1st Edition

State Participation in International Treaty Regimes

By Srini Sitaraman Copyright 2009
    346 Pages
    by Routledge

    346 Pages
    by Routledge

    Why do some states resist entering into international treaty regimes while others demonstrate eagerness to participate? Although factors such as degree of pressure exerted by international actors, ambiguity in the treaty language and a regime's 'lack of teeth' (enforcement and sanctioning mechanism) do affect participation, this book investigates whether internal (domestic) factors may ultimately be responsible for influencing why a state resists or joins international treaty regimes. The volume draws on United Nations treaty ratification data from three different issue areas - arms control, environment and human rights - to study the participation patterns of democracies and non-democracies in international treaty regimes. Incorporating two in-depth case studies on the United States and China, the author traces the impact of domestic institutional structure, state capacity and internal social norms on state decisions to resist or participate.

    List of Abbreviations; Preface; Chapter 1 Conceptualizing State Participation and Resistance with Multilateral Treaty Regimes; Chapter 2 Probing the Organizational Structure of Treaty Regimes and its Influence on Participation and Resistance; Chapter 3 State Participation in Multilateral Environmental and Security Regimes; Chapter 4 State Participation in Multilateral Human Rights Regimes; Chapter 5 The Case of the United States; Chapter 6 The Case of China; Chapter 7 State Resistance and Participation in Treaty Regimes: A Macro-Assessment;

    Biography

    Srini Sitaraman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and International Relations, Clark University, USA.

    '...provides a sustained account of the relationship between domestic political orders and participation in international treaty regimes. A particularly appealing feature of the analysis is the combination of in-depth case studies of American and Chinese participation in human rights regimes and extensive descriptive statistics covering a much broader range of treaty regimes. Oran R Young, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA