Two Courts Two Roads: Domestic Rule of Law and Legitimacy of International Courts

Journal of Peace Research

Wiegand

2013

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States involved in territorial disputes have several options with regard to resolving their disputes. What types of states are more likely to resort to legal methods of peaceful resolution in attempting to resolve their territorial disputes? We posit that two separate mechanisms affect states' decisions to choose legal methods of peaceful resolution: the legal mechanism -domestic rule-of-law, and the political mechanism -win/loss record. Rule-of-law based arguments cannot fully explain states' behavior towards arbitration and adjudication. It is the interplay of both of these mechanisms that explains the strategic choices made by states with regards to arbitration and adjudication. We explain why some high rule-of-law states return to binding methods, while others turn to different forums, and why low rule-of-law states consider binding methods. Empirical analyses of all attempts at peaceful resolution of territorial disputes from 1985 to 2006 show that high rule-of-law states are more likely to return to international binding venues only if they have a positive experience with these methods. On the other hand, we find that low rule-of-law states are not concerned with their record of successes/failures when resorting to international binding venues. Overall, the effect of regime type/rule-of-law is conditioned by past successes and failures in international resolution venues.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 60%

Strategic selection

Journal of Peace Research

Wiegand

2013

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“…The proliferation of international courts and adjudicatory mechanisms is increasingly shaping interstate interactions, and blurring the lines between international and domestic law (Mitchell andPowell 2011, Powell, 2015). This process has been documented clearly in the case of the ICC, which goes well beyond the positivist tradition of giving standing to states only in international courts (Powell 2013). The ICC, created by the Rome Statute in 1998, not only exemplifies the process of global legalization but also posits a puzzle that transitional justice scholars have pondered for quite some time: does the court hinder or promote dictator's decisions to peacefully relinquish power?…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Domestic Opposition and International Justice Regimes in Peaceful Transitions of Power

Nalepa

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2016

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This article considers how international criminal justice administered by the International Criminal Court (ICC) affects the possibility of negotiated, peaceful transitions of power in autocracies. We argue that a strong international criminal tribunal can deter dictators’ decisions to peacefully relinquish their power. It does so when the dictator in question has faced a relatively violent opposition, one that was ready to strike a deal with the dictator promising him amnesty in exchange for stepping down. Facing an opposition that “has skeletons in its closet,” the dictator will peacefully exit his office only under a weak ICC regime. We use a cross-national time-series data set spanning 1998 to 2007 to test our theory and find that under a weak ICC regime, the more skeletons the opposition has in its own closet, the more likely is the dictator to peacefully step down from office. Interestingly, this relationship holds, to a large extent, across various levels of dictator’s culpability. If the ICC is strong, the number of skeletons the opposition has in its closet has, for the most part, no effect on the dictator’s likelihood of stepping down.

“…Some studies examine the type of resolution method pursued, and it is to this literature that the PRTD dataset contributes directly. Typical factors linked to states' selection of specific peaceful settlement methods include systemic factors such as military balance and alliance membership (Huth, 1996), membership in international organizations (Shannon, 2009;Simmons, 2002), domestic factors including regime type (Huth & Allee, 2002;Mitchell, 2002;James, Park & Choi, 2006), the value or salience of territory (Huth, 1996;Huth & Allee, 2002;Hensel & Mitchell, 2005;Hensel et al, 2008), the vulnerability of governments (Huth & Allee, 2002;Allee & Huth, 2006), and domestic legal systems (Powell & Wiegand, 2010, 2014Powell, 2013Powell, , 2015Powell, , 2020. Dyadic factors -past conflict and past settlement activity (Hensel, 2001;Wiegand & Powell, 2011) -and characteristics of individual leaders (Chiozza & Choi, 2003) have also received scholarly attention.…”

Section: Prior Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Peaceful Resolution of Territorial Disputes dataset, 1945–2015

Wiegand

Journal of Peace Research

McDowell

2020

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This article introduces the Peaceful Resolution of Territorial Disputes (PRTD) dataset, covering all interstate territorial disputes (1945–2015). Our dataset captures proposals for the peaceful resolution of territorial disputes made by states involved in territorial claims at the disputant-year level. These proposals provide a concrete measure of changing state preferences toward negotiations, non-binding, and binding third-party dispute resolution methods over time. In contrast to existing attempt-level data, the monadic panel design of the dataset captures not only actual attempts at peaceful resolution – the result of an agreement between disputants – but also proposals for methods that did not occur but were preferred at a particular time point. Our dataset allows for robust and generalizable quantitative analyses of the peaceful resolution of territorial disputes that are sensitive to temporal, regional, claim-based, and state-level trends. To demonstrate the utility of our dataset, we use hybrid logistic regression to examine the determinants of binding PRTD proposals. Over-time changes in characteristics such as regime type and treaty commitments influence attitudes toward binding settlement methods differently than disputant-level measurements. We also show that time has a distinctively non-linear effect.