International Law, International Relations and Compliance

Commitments are a persistent feature of international affairs. Disagreement over the effect of international commitments and the causes of compliance with them is equally persistent. Yet in the last decade the long-standing divide between those who believed that international rules per se shaped state behavior and those who saw such rules as epiphenomena1 or insignificant has given way to a more nuanced and complex debate. Regime theory, originally focused on the creation and persistence of regimes, increasingly emphasizes variations in regimes and in their impact on behavior. The legal quality of regime rules is one important source of regime variation. At the same time the proliferation and evolution of intema-tional legal agreements, organizations and judicial bodies in the wake of the Cold War has provided the empirical predicate and a policy imperative for heightened attention to the role of international law. Across many issue-areas, the use of law to structure world politics seems to be increasing. This phenomenon of legalization raises several questions. What factors explain the choice to create and use international law? If law is a tool or method to organize interaction, how does it work? Does the use of international law make a difference to how states or domestic actors behave? These questions are increasingly of interest to IR theorists axid policy-makers alike. The core issue is the impact of law and legal-ization on state behavior, often understood in terms of compliance. While the distinction should not be overstated, legal rules and institutions presume compliance in a way that non-legal rules and institutions do not. Law and compliance are conceptually linked because law explicitly aims to produce compliance with its rules: legal rules set the standard by which compliance is gauged Explanations of why and when states comply with international law can help account for the turn to law as a positive phenomenon, but they also provide critical policy guidance for the design of new institutions and agreements. This chapter surveys the study of compliance in both the international relations (IR) and international law (IL) literature.' In many ways, the compliance literature is a microcosm of developments in both fields, and particularly of the rapproche-For IR scholars interested in reviving the study of international law in their discipline, it was a natural step to focus first on questions of whether, when and how law 'mattered' to state behavior. For international lawyers eager to use IR theory to …