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IL/IR Symposium: What Can IR Learn from IL?

[Jeffrey L. Dunoff is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law and Mark A. Pollack is professor of Political Science and Jean Monnet Chair ad personam at Temple University]

Many thanks to Opinio Juris – and to all of the Symposium participants – for a stimulating and informative discussion of the virtues and vices of international law and international relations (IL/IR) scholarship.

The Symposium highlights some of the ways that IL/IR research has enriched our understanding of the making, interpretation, and enforcement of international law.  Larry Helfer’s post provides a superb summary of what IL/IR scholarship teaches about the design of international legal agreements, and in particular of flexibility provisions.  In terms of interpretation, IL/IR scholarship has prompted a rediscovery of international courts by political scientists, who seek to explain patterns in international judicial behavior.  Finally, as Jana von Stein notes, IL/IR research has produced both increasingly systematic data collection on IL compliance, as well as sophisticated understandings of the diverse causal mechanisms behind law’s compliance pull on states.

However, our project seeks not only to identify “lessons learned,” but also to identify IL/IR’s weaknesses, blind-spots, and potential for further development.  The lively exchange between Richard Steinberg and Ian Hurd (see here, here, and here), as well as the thoughtful posts by Judge Joan Donoghue, Ed Swaine, Tim Meyer, and Ruti Teitel, suggest several ways that existing scholarship can be strengthened.

In this concluding post, we explore a different critique, namely that IL/IR scholarship is less interdisciplinary than its name implies, frequently consisting of a one-way application of IR as a discipline to IL as a subject.

IL/IR Symposium: Comment on von Stein

[Tim Meyer is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Georgia School of Law] As is de rigueur in discussions of compliance with international law, von Stein’s chapter quotes in the opening paragraph Louis Henkin’s statement that “almost all nations observe almost all principles of international law and almost all of their obligations almost all of the time” (p. 477) – the claim that launched a thousand journal articles.  Appropriately, von Stein’s excellent review of the compliance literature returns to Henkin in conclusion, noting in sum that “we know, for instance, that it is not the case that almost all states respect their obligations almost all the time.”  (emphasis in original) (p. 495).  In between, von Stein provides a clear, concise, and illuminating review of theories of compliance with international law and the empirical evidence for and against, and empirical challenges in evaluating, these theories.  International law seems to drive states to conform to its mandates at least some of the time, and our understandings of the mechanisms at work is improving, if still in need of improvement. In this comment, I want to suggest one way in which we can deepen our understanding of how international law affects state behavior. Specifically, I want to problematize the notion of compliance as a dependent variable.  Von Stein’s essay describes the state of the art in compliance studies, but as Dunoff and Pollack note the IL/IR literature consists overwhelmingly of the application of IR theories to international law.  Reconceptualizing how international law affects state behavior is a key way in which law can increasingly inform IL/IR scholarship. To put it simply, compliance – “the degree to which state behavior conforms to what an agreement prescribes or proscribes” (p. 478) – is undoubtedly a useful place to start studying how international law affects behavior, and great strides have been made in this area, but moving forward we need a conception of legal process that more accurately reflects how states actually implement and evaluate compliance with international law.

IL/IR Symposium: The Engines of Compliance

[Jana von Stein is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science and International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand) and a Faculty Associate at the Center for Political Studies (University of Michigan)] When do – and don’t – states comply with international rules? For instrumentalists (adopting Keohane’s –admittedly simplified– categorization of the literature as ‘instrumentalist’ and ‘normative’, the puzzle starts with the observation that no overarching power exists to enforce international law. If there is no ‘highest power’ to enforce rules, why follow them? The ‘engines of compliance’ are typically more diffuse than in domestic systems, but they are nonetheless real:

• International inducements. Sometimes a state benefits enough from having others follow the rules that it pays the ‘cost’ of ensuring compliance itself, whether in the form of ‘carrots’ (e.g., trade concessions) or ‘sticks’ (e.g., economic sanctions). Inducements are typically decentralized and based on self-help, so their application can be uneven. Inducements also face typical collective action problems, and so often work best when a powerful state is doing the heavy lifting.
• Reciprocity. Axelrod demonstrated long ago that reciprocity can be an engine of cooperation if the involved parties are sufficiently sure that they will interact into the future. The same logic holds for compliance, under certain conditions. Reciprocal noncompliance must harm the party that is tempted to renege: this is why (direct) reciprocity is rarely useful in international human rights law, but can work in the realms of trade and war conduct. Reciprocity is also problematic if the ‘punishment’ can’t be limited to the violator, as is often the case in international environmental affairs.
• Reputation. For instrumentalists, reputation is a means to an end: a reputation for keeping promises can make it easier to secure cooperation more broadly or in the future. Reputation is important for predicting future behavior, not for punishing past actions. Scholars debate just how much reputation carries over from one issue-area to another, or from one government administration to another. What is more, concerns about reputation can sometimes push governments not to comply, for instance if they want to foster a reputation for protecting their interests or their friends.