3 - Cooperating without Sanctions

Summary

Like domestic law, international law has experimented in recent decades with new approaches to changing legal subjects’ behavior. Realist and institutionalist scholarship in international law and relations generally assume that states will cheat on their obligations if doing so is in their interest. Below the radar, however, a variety of international regimes have begun to emerge that seek to coordinate state behavior without relying exclusively upon credible commitments, instead relying on producing information relevant to an underlying cooperative problem. This chapter takes a first cut at describing this newer mode of international cooperation, describes the relationship between epistemic and credible commitment regimes, and argues that states increasingly choose epistemic regimes over credible regimes in designing international institutions, but also that which option is truly better depends on which regime minimizes the transaction costs of coordinating state behavior.