Things Fall Apart: The Unraveling of International Institutions through Withdrawal
The phenomenon of treaty withdrawal has become more visible in recent years, as evident in the cases of Brexit; withdrawals from the International Criminal Court (ICC); and the United States’ withdrawals from the Paris Climate Accord, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, and other treaties. My dissertation focuses on presenting a new theory of treaty withdrawal tested using cross-sectional data from the past seventy years, text analysis, and in-depth case studies. In my project, I seek to determine why states make the choice to withdraw, possibly endangering the relevant international institution, rather than bargain or breach.
At its core, states’ preferences across cooperating, cheating, or exiting are defined within a bargaining framework set within features of a treaty’s design, namely the level of the treaty’s flexibility and obligation. I posit that an institution is more likely to suffer withdrawals when it is too rigid to address states’ ever evolving needs and imposes strenuous obligations. In addition, I argue that a state will be more likely to withdraw when it can replace the benefits of the subject treaty with another international institution.
To empirically test my theory, I collected and coded new datasets containing information on treaty actions, treaty texts, treaty network connections, and treaty-level variables. These variables were coded using both human coding and automated text analysis, providing new measures of treaty-level data for future research. I test the theoretical mechanisms driving treaty withdrawal using in-depth case studies of the ICC, U.S. arms control agreements, and Brexit. My case studies are supported by elite interviews with policy makers at multilateral institutions, in the administrations or diplomatic offices of foreign governments, and who were involved in the decisions at issue.
This book length project brings both new theory and data to an underdeveloped literature on when and why states decide to withdraw from a treaty, among other treaty behavior like breach. Through studying treaty withdrawal, we can understand the consequences of international law on state behavior and its impact on international cooperation—or lack thereof.
The dissertation project has produced a series of stand-alone projects, which are listed under my Works in Progress.