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In Lawmaking under Pressure, Giovanni Mantilla analyzes the origins and development of the international humanitarian treaty rules that now exist to regulate internal armed conflict. Until well into the twentieth century, states allowed atrocious violence as an acceptable product of internal conflict. Why have states created international laws to control internal armed conflict? Why did states compromise their national security by accepting these international humanitarian constraints? Why did they create these rules at improbable moments, as European empires cracked, freedom fighters emerged, and fears of communist rebellion spread? Mantilla explores the global politics and diplomatic dynamics that led to the creation of such laws in 1949 and in the 1970s. By the 1949 Diplomatic Conference that revised the Geneva Conventions, most countries supported legislation committing states and rebels to humane principles of wartime behavior and to the avoidance of abhorrent atrocities, including torture and the murder of non-combatants. However, for decades, states had long refused to codify similar regulations concerning violence within their own borders. Diplomatic conferences in Geneva twice channeled humanitarian attitudes alongside Cold War and decolonization politics, even compelling reluctant European empires Britain and France to accept them. Lawmaking under Pressure documents the tense politics behind the making of humanitarian laws that have become touchstones of the contemporary international normative order. Mantilla not only explains the pressures that resulted in constraints on national sovereignty but also uncovers the fascinating international politics of shame, status, and hypocrisy that helped to produce the humanitarian rules now governing internal conflict.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Failure in Paris, Success in Geneva -- 1. Social Pressure in International Lawmaking -- 2. Normative Gatekeeping (1863–1921) -- 3. Squaring the Circle -- 4. A Winding Road to the Additional Protocols (1950–1968) -- 5. A Revolution in Lawmaking? (1968–1977) -- Conclusion: Custom and Socially Pressured Codification -- Appendix: Research Design -- Notes -- Archival Sources -- Index

AbstractWhy do states create weak international institutions? Frustrated with proliferating but disappointing international environmental institutions, scholars increasingly bemoan agreements which, rather than solving problems, appear to exist "for show." This article offers an explanation of this phenomenon. I theorize a dynamic of deflective cooperation to explain the creation of compromise face-saving institutions. I argue that when international social pressure to create an institution clashes with enduring disagreements among states about the merits of creating it, states may adopt cooperative arrangements that are ill-designed to produce their purported practical effects. Rather than negotiation failures or empty gestures, I contend that face-saving institutions represent interstate efforts to manage intractable disagreement through suboptimal institutionalized cooperation. I formulate this argument inductively through a new multi-archival study of conventional weapons regulation during the Cold War, which resulted in the oft-maligned 1980 UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. A careful reconsideration of the negotiation process extends and nuances existing IR theorizing and retrieves its historical significance as a critical juncture and complex product of contesting diplomatic practices.

The protection of civilians from the dangers of warfare constitutes an imperative in contemporary global politics. Drawing on original multiarchival research, this article explains the codification of the core civilian protection rules within international humanitarian law in the 1970s. It argues that these crucial international rules resulted from the operation of two central mechanisms: Third World and Socialist-led social pressure and a strategic, face-saving reaction to it, leadership capture, in the politicized context of Cold War and decolonization-era international social competition. I demonstrate the conditional effect of social pressure by a coalition of materially weaker Third World and Socialist states upon powerful reluctant states: the United States, the United Kingdom, and more surprisingly, the Soviet Union. Third World and Socialist social pressure fostered a curious US-USSR backstage collaboration I label leadership capture, decisively shaping the legal compromise embodied in the civilian protection rules of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. Theoretically, this article furthers burgeoning IR work on the connection between social pressure, status competition, and international rule-making. Empirically it presents a new archives-based history of an intrinsically important case in international law.

The protection of civilians from the dangers of warfare constitutes an imperative in contemporary global politics. Drawing on original multiarchival research, this article explains the codification of the core civilian protection rules within international humanitarian law in the 1970s. It argues that these crucial international rules resulted from the operation of two central mechanisms: Third World and Socialist-led social pressure and a strategic, face-saving reaction to it, leadership capture, in the politicized context of Cold War and decolonization-era international social competition. I demonstrate the conditional effect of social pressure by a coalition of materially weaker Third World and Socialist states upon powerful reluctant states: the United States, the United Kingdom, and more surprisingly, the Soviet Union. Third World and Socialist social pressure fostered a curious US-USSR backstage collaboration I label leadership capture, decisively shaping the legal compromise embodied in the civilian protection rules of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. Theoretically, this article furthers burgeoning IR work on the connection between social pressure, status competition, and international rule-making. Empirically it presents a new archives-based history of an intrinsically important case in international law.

AbstractWhy have states created international laws to regulate internal armed conflicts? This article is the first to theorize the emergence and design of these international rules, focusing on Common Article 3 to the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Drawing on original multicountry archival research, I develop the mechanism offorum isolationto explain the origins of Common Article 3, demonstrating the importance of social opprobrium pressure to explain why Britain and France switched from staunch opposition to support and leadership in 1949. Specifically, forum isolation pressured these European empires to concedeandto react strategically behind the scenes, saving face and safeguarding their security interests by deliberately inserting ambiguous language in the text of Common Article 3. This move later facilitated states' avoidance of this rule in many conflict cases.

This article critically reviews the main debates and literature produced by international relations and comparative politics scholars connecting religion to the eruption of violence. Centrally, it argues that, despite fierce fractionalization in other fields of study, academic work on the religion-violence nexus seems to be reaching an emerging consensus between rationalist and constructivist approaches, approximating what Katzenstein and Sil have recently dubbed "eclectic theorizing." It also surveys the virtues and weaknesses of current work, and suggests avenues for future research. ; Este artículo discute los debates centrales de la literatura académica sobre religión y violencia producida por los estudiosos de las relaciones internacionales y la política comparada. El argumento central es que, a pesar de que en otros campos de estudio las aproximaciones racionalistas y constructivistas se enfrentan como explicaciones alternativas, en los estudios sobre religión y violencia parece estar surgiendo un consenso que las combina, al estilo de lo que Katzenstein y Sil bautizaron recientemente "teorización ecléctica". El artículo destaca las virtudes y deficiencias del trabajo existente, y sugiere vías para investigaciones futuras.

Despite the common reference to international humanitarian law (IHL) in the discourse and practice of international politics, international relations (IR) scholarship has yet to consistently engage in an analysis of IHL that extends beyond the relatively narrow specifications of its regulative and strategic effects. In this theory note, we argue that this prevailing focus leaves the discipline with an impoverished understanding of IHL and its operation in international politics. We propose that the study of IHL should be expanded through a deeper engagement with the law's historical development, the politics informing its codification and interpretation, and its multiple potential effects beyond compliance. This accomplishes three things. First, it corrects for IR's predominantly ahistorical approach to evaluating both IHL and compliance, revealing the complicated, contested, and productive construction of some of IHL's core legal concepts and rules. Second, our approach illuminates how IR's privileging of civilian targeting requires analytical connection to other rules such as proportionality and military necessity, none of which can be individually assessed and each of which remain open to debate. Third, we provide new resources for analyzing and understanding IHL and its contribution to "world making and world ordering."