. As this example suggests, deadlines can prove hugely important to international law. Yet they have received little attention for legal scholars. Given how integral deadlines can be to the functioning of treaty regimes, it is important to think about they can be best deployed.

Deadlines and Behavior: Some Insights from Domestic Research

Although deadlines have received little study in international law, scholars have studied deadlines in lots of other contexts. As examples, consider the following findings: 

International Law as Behavior Symposium: Toward an Anthropology of International Law

[Galit A. Sarfaty is the Canada Research Chair in Global Economic Governance and Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia] With the growing importance of global legal institutions, new forms of global law, and transnational social movements around legal issues, anthropologists are studying the multiplicity of sites where international law operates. Scholars have examined the practices of international courts and tribunals and their conceptions of justice in relation to those of local communities. They have studied the global impact of law-oriented nongovernmental organizations on postcolonial consciousness. They have also analyzed the production of international treaties by transnational elites and their localization and translation on the ground. Given the critical need to uncover how international law is produced and operates in practice, legal scholars can gain insights from anthropological literature and adopt ethnographic tools in their own analysis. As I will outline below, anthropology offers unique insights in understanding international law behavior.

What is an Anthropological Approach to International Law

Anthropological theory and methods enables the study of how international law operates in practice, from how it is produced on a global scale to its localization on the micro-level. Through ethnographic research, anthropologists analyze individual actions, systems of meaning, power dynamics, and the political and economic contexts that shape the operation of international law. They recognize disjunctures between how laws are written and how they are implemented on the ground, as well as further variations in how they affect different communities. In the context of Harold Koh’s transnational legal process theory of norm compliance, an anthropological approach sheds light on the norm emergence and internalization phases by which international norms penetrate domestic legal systems on the local level. Ethnographic research involves case-oriented study, including long-term fieldwork and in-depth interviews. In the context of studying international law, fieldwork is frequently multi-sited to allow researchers to analyze such phenomena as the transnational circulation of global norms and local settings where multiple legal orders intersect—or what scholars call “global legal pluralism.” By tracking the flow of laws, institutions, people, and ideas across locales and jurisdictions, multi-sited “deterritorialized” ethnography is a useful tool in the study of international law. Anthropological research aims at answering a question rather than testing a hypothesis. Unlike other methods, it is not based on prior assumptions or models. Rather, hypotheses and theories emerge from the data, and are constantly evaluated and adjusted as the research progresses. Interviews are usually unstructured or semi-structured with open-ended questions developed in response to observations and ongoing analysis. The questions are designed to seek respondents’ interpretations of what is happening and allow them to describe problems, policy solutions, and their rationales in their own words.

What Anthropologists of International Law Study

While there are numerous areas of focus for anthropologists of international law, I will very briefly highlight a few important ones here: (i) the cultures of international organizations and international tribunals; (ii) the transnational circulation and localization of international legal norms; and (iii) the knowledge practices and technologies of governance in international law.

The Cultures of International Organizations and International Tribunals