ILASS Prize for Best Article of 2025, International Law and Social Science Interest Group, ASIL.
Best Article of 2023 Award, International Collaboration Section, APSA.
This paper examines how treaty withdrawal affects international cooperation. By terminating its treaty commitments, the exiting state could earn a reputation for unreliability, making other states less willing to cooperate with it. However, states’ reactions to withdrawal vary markedly, even though it is public behavior. I develop an experiential theory of international cooperation that explains this variation. I argue that withdrawal damages the exiting state’s relations with other treaty members, causing them to ratify fewer agreements with it in the future. I test this theory using an original dataset of all treaties registered with the United Nations and a case study of France’s exit from NATO’s status of forces agreement. I find that withdrawal reduces treaty members’ ratification of agreements with the exiting state by 7.9% in the seven years after exit. This effect increases with the salience and material cost of withdrawal and can spill across issue areas.
In this article, we explore historical trends in gender-attentive transitional justice policies using a new global dataset of truth commissions, prosecutions and reparations policies. We find that gender was largely absent from these policies from 1970 through 1990 but that more attention to gender began in the 1990s and has been sustained since that time. Initial attention to gender focused primarily on violence against women; more recently, some limited attention to broader understandings of gender that include men, boys and LGBTQI+ individuals have started to appear. We argue that the early efforts of feminist activists in countries both in the Global North and the Global South to frame and set the global agenda on violence against women shaped when transitional justice policies became gender-attentive and how these policies have diffused across countries. We argue that attention to female victims and physical gender violence is associated with a positive spillover, leading to broader attention to gender issues, rather than crowding out attention to other gender harms.
Lawrence S. Finkelstein Prize, International Organization Section, ISA.
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 the 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. Consequentially, treaty withdrawal has a mixed impact on the development of international law: it expedites the reform of one treaty while inhibiting 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 similar treaties with comparable memberships. The indirect effect more than cancels out the direct effect. Overall, treaty withdrawal impedes the creation of new international laws.
Following the attacks of 9/11, the United States adopted a policy of torturing suspected terrorists and reinterpreted its legal obligations so that it could argue that this policy was lawful. This article investigates the impact of these actions by the United States on the global norm against torture. After conceptualizing how the United States contested the norm against torture, the article explores how US actions impacted the norm across four dimensions of robustness: concordance with the norm, third-party reactions to norm violations, compliance, and implementation. This analysis reveals a heterogeneous impact of US contestation: while US policies did not impact global human rights trends, it did shape the behavior of states that aided and abetted US torture policies, especially those lacking strong domestic legal structures. The article sheds light on the circumstances under which powerful states can shape the robustness of global norms.
Featured in: "Covert Collaboration," Nature Human Behaviour, Vol. 3, No. 2 (February 2019), p. 110.
In the years following the attacks of 9/11, the CIA adopted a program involving the capture, extraordinary rendition, secret detention, and harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists in the war on terror. As the details of this program have become public, a heated debate has ensued, focusing narrowly on whether or not this program “worked” by disrupting terror plots and saving American lives. By embracing such a narrow view of the program’s efficacy, this debate has failed to take into account the broader consequences of the CIA program. We move beyond current debates by evaluating the impact of the CIA program on the human rights practices of other states. We show that collaboration in the CIA program is associated with a worsening in the human rights practices of authoritarian countries. This finding illustrates how states learn from and influence one another through covert security cooperation and the importance of democratic institutions in mitigating the adverse consequences of the CIA program. This finding also underscores why a broad perspective is critical when assessing the consequences of counterterrorism policies.
Book Chapters
Averell Schmidt, "Torture during the War on Terror: A Story of Norm Contestation and Resistance" in: Jan Eckel and Daniel Stahl (Eds.), Embattled Visions: Human Rights since 1990 (Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein Verlag, 2022), pp. 229-247.
The 1990s saw an extraordinary surge in the significance that various actors attributed to the concept of human rights. A growing number of activists and politicians began framing their concerns as human rights issues. The universal claim of human rights received unprecedented support and spurred new interventionist practices across national borders. Numerous academic disciplines made human rights a subject of research, both reflecting on and influencing the emerging human rights policies. Yet the moment of enthusiastic new departures waned even before the advent of the new century. At the same time – and often as a direct consequence of its new prominence – critics opposed the idea of universal rights with an unprecedented fierceness. This volume breaks new ground in examining important developments that have unfolded in human rights history over the past thirty years. In situating these events, the volume looks beyond dichotomous interpretations of either triumph and success or failure and decline, sharpening our view of complexities and contradictions.
This article examines how international monitoring affects accountability for human rights violations. International organizations often publicize human rights violations to pressure non-compliant states to change their behavior; however, recent research suggests that publicity can prompt intransigence or backlash. Drawing on the sociological concept of reactivity, I argue that states respond to monitoring strategically: they adopt some visible accountability measures to signal their intention to comply, while also attempting to reduce the risk that violations are uncovered. To test this argument, I leverage a lottery used to determine the schedule of Universal Periodic Review, a human rights monitoring mechanism implemented by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Consistent with my argument, I find that monitoring increases the release of political prisoners and the prosecution of government officials, but decreases the creation of truth commissions and increases the targeted repression of domestic actors that have collaborated with the United Nations.
This article examines how international regime complexity affects diplomacy. We argue that diplomats modify their behavior in anticipation of changes to their social environment, driven by psychological pressures to conform rather than learning or socialization. We test this theory of diplomatic adaptation with a natural experiment. Once every four years, states undergo Universal Periodic Review, an assessment of their human rights records at the UN Human Rights Council. Delegates also convene annually for the International Labour Conference to debate the International Labour Organization’s policies. Both events are held at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, many delegates represent their states at both forums, and the timing of UPR was set by lottery. We leverage this lottery and the names of over 37 thousand delegates to assess how exposure to UPR -- at both the state and individual levels -- impacts debate at the ILC. We show that government delegates use human rights language more in ILC debates before UPR and, contra socialization theory, emphasize human rights less often after UPR. These effects are driven by the exposure of individual diplomats to UPR.
Averell Schmidt, "Reciprocity and the Dynamics of Human Rights Diplomacy” (Draft available upon request)
Recent research suggests the international human rights regime is deeply politicized -- states disproportionately criticize their foes and praise their friends. Here, I demonstrate that the regime also exhibits strong norms of reciprocal ingroup policingi. Human rights institutions regulate domestic behavior, not externalities arising from international interactions, and states often disagree about what rights to prioritize, forming distinct groups based on their policy preferences. A human rights accommodation dilemma consequently emerges from non-material tradeoffs: criticizing members of one's own group can harm group standing, but ignoring violations may weaken shared norms. I argue that norms of reciprocity help to mitigate this dilemma. If one ingroup member criticizes another, the target often responds in kind to signal continued commitment to the group's norms. Criticism from outsiders, in contrast, is discounted and ignored. To test this argument, I leverage a natural experiment at Universal Periodic Review to disentangle reciprocity from other determinants of human rights diplomacy. I find consistent evidence that reciprocity shapes the dynamics of human rights diplomacy, illustrating how the accommodation dilemma framework operates when the material costs of non-accommodation are low and when states disagree about standards of appropriate behavior.
Kathryn Sikkink, Geoff Dancy, and Averell Schmidt, "Is the Justice Cascade Over? Accountability in an Era of Impunity” (Draft available upon request)
The emergence of individual criminal accountability for war crimes, mass atrocities, and the violation of human rights is among the most dramatic normative developments in international politics during the past half-century. Yet, recent political events – from contestation of the International Criminal Court to the election of populist leaders opposed to legal accountability – have fueled widespread concern that the world is returning to an era of impunity. In this article, we document a sharp global decline in human rights prosecutions since 2010 and develop a theory to explain this trend. We argue that human rights accountability requires a government willing to supply justice and a domestic audience that demands it. After 2010 the demand for prosecutions decreased where they were supplied in the past and increased where they were least likely to be supplied in the future. We test this argument using an original dataset of all human rights prosecutions initiated between 1970 and 2020. Consistent with our theory, we show that the global shift is driven by a reduction of prosecutions in domestic courts and that the interaction of supply and demand factors – a state’s level of liberal democracy and its legacy of past human rights abuse – is strongly predictive of domestic trial initiation. Our argument and findings indicate that the global decline in prosecutions is both a sign of success and a cause for concern. While past legacies of violence were addressed in openings created by democratic transitions, contemporary democratic backsliding risks denying justice to today’s victims.