When, What, and Why do States Choose to Delegate?

Koremenos demonstrates that international delegation is an important and nontrivial empirical phenomenon. Using an extensive data set created from the United Nations Treaty Series, she finds that almost half of all international agreements involve delegation of some kind. By exploring the institutional design choices of international delegation, she finds that dispute resolution is the most commonly delegated function and often involves externally delegating authority to an existing arbitration tribunal or an international court. Furthermore, she finds that external delegation in particular increases with the existence of complex cooperation problems such as enforcement and uncertainty and with the heterogeneity and number of parties

The Role of State Leadership in the Incidence of International Governance

To understand leadership in international governance, I begin at the structural level with state actors. A simple framework that relies on state interests and material power can shed light on why powerful states take on leadership roles in some negotiations (e.g. arms control) but not in others (e.g. human rights). States attempting to cooperate to realize joint interests or solve problems often face a set of common and persistent obstacles. These obstacles, which I call ‘cooperation problems’, can make otherwise beneficial cooperation difficult to achieve. I argue that the particular combination of underlying cooperation problems present in an issue affects a powerful state's desire to take on a leadership position with respect to the incidence of international cooperation – that is, agenda setting by putting forth the first draft of an international agreement addressing the issue and remaining in control of subsequent drafts. Because, from a policy point of view, the most interesting cases are those that involve distribution problems, I focus on the following two combinations of problems: distribution with coordination and distribution without coordination. I use the examples of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Antarctic Treaty, the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Convention Against Torture to illustrate the theoretical discussion.Powerful states only take leadership roles in setting the agenda for the negotiation of international agreements when their interests cannot be served without leadership.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113689/1/gpol12246.pd

The Continent of International Law: (Im)precision and Reservations

Barbara Koremenos is an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Koremenos focuses on how international law can be structured to make international cooperation most successful. Theoretically, she develops hypotheses about how details of international law help countries confront harsh international political realities, and thereby increase the incidence and robustness of international cooperation. Empirically, she introduces systematic testing of hypotheses, featuring the only dataset that employs a random sample of agreements across the issue areas of economics, environment, human rights, and security.Ohio State UniversityMershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent web pag

International Nonregimes: A Research Agenda1

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146934/1/j.1468-2486.2007.00672.x.pd

The Continent of International Law

This working paper introduces a new project on international institutional design, the Continent of International Law (COIL). The unit of observation in COIL is an international agreement drawn from a random sample across four issue areas: economics, environment, human rights, and security. The theoretical portion of COIL articulates a set of cooperation problems including enforcement problems, distribution problems, three (independent) kinds of uncertainty, commitment problems, and problems of externalities, deadlock, and coordination, and provides concrete definitions and examples. Each agreement is coded for its underlying cooperation problems using background research and expertise in the sub-issue area. More than one answer can be chosen for each agreement, which gets around the problems of having to force real-life issues into 2x2 games. The theoretical premise is that cooperation problems are the driving force behind institutional design and that one cannot compare across agreements without first understanding the underlying cooperation problems the agreements are trying to solve. A completely different set of coders code 500+ questions of institutional design. This separation of coders allows for the testing of theories connecting cooperation problems to institutional design. To show how the data can be exploited, I present a variety of descriptive statistics as well as an operationalization of the important but difficult-to-measure concept of the incomplete contract. Among the findings presented are the following: With respect to cooperation problems, uncertainty about behaviour plagues human rights cooperation over 50% of the time, but rarely does so for economic cooperation. Human rights is the issue area in which parties are most likely to try to resolve uncertainty about preferences while they never do in economic agreements. With respect to design provisions, take nonstate actors as an example: Almost half of the agreements mention them, with human rights agreements alluding to them almost ¾ of the time. The most common nonstate actor is an IGO, but in economics, individuals sometimes play a role in dispute resolution. NGOs are mentioned in about 20% of human rights agreements but rarely if ever in the other issue areas

International Institutions as Solutions to Underlying Games of Cooperation

This Working Paper was presented at the international workshop "Game Theory in International Relations at 50", organized and coordinated by Professor Jacint Jordana and Dr. Yannis Karagiannis at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals on May 22, 2009. The day-long Workshop was inspired by the desire to honour the ground-breaking work of Professor Thomas Schelling in 1959-1960, and to understand where the discipline International Relations lies today vis-à-vis game theory