This chapter considers the fourth and final form of backlash discussed in the book: doctrinal challenges. Using examples from the European Court of Human Rights, this chapter considers how and why doctrinal challenges, or challenges that dilute the ability of human rights and criminal courts to affect domestic policy change, constitute a form of backlash. The chapter begins with a case study of Russia and the European Court of Human Rights and goes on to provides examples from the United Kingdom and Denmark. As this chapter shows, backlash politics can come from both traditional foes as well as long-standing supporters.

One way a target government can try to mitigate outbidding violence is to increase enforcement efforts to intercept contributions and arrest volunteers to militant groups. We expand the workhorse outbidding model to account for this decision. States with greater enforcement capacity indeed benefit, partially from directly stopping contributions and partially from deterring supporters from making contributions in the first place. The decreased prize therefore also tempers outbidding violence. As a result, competition is contingent on enforcement capacity, with the effect of another group growing larger as that capacity declines. Statistical analysis finds broad empirical support for our mechanism: competitive violence is most pronounced when governments incur higher marginal costs of enforcement. These results increase our confidence that competition drives violence more broadly, as competing explanations do not predict this conditional effect.

This chapter reflects on the generalizable lessons that our theoretical and empirical results generate. Two central ideas emerge. First, strategic interaction is a central component of political violence. Failure to account for it risks generating invalid theoretical mechanisms and ineffective policy recommendations. Second, there is no silver bullet for terrorism. Some policies may be more effective on average than others. But even some seemingly sensible solutions can backfire under the wrong circumstances. As such, policymakers wishing to influence political violence outcomes must have a strong understanding of the causal process that guides the violence before making interventions. We also unite various subthemes that have reoccurred throughout the book, such as the role international institutions play in affecting terrorism patterns.

The concluding chapter of Saving the International Justice Regime identifies how scholars, activists, stakeholders, and supporter states can help to save the international justice regime. It identifies three main ways to bolster international justice: (1) managing public opinion by engaging in targeted and effective self-marketing campaigns as a way to make their case to a broader audience; (2) improving the rule of law and the functioning of the tribunals as judicial institutions; and (3) reaffirming the fundamental norm(s) of criminal accountability and human rights. The chapter concludes with a discussion of a future research agenda based on the definition, typology, and theoretical framework set out earlier in the book.

This chapter develops the workhorse model we explore throughout the book. We begin by substantively motivating many aspects of competitive violence: the marketplace has limited resources, violence is costly but increases a group’s share of those resources, opposing violence decreases one’s own share, and others. These components lead us to conclude that a "contest" model is ideal to study the implications of competition. Doing so allows us to recover a central implication from existing theories of outbidding: that more groups imply more total violence output. However, our model concludes that outbidding is a collective effect rather than an individual one. Even as total violence increases in group numbers, the per-group rate of violence drops. These central results are robust to a variety of alternative assumptions.

We directly assess the empirical evidence of the propositions derived in the previous chapter. First, we conduct a large-n analysis of terrorist violence in every country between 1970 and 2015. We then examine whether there is a relationship between the number of active militant groups in a state and the aggregate amount of violence. We find evidence to support the basic outbidding hypothesis: more militant groups are significantly associated with more violence at the state level. We subsequently analyze the effect of increasing numbers of groups on per group violence. In accordance with our model expectations, we find that while increasing competition appears to lead to more violence overall, per group violence declines on average. Finally, to more fully explore the causal mechanisms at work in this process, we examine in detail the multi-dimensional insurgency in Northeast India since 2009. We find that as aggregate violence in the country and the region increased, groups curtailed their own use of violence due to concerns over diminishing returns and increased costs.

This chapter provides some concrete suggestions for how democracies should proceed in the so-called post-liberal era. The future of prodemocratic international law will depend on democracies leveraging collateral areas of international law to advance liberalism. This involves an essentially defensive liberalism.

This chapter endogenizes a would-be militant group’s decision to enter the marketplace for violence. We show that an existing group may overproduce violence to corner the market and make its potential rivals calculate that recuperating their costs will be impossible. As a result, violence may be greater when we observe one group than when we observe many. We then investigate four ways in which a target government might mitigate the violence: offensive measures that undermine the lead group’s marginal cost of violence, defensive measures that absorb a portion of all violence, deterrent measures that increase the cost of group formation, and concessions to the group’s audience to reduce grievances. Of these, only specific types of defensive measures are guaranteed to decrease violence. In contrast, increasing the burden of entry and decreasing grievances can counterintuitively increase violence.

Chapter 3 considers the politics of state withdrawal from international human rights and criminal courts. This is perhaps the most ostentatious form of backlash politics. Despite states’ threats that they will withdraw from international courts, however, very few threatened withdrawals ever materialize. Using the theoretical framework established in Chapter 2, this chapter considers the experiences of Peru, Venezuela, and Columbia. Venezuela has withdrawn from the Inter-American Human Rights System, while Peru came quite close to withdrawing from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the waning days of the Fujimori regime. In contrast, Colombia has never enacted such threats. This chapter explains why these three states have had such different experiences with respect to withdrawals from the Inter-American human rights regime.

While the global level of democracy intervention has not been particulalry successful, there are theoretical reasons to think that regions are better situated. This chapter lays out the history of regional prodemocratic law, in Europe, Latin America and Africa. It shows that Africa is the region with the greatest level of success, despite relatively poor initial conditions.