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. 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 exceeds the direct effect in substantive terms: overall, treaty withdrawal impedes the creation of international laws.
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.
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.
Averell Schmidt, Kathryn Sikkink, Aroop Mukharji, and Federica D'Alessandra, "Peace through Law? International Law, Norms, and the Decline in Interstate Wars"
We argue that international laws governing the initiation of war – jus ad bellum – reduce the likelihood of interstate war under two conditions: when treaties are interpreted as prohibiting interstate war and when the application of treaties is not counteracted by other international norms. The development of international law in the interwar period shows that the letter of treaties is not always closely related to states’ interpretation of their normative commitments. This disjuncture is key to understanding the impact of international law on interstate war initiation. We demonstrate statistically that ratification of treaties that are understood to reflect the norm prohibiting interstate war is associated with a decrease in states’ propensity to initiate wars deemed unlawful by treaties and illegitimate by international norms. We couple this statistical analysis with case studies from Latin America illustrating the roles of norms and law in governing the initiation of interstate war.
Kathryn Sikkink, Helen Clapp, Daniel Marin-Lopez, and Averell Schmidt, "Gender and Transitional Justice: Explaining Global Trends"
Scholars and practitioners have long critiqued truth commissions, reparations, prosecutions, and other transitional justice policies for their limited attention to gender, claiming these policies often ignore gender entirely or define it narrowly. In this article, we argue that the efforts of activists to frame and set the global agenda on violence against women subsequently shaped both when transitional justice policies became gender-attentive and how these policies have diffused across countries. We present evidence from a new global dataset of gender-attentive truth commissions, prosecutions, and reparations policies to show if and how the historical record aligns with common critiques of transitional justice. Rather than showing attention to gender emerging from a small set of countries in the Global North, our findings are more consistent with an explanation grounded in the global women’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s.
In Progress
Averell Schmidt, "Constructive Criticism: Reciprocal Shaming in the International Human Rights Regime"
This paper examines how reciprocity shapes the dynamics of interstate naming and shaming. I argue that the fragmentation of states' normative commitments incentivizes constructive ingroup reciprocity. The existence of competing standards leads states to engage in ingroup policing to sustain group-based norms and to signal their own commitment these ideals. One's status as a member of a group requires that others recognize this status. As a result, group members tend to reciprocate feedback with each other and ignore criticism from outgroup members. I test this argument by leveraging a natural experiment that induces exogenous variation in state participation in Universal Periodic Review, a peer review mechanism in which UN member states evaluate one another's compliance with human rights laws. Even if states behave politically at peer review by praising their friends and chastising their foes, my results suggest that the mechanism nonetheless engenders norm-reinforcing behavior.
Averell Schmidt, "Peer Review Increases Human Rights Transparency: Experimental Evidence from the United Nations Human Rights Council"
The United Nations overhauled its human rights system in 2006, replacing the long-derided Human Rights Commission with the Human Rights Council. A key reform was the introduction of Universal Periodic Review, a process in which each state regularly undergoes a review of its human rights practices. There is, however, little causal evidence of whether these reforms have contributed to the advancement of human rights. I leverage a lottery used to determine the schedule of Universal Periodic Review to identify its causal effect on states' human rights practices. I demonstrate that undergoing review neither increases nor decreases states' human rights scores but does increase the variation in these measurements. This effect is especially pronounced in authoritarian states in the years following reform, precisely where human rights information was previously most scarce. These findings suggest that the adoption of Universal Periodic Review has increased information concerning human rights practices in hard-to-reach places.