A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Rome: Explaining International Criminal Court Negotiations

Abstract

The first proposal for the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1994 envisioned a weak institution. Over the subsequent four years, states surprisingly strengthened the draft to create a robust ICC with novel enforcement authority. What happened and why? We argue that during negotiations governments adopted the positions of the international partners on whom they depend for a diverse set of goods that includes trade, security, and foreign policy success in international organizations. We label this set of partners a “dependence network.” In our approach, leaders watch closely how other governments behave within their dependence network and alter their own actions accordingly. We test this theory against a variety of other explanations on a new database that codes state negotiating positions relative to four key institutional features of the ICC. We find that trade networks substantially influence state negotiating positions on the ICC even taking into account an array of other factors.