Hyeran Jo

Dispute Settlement Mechanisms in Preferential Trade Agreements

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have increased dramatically in the past several decades and play an important role in the global economy. Dispute settlement mechanisms (DSMs) in these international agreements significantly influence their functioning. In this article, the authors seek to understand what factors determine the legal arrangements of these mechanisms. The authors argue that the confluence of domestic political regime type, emulation incentives, and the development of the multilateral trade regime determines their legal dimension. Using a data set of PTAs between 1957 and 2008, the authors show that (1) democracies are more likely than autocracies to prefer moderately strict DSMs, (2) trading partners increasingly emulate each other by adopting similar legal templates, and (3) the recent trend against legalistic mechanisms is largely driven by the development of the multilateral trade regime. Their findings have important implications for the design of international institutions by highlighting the importance of member-specific as well as macro-level factors.

Compliance with the Laws of War: Dataset and Coding Rules

This report describes a dataset on compliance with the laws of war in 20th century interstate wars. We introduce the dataset, discuss sources, and explain the coding schemes. The unit is a directed warring dyad in a given war for one of nine issues. We collect five dimensions of compliance, including quality of the data, and construct a single measure of compliance. Reciprocity exists in the data, and treaty law strengthens reciprocity by clarifying what acts constitute violations. Compliance varies across issues, matching the scope for individual violations. States are more likely to respond reciprocally to violations by individuals than to those that are state policy.

Compliance with International Humanitarian Law by Non-State Armed Groups: How Can It Be Improved?

How can compliance of non-state armed groups with international humanitarian law (IHL) be improved? In answering this question, this chapter presents a political science perspective and approach to achieve three goals. First, the author discusses the current state of our understanding about the compliant behavior of non-state armed groups in contemporary security. Second, existing legal tools and policy instruments are outlined, with an eye toward enhancing IHL compliance by armed groups. Third and finally, the author provides conjectures regarding the conditions under which some policies might work better than others. This examination of rebel groups and IHL non-compliance calls for more systematic policy evaluation in future research for the improvements of compliance mechanisms to better attain the goals of IHL.

Fighting the Hydra: United Nations sanctions and rebel groups

In the past 25 years, the United Nations has sanctioned 28 rebel groups in 13 civil wars. Have the UN sanctions been effective in meeting the goal of conflict reduction? In this article, we argue that UN sanctions are effective to the extent that they can constrain and weaken some rebel groups. But this constraining effect can only occur when UN sanctions curtail rebel groups’ ability to adapt. For less adaptable groups, UN sanctions can trigger a causal chain of depressed rebel income, territorial losses, and battlefield defeats that leads to conflict reduction. This adaptability is the key to the understanding of UN sanctions’ effectiveness in conflict reduction, as rebel groups often engage in illegal and criminal economic activities and many of them are ‘Hydra-like’, being able to shift their income sources in response to sanction measures. As evidence of how UN sanctions can trigger these conflict dynamics, we first perform negative binomial regression on all civil war cases. We then proceed to provide more detailed evidence for our causal chain by conducting time-series intervention analysis on two sanctioned rebel groups: UNITA in Angola and al-Shabaab in Somalia. Our work is the first systematic quantitative analysis of UN sanctions’ effects on rebel groups, and the results have implications for the viability of economic coercion as a means to intervene into civil conflicts.

Can the International Criminal Court Deter Atrocity?—CORRIGENDUM

A coding error resulting in duplicate observations in rebel group data was discovered in an article by Jo and Simmons1. Thanks to Dr. Michael Broache at the University of Tampa for discovering the error. The error relates to the findings on rebel deterrence only; none of the findings for government actors are affected by the error. In the original article we concluded that “Neither ICC RATIFICATION (Model 1) nor DOMESTIC CRIME STATUTE (Model 3) appears to reduce rebel civilian killing.” This claim is sustained. We also wrote that “However, even rebel groups appear to respond to ICC ACTIONS (Model 2).” This conclusion is also sustained, although somewhat less significantly. Finally, we wrote that “Rebels do not respond to legal change alone; they are much more impressed with action.”2 This conclusion is also sustained, but correcting the error shows that the ratification of the ICC may be associated with increased violence among rebel groups, which differs from our initial conclusion of “no effect” and is contrary to theoretical expectations of prosecutorial deterrence. Overall, corrected results still suggest that if rebel prosecutorial deterrence exists (and we agree that the results, when corrected, are marginally significant), deterrence flows from ICC actions, and not from ratification of ICC statutes. With respect to the social deterrence of rebel groups, our conclusion that there is “some evidence of social deterrence for a particular class of rebel groups”3 is sustained, in that the triple interaction of SECCESSIONIST*DISCIPLINE* POST-ICC is essentially unchanged. The triple interaction was not flagged as statistically significant in the original version, and the result is approximately the same with the correction (i.e., expected direction, though not statistically significant). To be clear, both the original and the corrected findings show that for rebel groups, relative strength and government behavior are the most consistent predictors of rebel intentional killing. The corrected data for the rebel analysis and the corrected table on rebel deterrence can be found here. The error is the complete responsibility of the coauthors.