The Continent of International Law: Explaining Agreement Design

by Barbara Koremenos

Every year, states negotiate, conclude, sign, and give effect to hundreds of new international agreements. Koremenos argues that the detailed design provisions of such agreements matter for phenomena that scholars, policymakers, and the public care about: when and how international cooperation occurs and is maintained. Theoretically, Koremenos develops hypotheses regarding how cooperation problems like incentives to cheat can be confronted and moderated through law's detailed design provisions. Empirically, she exploits her data set composed of a random sample of international agreements in economics, the environment, human rights and security. Her theory and testing lead to a consequential discovery: considering the vagaries of international politics, international cooperation looks more law-like than anarchical, with the detailed provisions of international law chosen in ways that increase the prospects and robustness of cooperation. This nuanced and sophisticated 'continent of international law' can speak to scholars in any discipline where institutions, and thus institutional design, matter.

456 pages, Paperback

Published April 7, 2016

Reviews

[Leanne Powner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Barbara Koremenos’s _The Continent of International Law: Explaining Agreement Design_ is the culmination of well over a decade of theorizing and data collection. It focuses on two primary sets of hypotheses, those related to flexibility provisions and those related to centralization, scope, and control. Using primarily quantitative evidence drawn from her newly-released Continent of International Law dataset, supplemented with brief case studies drawn from agreements in the dataset, she finds at least moderate support for the majority of the hypotheses tested.

Very little in the book’s theoretical arguments and hypotheses is novel; it draws heavily on the original Rational Design special issue/book and Koremenos’s other published works. What is original to the book is hardly novel or pathbreaking. For such an important and field-setting work, the book is practically boring. Chapters and analyses are predictably and mechanically organized, leaving little to catch and keep the reader’s attention. I’ve been looking forward to this book for years, and when I finally got it, I was bored and had to drag myself through it; not a good sign.

The true contribution of this book is probably less its analysis and more the dataset underlying it, which took years to construct. 147 randomly chosen international agreements across the full range of issue areas, thoroughly and reliably coded for hundreds of characteristics. The database is a huge contribution to our understanding of international agreements because users can (well, not quite easily) append their own variables to it and expand what we know about the role of agreement design on a host of outcome variables beyond those considered by Koremenos et al.

[Alba Ibraj · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has profoundly changed the way I view international agreements and global policy. Thank you for sharing such a well-constructed piece with the world, Dr. Koremenos! A must read for all those in the NGO/foreign affair space.