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23 - Persuading to Comply

On the Deployment and Avoidance of Legal Argumentation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2013

By
Steven R. Ratner
Edited by
Jeffrey L. Dunoff  and
Mark A. Pollack
Jeffrey L. Dunoff
Affiliation:
Temple University, Philadelphia
Mark A. Pollack
Affiliation:
Temple University, Philadelphia
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Summary

For those international actors seeking to promote respect for international law, persuasion is at the core of the enterprise. By persuasion, I mean a process of social interaction whereby one actor seeks to convince another to believe or do something through principled rational arguments and interactions, without any overt coercion (Checkel 2001: 562). Whether in arguments to the noncomplying entity itself, to an authority with the capacity to impose costs for noncompliance, or to an interpretive body charged with offering legal opinions regarding noncompliance, international law encompasses a constant process of communication over conduct and consequences. Yet, beyond this seemingly obvious starting point to the international lawyer – although not to all political scientists – the scholarship on compliance is woefully thin on the precise content of such a communication of persuasion, and, in particular, on the role of legal argumentation in that process. We can all agree generally on the contours of an argument to a court, but most persuasive strategies are not aimed at courts. In those situations, what determines an actor's persuasive strategy and the role for law in it?

This chapter constructs a theoretical model for answering these questions. My approach is fundamentally inductive, based on experience in two organizations whose central mission entails the deployment of persuasion to achieve compliance with international norms – the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) High Commissioner on National Minorities and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). It is also, however, informed by debates within political science and law on modes of compliance and is intended to be generalizable. These institutions’ methods show that a compliance strategy can invoke a range of law, along several dimensions, and that the choices regarding the argumentation to use are highly contextual. This practice contrasts with static or unidimensional approaches to the modalities of persuasion and the role of law assumed by most scholarship on compliance.

Type
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Interdisciplinary Perspectives on International Law and International Relations
The State of the Art
 , pp. 568 - 590
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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