Research

The international investment regime is increasingly reliant on the expertise of lawyers. What impact does the rise of lawyers have on the design of international cooperation? We argue that lawyers can advise states to create international investment agreements (IIAs) that lower institutional barriers, making it easier for investors to access legal dispute resolution. Using an original dataset of 479 arbitration practitioners registered with the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes from 1974 to 2023, along with a newly constructed dataset measuring investors’ access to legal dispute settlement, we find that states with a larger pool of arbitration practitioners are more likely to amend their treaties in a way that eases investors’ access to Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). We also find support for our theory through interviews with arbitration practitioners. Our findings can explain why states maintain investor-friendly ISDS clauses, even after suffering losses from previous ISDS disputes. The growing reliance on lawyers can reshape and professionalize international cooperation beyond the purview of states.

Scholarship on legalization and nuclear proliferation often relies on aggregate measures of institutional design that obscure critical variation. We introduce the Nuclear Arms Control Index (NACI), a dataset of 91 nuclear arms control and nonproliferation instruments (1945–2025) organized by a nuclear life cycle framework developed in consultation with an IAEA nuclear safety professional. NACI codes 53 clause-level indicators capturing life cycle stages and institutional design features across instruments and time. Replications show heterogeneous effects obscured by aggregation: disaggregating obligation reveals that bindingness and withdrawal clauses have opposing associations with time to agreement conclusion. In a separate replication, we find that when agreements contain strong acquisition-control provisions, militarized disputes commonly viewed as a primary driver of proliferation, become statistically insignificant. These results indicate that specific institutional constraints can dampen the security dilemma and underscore the value of clause-level data for assessing whether the nuclear regime can address evolving proliferation risks.

Consensus decision-making is widely associated with lowest-common-denominator outcomes. By effectively giving each state a veto, it enables opponents to block or dilute sovereignty-infringing provisions in international law. Yet the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (2000) and the United Nations Convention against Corruption (2003), both negotiated under consensus, ultimately adopted mandatory peer review in 2009 and 2018 respectively, despite persistent opposition. I explain this puzzle by distinguishing two subtypes of consensus decision-making. I theorize that enduring consensus, where institutions are incrementally strengthened rather than abandoned due to contestation, occurs when consensus is deeply internalized within a stable negotiating community of shared expertise and extended time horizons. I suggest two micro-level practices: seed planting, where delegates embed mandates to revisit disputed issues within the same forum, and precedent layering, which invokes prior local community decisions to raise the reputational and argumentative costs of continued obstruction. Drawing on six months of fieldwork in Vienna, UN documents, leaked diplomatic cables, and forty-two interviews with negotiation participants, I trace how monitoring proposals blocked at treaty adoption were preserved and later enacted through these practices. The findings challenge the assumption that consensus inevitably weakens cooperation and demonstrate how diplomatic practices can deliver the institutional designs that functional logics predict but procedural constraints would otherwise block.

International human rights treaties are created to uphold human rights norms and to improve domestic practices. Increasingly, states are withdrawing from international agreements. If states decide to withdraw from a human rights treaty, does this lead to a decline in domestic human rights practices that the international treaty was meant to promote? Focusing on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, this paper examines the domestic impact of the Statute withdrawal. We propose a theory of performative compliance to explain how states that do not have intention to comply with human rights norms – such as through withdrawing from the treaty – perform compliance to evade backlash and resistance. We test the argument through the case of Burundi, one of the two countries that withdrew from the Rome Statute. Through process-tracing and text analysis of the government statements, we find that the Burundi government attempted performative compliance post-withdrawal to avoid further responsibility and condemnations from human rights advocates. The research implies that withdrawal may not lead to a direct decline in goals of international treaties, and that states may still be bound to these standards even after withdrawal at least under international scrutiny.

Environmental negotiations, particularly the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, have been constantly criticized for ongoing deadlock and inefficiency, unable to provide timely and strong solutions to environmental problems. Scholars have identified the stringent yet informal requirement for full consensus as the main reason why this deadlock persists. Puzzling is the fact that participants could rely on other forms of negotiation, considering that the rules of procedure do not stipulate a requirement for consensus. Why, then, have environmental negotiations imposed a consensus requirement despite its inefficiency and the absence of any formal obligation? We argue that informal consensus functions as a procedural script: a socially recognized template for how legitimate multilateral decision-making should proceed. The script originated in UNCLOS III negotiations and was subsequently carried across environmental venues by procedural script entrepreneurs such as chairs, secretariat officials, and delegates who reproduced the template in new negotiations. Through historical case studies we trace the lineage of the procedural script, its creation, transmission, and entrenchment in the UNFCCC despite persistent calls for reform. The findings of this research contribute to understanding why international cooperation may fail to provide effective remedies for globally imminent problems.

Flexibility clauses in international economic agreements give member countries a temporary “out” when unforeseen conditions make it difficult to adhere to the agreement. Theory suggests such derogations can deepen cooperation. For countries that comply with the rules, derogation rules impose monitoring costs on violators. For violators, opt-outs keep the costs of membership from becoming unreasonably high. In the trade domain, balance of payments (BOP) trouble can make quantitative import controls and other restrictions attractive remedies. The GATT/WTO agreement includes carve-outs that allow members to temporarily impose otherwise illegal trade restrictions to deal with BOP problems. But the use of BOP safeguards by GATT/WTO members dramatically dwindled over time. In this paper we explain how BOP safeguards become stigmatized. Rather than pay the costs of removing the clauses from the GATT/WTO agreement, actors that opposed BOP safeguards reinterpreted their use as inappropriate – in effect, stigmatizing otherwise legal mechanisms for temporarily seeking protection during hard economic times. Using a mix of original data on BOP consultations in the GATT/WTO from 1952 to 2020 and qualitative process-tracing, we examine whether GATT/WTO member states facing payments pressures actively shied away from using safeguard clauses out of fear of being associated with remedies that were on-the-books legal but stigmatized as normatively inappropriate. The findings of this paper contribute to the literature by highlighting how stigma and reputational concerns shape how states engage with international rules and institutions.