The promise and perils of theorizing international regime complexity in an evolving world

Alter, Karen J.

doi:10.1007/s11558-021-09448-8

Cited by 25 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Recent scholarship has been especially concerned with how states contest multilateral institutions, forum shop, and pit institutions against one another (Morse and Keohane, 2014;Helfer, 2004;Clark, 2022). This research has been dominated by research within issue areas, small-N analyses, and case studies (Alter, 2022). I advance this literature by introducing new, comprehensive data on multilateral legal regimes and by demonstrating how contestation within one regime can reverberate across other regimes through their overlapping memberships.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Treaty Withdrawal and the Development of International Law

Schmidt¹

2023

Preprint

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I argue that treaty withdrawal has two opposing effects on the development of international law. First, it directly impacts the treaty where it occurs by pushing remaining members to adopt reforms to maintain cooperation. Second, it indirectly affects the development of other treaties by damaging diplomatic relations between the withdrawing state and other members, hindering negotiations in other areas of cooperation. The impact of withdrawal on legal development is consequentially mixed: while it expedites the reform of one treaty, it inhibits reform elsewhere. I test this argument by applying a difference-in-differences design to an original panel of treaties built from the records of the United Nations. My findings reveal that while withdrawal increases the number of reforms in treaties where it occurs, it decreases reforms in other similar treaties with comparable memberships. The indirect effect cancels out the direct effect; overall, treaty withdrawal contributes to the stagnation of international law.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Treaty Withdrawal and the Development of International Law

Schmidt¹

2023

Preprint

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“…The multilayer network approach might also teach us about multilevel governance, that is, how WHA resolutions are taken forward at other levels of governance (national and subnational). Finally, given the focus of the global governance literature on understanding regime complexity, 43 44 assessing interlinkages between international organisations appears as a promising way to understand how WHO interacts with other organisations in addressing global health issues and more broadly to study interorganisational collaboration. 45 Given, the common assumption that 194 member states leads to greater plurality and thus representativeness of decisions-making, potential future analysis might be to compare the structure of the WHA normative web with the plenary bodies of World Bank, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) or other international organisations with a health mandate.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emergent patterns in global health diplomacy: a network analysis of the resolutions adopted by the World Health Assembly from 1948 to 2022

et al. 2023

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From a complexity perspective on governance, multilateral diplomacy is based on interactions between people, ideas, norms, policies and institutions. This article uses a computer-assisted methodology to better understand governance systems as a network of norms. All World Health Assembly (WHA) resolutions that were available from 1948 to 2022 were collected from the WHO Institutional Repository for Information Sharing (IRIS) database. Regular expressions were used to identify how resolutions cite other resolutions and the resulting relationships were analysed as a normative network. The findings show that WHA resolutions constitute a complex network of interconnected global health issues. This network is characterised by several community patterns. While chain-like patterns are associated with specific diseases programmes, radial patterns are characteristic of highly important procedural decisions that member states reaffirm in similar situations. Finally, densely connected communities correspond to contested topics and emergencies. While these emergeng patterns suggest the relevance of using network analysis to understand global health norms in international organisations, we reflect on how this computational approach can be extended to provide new understandings of how multilateral governance systems work, and to address some important contemporary questions about the effects of regime complexity on global health diplomacy.

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“…International migration governance takes the architecture of a regime complex in which relevant provisions figure in different institutions that are partly overlapping and partly nested, but where none is focal (Alter, 2022;Betts, 2009;Eilstrup-Sangiovanni & Westerwinter, 2021;Jupille & Snidal, 2005). Unlike other areas of international relations such as trade or the environment, where states tend to agree on key objectives such as opening markets or saving the planet but disagree on the means, cooperation on international migration is fragmented across several partly contradictory objectives.…”

Section: The Eu In the Multi-layered Migration Regime Complexmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expanding, Complementing, or Substituting Multilateralism? EU Preferential Trade Agreements in the Migration Regime Complex

Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik

Lavenex

Lutz

2023

PaG

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Intense pressure for international solutions and weak support for multilateral cooperation have led the EU to increasingly rely on its strongest foreign policy tool in the pursuit of migration policy goals: preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Starting from the fragmentary architecture of the migration regime complex we examine how the relevant content of the EU PTAs relates to multilateral institutions. Depending on the constellation of policy objectives, EU competence, and international interdependence, we propose a set of hypotheses regarding the conditions under which EU bilateral outreach via PTAs expands, complements, or substitutes international norms. Based on an original dataset of migration provisions in all EU PTAs signed between 1960 and 2020, we find that the migration policy content in EU PTAs expands or complements the objectives of multilateral institutions only to a very limited extent. Instead, the predominant constellation is one of substitution in which the EU uses its PTAs to promote migration policy objectives that depart from those of existing multilateral institutions.

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The promise and perils of theorizing international regime complexity in an evolving world

Cited by 25 publications

References 44 publications

Treaty Withdrawal and the Development of International Law

Treaty Withdrawal and the Development of International Law

Emergent patterns in global health diplomacy: a network analysis of the resolutions adopted by the World Health Assembly from 1948 to 2022

Expanding, Complementing, or Substituting Multilateralism? EU Preferential Trade Agreements in the Migration Regime Complex

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