Treaty Behavior
The Ties that (Un)bind: A Network Analysis of Treaty Exit. Working paper.
Withdrawal from international institutions, like the recent withdrawals from the International Criminal Court (ICC), the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord, or Brexit, have often been explained with ad hoc state- or institutional-level theories without much consideration of the broader connections between states. This paper moves beyond this approach to provide a theory that explains treaty exit by considering a state’s position in the international network of treaties on the whole and within higher-order treaty clusters. States that have higher and long-lasting centrality may value each relationship less because it has many other pathways to obtain benefits or information, leading to a higher probability of ending those relationships. The theory is tested using a dataset of a random sample of treaties to find that enduring centrality within a treaty cluster affects the probability of treaty exit, especially when that centrality begins to shift within the treaty cluster. These individual state decisions also appear to ripple through the network, affecting other seemingly unrelated treaty relationships. The theory and findings open a new approach to understanding how the network of treaty relationships jeopardize the survival of international institutions.
Asking for the Moon: A Bargaining Model of Treaty Exit. Working paper.
Why do states choose to withdraw rather than bargain for an accommodation or simply breach to meet their needs? This paper presents a bargaining model of treaty exit that incorporates treaty features of obligation and flexibility to understand how the distributional shift in treaty costs and the effect of treaty precision and enforcement shape a member state’s preference to withdraw over reaching a bargain, maintaining the status quo, or breaching. Being that withdrawing is costly to international cooperation—foreclosing a forum within which to address interstate problems—it is puzzling why a state would ever choose to withdraw. The plausibility of the theory is assessed using three cases of withdrawal from UNIDO, the Universal Postal Union, and the International Whaling Convention. It concludes with some expectations for results and implications of the project for future research.
Measuring Treaty Obligation. Developing project.
How can obligation be measured in a standard way across treaties? To find obligation, one must start with the text of the treaty. The treaty lays out the purpose, parameters, scope, costs, and obligations of an agreement between nations. However, the overall level of obligation or costliness of a treaty is a latent variable that is theoretically important but has been difficult to measure. This paper assesses how the magnitude of a treaty’s obligation affects a state’s decision to enter, ratify, qualify, and potentially leave a treaty. The paper does so by analyzing a new data set of treaty texts using quantitative text analysis and machine learning (in process) to understand the relationship between a treaty’s obligations and a state’s effort to mitigate those obligations. The quantitative analysis is validated against treaty design measures from the COIL data set and new treaty action data. The findings and new data may provide a useful resource for further research regarding treaties and state behavior.
Foreign Relations Law
Exit through the White House: Constraints on Presidential Power to Unilaterally Withdraw from Treaties. Working paper.
When does the U.S. President have the power to withdraw unilaterally from a treaty within the context of the constitutional balance of powers? Where modern practice supports a conclusion that the president has the practical—if not legal—power to unilaterally withdraw from a treaty without the consent of the Congress, there is little investigation as to whether the Congress and electorate serve as a check on the president’s power and behavior. I collected data on U.S. treaty withdrawals since 1945, as well as Congressional action attempting to support or restrain unilateral treaty withdrawal by the executive, to test my expectation and find evidence that presidents are less willing to withdraw from treaties when they face opposition from the Congress, especially from their own party. Additionally, the president’s political ideology is correlated with a propensity to withdraw, where Republican presidents, on the whole, are less likely to withdraw than Democratic presidents. This is not because of any antagonism to the international system but a more robust engagement with creating new institutions on the whole.
International Governance
Arming Costs Humanity More Than War (with Andrew J. Coe). Working paper.
Policymakers and scholars have long focused on the costs to human welfare imposed by war, while largely neglecting the costs imposed by arming. Yet arming—the building and maintenance of states’ militaries—is also costly, and unlike war, most states engage in arming most of the time. We explicitly compare the costs of arming and war. The costs of arming can be measured by existing data on national military expenditures, but it is more difficult to assess the costs of war. We develop a novel approach to estimating war costs, based on using case studies of the costs of particular wars to project an upper bound to total costs of other wars from data on battle deaths. We find that, in the last half-century at least, the annual global costs to human welfare of arming grossly exceed those of war. This suggests that the costs of arming deserve greater attention than they have so far received.
Developing the Final Frontier: Defining Private Property Rights on Celestial Bodies for the Benefit of All Mankind (August 16, 2010) SSRN Cornell
Sustainable colonization and exploitation of the lunar surface, Mars, or nearby asteroids is still decades away. However, NASA, the Obama Administration, and other agencies around the world have shown a growing interest in establishing a human presence on the moon, mars, and beyond. Unfortunately, the legal regime concerning the use of the Moon and other celestial bodies, which is necessary to further development in outer space, is largely unsettled. One important unsettled area is the ownership status of celestial bodies and whether private property rights on those bodies are permissible and desirable. This Paper takes the view that private property rights on celestial bodies is permissible and desirable if celestial bodies are considered terra nullius—incentivizing development—and private property rights be defined in terms of a social obligation norm. This coupling of concepts will satisfy the desires of both proponents of celestial development and proponents of outer space as the common heritage of all mankind.
International Courts
Appeals to Fairness: Does the Appeal Process at the ICC Enhance Its Legitimacy. Working paper.
The legitimacy and effectiveness of the International Criminal Court (ICC) have come under severe criticism in recent years, leading—in part—to states recently exiting the institution. Crucial to the ICC’s legitimacy is its process and procedure, including the essential appellate process. Appeals allow for errors to be identified, challenged, and remedied, as well as providing an accountability mechanism for judges and litigants. However, that process has yet to be empirically studied. This project presents a theory of measuring whether the court’s appellate process is promoting legitimacy and effectiveness, focusing on the comparative diversity and experience of the Pre-Trial, Trial, and Appellate Chambers as well as issues involved. The project aims to code new data of all appeals of convictions or acquittals and interlocutory appeals at the ICC, and it hopes to show that the differing legal backgrounds of the judges between the Chambers lead to more reversals on issues pertaining to state sovereignty, which undermines the legal legitimacy but promotes broader political goals of the Court. The theory and new data highlight the structural idiosyncrasies of the ICC that should be reexamined as the Court’s legitimacy is under fire.