As Kristina Daugirdas points out in her article on the role of reputation in international organizations (IOs), peacekeeping operations include a multitude of actors with varying interests. These actors have competing priorities, which forces IOs to balance the needs of the actors involved in peacekeeping missions. Because IOs often depend on member states as implementing agents, this could cause IOs to suppress their own interests in favor of member states, which could ultimately negatively affect the communities in which the peacekeepers operate. This dynamic is present in UN peacekeeping operations. While Daugirdas seeks to align the incentives of the UN and the states that contribute peacekeepers so as to harness reputation as a force to encourage the good behavior of all involved, I argue that this alignment rarely happens because of IOs’ reliance on member states. Through the dynamics of UN peacekeeping operations, I show that the UN reliance on states to provide police officers and troops suppresses the UN's own interests in favor of the contributing states’ interests. I also identify a carrots and sticks approach to balancing incentives. As Paul Stephan does in his essay for this symposium, I draw on a rational-choice, actor-based theory to identify the mixed motives of the various actors who staff and operate peacekeeping missions. The framework proposed here, I contend, provides a way to better understand the sources of the tension that exist when evaluating reputation as a disciplinary tool for IOs.

In her interesting study on “Achieving Sex Representative International Court Benches,” Nienke Grossman observes that international judgeships are often based on personal networks and social currency, or used to reward political loyalty or to advance political agendas, rather than to select the most qualified candidates. She illustrates how nomination procedures for international benches generally lack transparency, and horse-trading infects elections to the international courts. To ensure gender equity, Grossman advocates that states should take remedial steps to make nomination and selection procedures more open, transparent, and merit-based, at both the national and the international level.

What would it mean for international law to be effective? There are different senses of the word. In a dis-cussion of the idea of effectiveness, then, the first step is to distinguish a variety of different ideas. The aim is not to decide which sense of the word is the right one, conceptually or linguistically. The aim should be to discuss which of these ideas of effectiveness is important, worth thinking about.

The three disparate cases decided by the International Court of Justice (Court or ICJ) in 2014 may not contribute much to the development of substantive international law, but they are instructive about the operations of the Court. Perhaps the Court was not at its finest in terms of coherent legal reasoning in these three cases; it certainly avoided difficult questions in all of them. Yet each of the three cases had significant numbers of separate and dissenting opinions, which sometimes reveal more about the Court’s reasoning than is apparent from the judgment or order itself.