This article focuses on the G7’s Hiroshima AI Process (HAIP) and its flagship document, the Hiroshima Code of Conduct, as pivotal elements in shaping global artificial intelligence (AI) governance. By conducting a comprehensive analysis of AI regulations in G7 member states, the article demonstrates a high degree of interoperability between these national frameworks and the Code of Conduct’s principles. The article proposes concrete steps to translate these principles into actionable policies at the G7 level and develops strategic adjustments to incorporate them into national standards. The article then proposes enhancements to the Code of Conduct, including the development of a common AI governance vocabulary, robust risk management frameworks, life cycle standards harmonization, effective stakeholder engagement mechanisms, specific redress mechanisms for AI harms and guidelines for government AI use to ensure democratic principles and human rights are upheld. Ultimately, this research aims to strengthen the G7’s role in leading a global AI landscape characterized by the rule of law, democracy, and human rights.

Technology is of increasing importance for international cooperation, yet theory development in rationalist International Relations has not kept pace. I develop a theoretical framework for explaining cooperative outcomes in the international regulation of technology. I propose that uncertainty and the distribution of material capacities create a severe international collective action problem for novel technologies, which precludes robust cooperative outcomes and thus limits joint gains from the appropriation of technological benefits and from the mitigation of technological risks. While the severity of the collective action problem attenuates over time, in principle enabling greater ambition in cooperative outcomes, sociotechnical lock-in reduces the capacities and incentives of state actors to deviate from pre-existing rules. This leads to incremental change whereby rules harden over time but do not change significantly in terms of their regulatory substance. While early regulatory interventions are hampered by collective action problems, late interventions are constrained by lock-in. These temporal dynamics create a tendency towards systemic inefficiency in international technology regulation. I illustrate this argument using the cases of nuclear power and synthetic biology.

Do recent increases in women’s representation around the world have implications for international relations? We argue that greater representation of women in legislatures increases the likelihood of human rights treaty ratification for two reasons. First, given their shared gendered experiences of exclusion and discrimination, women legislators will advocate on behalf of marginalized groups on an international scale as transnational surrogate representatives. Second, women legislators may be more inclined to prioritize the ratification of human rights treaties because these treaties align with their domestic policy preferences, which aim to support marginalized groups. We contend that, in countries where ratification depends upon legislative approval, legislatures are more likely to ratify human rights treaties as women’s presence increases. Using an original dataset of 201 multilateral treaties, we find that countries become more likely to ratify human rights treaties as levels of women’s legislative representation increase.

The potential for mutual influence or “spillover” between economic and security cooperation is a long-standing area of interest for policymakers and scholars alike. This paper examines how network dynamics affect spillover. We focus on two prominent types of formal bilateral cooperation—defense cooperation agreements (DCAs) and bilateral investment treaties (BITs)—both of which have proliferated dramatically in the post-Cold War international system. We argue that existing theoretical and empirical approaches to economic-security spillover focus too strictly on influences at the bilateral level. As with other forms of international cooperation, BITs and DCAs comprise larger international networks. Governments develop portfolios of BITs or DCAs with distinct structural goals in mind, and they implement specific strategies in pursuing those goals. With BITs, governments follow a network-hierarchy strategy that allows them to influence treaty design and protect their firms. In DCAs, governments instead favor a network-community strategy focused on pooling collective security goods among groups of like-minded collaborators. When these network strategies complement one another, they promote cooperative economic-security spillover. When they conflict, however, they inhibit spillover, such that cooperation in economic or security issues discourages cooperation in the opposing issue area.

This article challenges the orthodox view of international law, according to which states have no legal duty to cooperate. It argues for this legal duty in the context of COVID-19, based on the ethical principles of solidarity, stewardship, and subsidiarity. More specifically, the article argues that states have a legal duty to cooperate during a pandemic (as solidarity requires); and while this duty entails an extraterritorial responsibility to care for and assist other nations (as stewardship requires), the legal duty to cooperate still allows states to attend first to the basic needs of those under their own jurisdiction—namely, fellow nationals and residents (as subsidiarity requires). The article provides a definition and philosophical justifications for this legal duty that are lacking in the literature by examining its application to a current COVID-19 controversy: namely, states’ responsibility to assist other countries in greater need by, inter alia, exporting at a discount or donating scarce COVID-19 treatments (including vaccines). In providing a principled tripartite account of pandemic governance, this conceptual and normative article offers a new lens for debating the potential international treaty for pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response that has now been drafted and is under negotiation at the World Health Assembly, by responding to the recent backlash against multilateralism by substantiating global co-responsibilities in times of pandemics and beyond.

International society has recently witnessed the emergence of two interrelated trends: on the one hand, the significant rise in transnational crimes, which constitute a serious challenge to States’ traditional security capabilities, and the noticeable increase in the number of international instruments put in place to bring that challenge to acceptable levels, on the other hand. The great emphasis the international community has put on the principle “aut dedere aut judicare” to strengthen the universal legal regime against serious crimes and to deny safe haven to their perpetrators is challenged not only by political, legislative and practical considerations pertaining to the lack of ratification and incorporation of international conventions and the wide disparity between States as to their implementation capacity, but also by the inherent differences between States’ differing legal systems. This is an area that, despite its relevance to international cooperation and human rights, has long been ignored by criminal justice comparative studies. Based on actual cases such as the Ramda and El Guerbouzi cases, this article examines and assesses the impact of the differences between civil law and common law systems on the effectiveness of international cooperation and human rights. It argues that, unless these differences are acknowledged and properly dealt with, perpetrators of serious crime will continue to constitute a serious threat to our peace and security.