Rohn's World Treaty Index: Its Past and Future

Abstract

The question of national self interest reconciled to the demands of a treaty obligation inevitably calls upon a different level ofperception than pure' self-interest, outside such a system, invites.Maxwell CohenThe World Treaty Index (WTI), first published in print form in 1974, has been a mainstay of treaty research for over a quarter of a century. A second edition was published in 1983 and a reprint of that edition appeared in 1997. Both editions of the print multi-volume set can be found in almost all major law libraries and in research institutes with an interest in international relations, area studies and globalization. The WTI lives on in electronic form and remains to this day the largest collection of treaty citations in the world, with well over 60,000 entries to date. Over the last decade, interdisciplinary scholarly research interests have increasingly focused on the kinds of information that can be extracted from The World Treaty Index.