Suchergebnisse

AbstractSeveral prominent human rights treaties seek to minimize violations during emergencies by authorizing states to "derogate"—that is, to suspend certain civil and political liberties—in response to crises. The drafters of these treaties envisioned that international restrictions on derogations, together with international notification and monitoring mechanisms, would limit rights suspensions during emergencies. This article analyzes the behavior of derogating countries using new global data sets of derogations and states of emergency from 1976 to 2007. We argue that derogations are a rational response to domestic political uncertainty. They enable governments facing serious threats to buy time and legal breathing space from voters, courts, and interest groups to confront crises while signaling to these audiences that rights deviations are temporary and lawful. Our findings have implications for studies of treaty design and flexibility mechanisms, and compliance with international human rights agreements.

There is heated debate over the wisdom and effect of secrecy in international negotiations. This debate has become central to the process of foreign investment arbitration because parties to disputes nearly always can choose to hide arbitral outcomes from public view. Working with a new database of disputes at the world's largest investor-state arbitral institution, the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, the authors examine the incentives of firms and governments to keep the details of their disputes secret. The authors argue that secrecy in the context of investment arbitration works like a flexibility-enhancing device, similar to the way escape clauses function in the context of international trade. To attract and preserve investment, governments make contractual and treaty-based promises to submit to binding arbitration in the event of a dispute. They may prefer secrecy in cases when they are under strong political pressure to adopt policies that violate international legal norms designed to protect investor interests. Investors favor secrecy when managing politically sensitive disputes over assets they will continue to own and manage in host countries long after the particular dispute has passed. Although governments prefer secrecy to help facilitate politically difficult bargaining, secrecy diminishes one of the central purposes of arbitration: to allow governments to signal publicly their general commitment to investor-friendly policies. Understanding the incentives for keeping the details of dispute resolution secret may help future scholars explain more accurately the observed patterns of wins and losses from investor-state arbitration as well as patterns of investment.

There is heated debate over the wisdom and effect of secrecy in international negotiations. This debate has become central to the process of foreign investment arbitration because parties to disputes nearly always can choose to hide arbitral outcomes from public view. Working with a new database of disputes at the world's largest investor-state arbitral institution, the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, the authors examine the incentives of firms and governments to keep the details of their disputes secret. The authors argue that secrecy in the context of investment arbitration works like a flexibility-enhancing device, similar to the way escape clauses function in the context of international trade. To attract and preserve investment, governments make contractual and treaty-based promises to submit to binding arbitration in the event of a dispute. They may prefer secrecy in cases when they are under strong political pressure to adopt policies that violate international legal norms designed to protect investor interests. Investors favor secrecy when managing politically sensitive disputes over assets they will continue to own and manage in host countries long after the particular dispute has passed. Although governments prefer secrecy to help facilitate politically difficult bargaining, secrecy diminishes one of the central purposes of arbitration: to allow governments to signal publicly their general commitment to investor-friendly policies. Understanding the incentives for keeping the details of dispute resolution secret may help future scholars explain more accurately the observed patterns of wins and losses from investor-state arbitration as well as patterns of investment.

AbstractWhy do some decision makers prefer big multilateral agreements while others prefer cooperation in small clubs? Does enforcement encourage or deter institutional cooperation? We use experiments drawn from behavioral economics and cognitive psychology—along with a substantive survey focused on international trade—to illustrate how two behavioral traits (patience and strategic reasoning) of individuals who play key roles in negotiating and ratifying an international treaty shape their preferences for how treaties are designed and whether they are ratified. Patient subjects were more likely to prefer treaties with larger numbers of countries (and larger long-term benefits), as were subjects with the skill to anticipate how others will respond over multiple iterations of strategic games. The presence of an enforcement mechanism increased subjects' willingness to ratify treaties; however, strategic reasoning had double the effect of adding enforcement to a trade agreement: more strategic subjects were particularly likely to favor ratifying the agreement. We report these results for a sample of 509 university students and also show how similar patterns are revealed in a unique sample of ninety-two actual US policy elites. Under some conditions certain types of university student convenience samples can be useful for revealing elite-dominated policy preferences—different types of people in the same situation may prefer to approach decision-making tasks and reason through trade-offs in materially different ways.

Hafner-Burton, E. ; Von Stein, J. ; Gartzke, E.: International organizations count. - S. 175-188 Dorussen, H. ; Ward, H.: International organizations and the Kantian peace: a network perspective. - S. 189-212 Hafner-Burton, E. ; Montgomery, A.: Power or plenty: how do international trade institutions affect economic sanctions? - S. 213-242 Von Stein, J.: The international law and politics of climate change: ratification of the United Nations Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol. - S. 243-268 Mansfield, E. D. ; Pevehouse, J. C.: Democratization and the varieties of international organizations. - S. 269-294 Hansen, H. E. ; McLaughlin Mitchell, S. ; Nemeth, S. C.: IO mediation of interstate conflicts: moving beyond the global versus regional dichotomy. - S. 295-325 Snidal, D.: Commentary on the special issue. - S. 326-333 Milner, H. V.: Commentary on the special issue. - S. 334-337

Human Rights at Risk brings together social scientists, legal scholars, and humanities scholars to analyze the policy challenges of human rights protection in the twenty-first century. The volume is organized based on three overarching themes that highlight the challenges and risks in international human rights: international institutions and global governance of human rights; thematic blind spots in human rights protection; and the human rights challenges of the United States as a global and domestic actor amidst the contemporary global shifts to authoritarianism and illiberal populism. One of the very few books that offer new perspectives that envision the future of transnational human rights norms and human dignity from a multidisciplinary perspective, Human Rights at Risk comprehensively examines the causes and consequences of the challenges faced by international human rights. Scholars, students, and policy practitioners who are interested in the challenges and reform prospects of the international human rights regime, United States foreign policy, and international institutions will find this multidisciplinary volume an invaluable guide to the state of global politics in the twenty-first century