Designing the Global Governance of Crime
My book project, Designing Global Governance of Crime, explores when consensus requirements weaken international cooperation, and when they enable cooperation to deepen and strengthen over time in the context of international agreements governing transnational organized crime.
Conventional wisdom holds that consensus decision-making produces weak international agreements. When every delegation can block progress, the result should be watered-down commitments with little enforcement. Yet major UN crime treaties negotiated in Vienna, including conventions against transnational organized crime and corruption, incorporated surprisingly robust monitoring provisions such as mandatory data submission and deeper review, along with stringent obligations. How was this possible?
This book develops a theory of enduring consensus and traces its life cycle through the three phases: emergence, consolidation, and contestation. It distinguishes enduring consensus, in which consensus becomes internalized as a legitimate mode of lawmaking within a stable negotiating community, from deflective consensus, in which actors use informality to defer or dilute demanding provisions while preserving the appearance of harmony. When delegates operate with longer time horizons, repeated interactions, and reputational costs for obstruction, consensus can enable rather than constrain institutional strengthening.
The book identifies two key mechanisms that make this possible. Through seed planting, negotiators embed forward-looking mandates into treaties. These provisions authorize future review or monitoring without specifying the details, creating legal openings that can be activated later. Through precedent layering, they frame stronger provisions as natural extensions of past agreements, making ambitious proposals appear conservative and reducing resistance.
The empirical analysis spans four decades of international crime governance, drawing on six months of fieldwork at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna, forty-two interviews with diplomats across all world regions, and extensive archival research. The book traces the emergence of consensus norms in the UN drug conventions, their consolidation in the trajectories of UNTOC and UNCAC, and their contestation in the recently concluded negotiation of the UN Cybercrime Convention, where venue alternation between Vienna and New York, wider participation, and heightened geopolitical polarization tested the durability of enduring consensus.
The book bridges rational design theory with practice-oriented constructivism and historical institutionalism, offering new ways to understand how procedural rules shape the agreements states are able to reach.
The book makes three primary contributions. First, it refines prevailing expectations about consensus in international organizations by demonstrating that under specific structural conditions, consensus can enable rather than undermine institutional strengthening. Second, it bridges rational design theory with practice-oriented constructivism and historical institutionalism, showing how functional demands for monitoring intersect with procedural norms and community practices to produce institutional outcomes. Third, it brings global criminal governance, an understudied but high-stakes domain that implicates domestic security and sovereignty concerns, into mainstream international relations theory by reconstructing the histories of major crime treaties through novel interview and archival evidence.
Bo Won Kim 