The nuclear nonproliferation regime lacks formal enforcement mechanisms, but this does not mean that violations of nonproliferation commitments always go unpunished. States that violate the NPT routinely face pressure from others to change their behavior, including through economic sanctions. But the lack of formal enforcement measures does contribute to significant variation in the states that are targeted for punishment – enforcement is always at the discretion of the punishing state. Why do some states face punishment while the transgressions of others are overlooked? This chapter argues that enforcing states look to the policy preferences of violators for signals about the likelihood that enforcement will change state behavior and about the cost to the international community of allowing the violation to continue. Patterns of institutional membership within the larger regime help to credibly reveal the preferences of state parties. Using data on membership in the various agreements that make up the nuclear nonproliferation regime, this chapter shows that violating states are less likely to face costly enforcement action the more embedded they are within the regime.

This introduces the topic of multilateral drug control, its contemporary relevance and the areas under examination within the book. It highlights the key themes grouped by three overarching focuses: historical, contemporary-legal and international relations theory. It examines the major debates under way in UN drug control and their direct relation to the historical-legal regulatory discussion encapsulated within the book. It outline existing historiography on international drug control and examines more recent developments. It points to continuing gaps in historiography, international relations, legal and policy literature which this book will fill. In particular it highlights the extensive literature on international legal fragmentation and its relevance for drug control debates. It offers an overview of regime theory and international relations approaches, suggesting a new and emerging framework based on evaluating drug control as a ‘regime complex’ in a similar lineage to climate change and intellectual property regimes, which will be covered in a more breadth in the Conclusion.

This chapter argues that whereas much of the past century was geared towards a legal and institutional homogenisation of international drug control, the coming decades appear underpinned by recourse to ‘policy pluralism’ as a mechanism to enable policy evolution. It is precisely these endogenous processes of pluralism, devolution and increasing diversity of global drug policies that provide the most promising avenues for various actors to influence policies at local, national, regional and international levels. It further argues that the international drug control system is undergoing a long-term process of fragmentation and evolution towards what international relations scholars in other spheres would term a ‘regime complex’. It concludes by suggesting that these endogenous regime changes likely provide the greatest opportunity to draw exogenous actors and regimes into the system’s orbit and thereby modernise and adapt drug policies to new global realities.

This chapter examines the role of the Opium Wars and great power conflict between Britain and China within the context of drug control. Within the Opium Wars, the foundational elements for the coming global drug control system were laid. These included straining bilateral relations between great powers as well as the emergence of nationalist and moralist coalitions of diplomats and missionaries driving ‘reformist’ agendas globally. The first international treaty, the 1912 International Opium Convention, aimed to create reciprocal state responsibilities for limiting the flow of mind-altering drugs. After World War I, the new multilateral drug control system was quickly absorbed by the League of Nations. However, the US’ simultaneous interest in the issue and unwillingness to join the League of Nations proved complicating. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s a whole series of treaties and institutional changes gave the system regulatory shape. The League Opium Advisory Committee, precursor to the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) ultimately sank. The enforcement and monitoring bodies, survived and fled Geneva for the safety of Washington DC. The chapter concludes with a brief introduction to the main diplomats of the wartime era, most prominently, Harry J. Anslinger.

This chapter traces the emergence and evolution of the concept of ‘regime complex’. Coined by Kal Raustiala and David Victor in their seminal 2004 article, the term calls anyone who aspires to understand the creation, evolution, implementation or effectiveness of a particular institution to take into account its broader institutional environment. A key innovation in the literature on international institutions, it spawned a rich body of work, rapidly becoming a central element of the theoretical repertoire of global governance. The chapter takes stock of this literature, discussing the main insights on causes, evolution and consequences, as well as the research methodologies that have been used to study regime complexes in various issue-areas of international politics. It also discusses avenues for future research, which may contribute to a deeper and theoretically informed understanding of regime complexity and its implications for global governance.

This chapter investigates the overlapping nature of investment governance, in which BITs and PTAs encode common commitments toward the protection and liberalization of investment. It advances the scholarship on regime complexity, in which non-hierarchical and overlapping institutions regulate investment. The study examines common institutional design across PTAs and BITS, while recognizing that the broader investment regime complex includes legal precedents set through dispute settlement at the WTO and ICSID. Utilizing an original data set of investment provisions in PTAs and for BITS data provided by UNCTAD’s International Investment Agreements (IIA) project, the analysis examines how these two international agreements have co-evolved in terms of institutional design in guiding principles, scope, and enforcement. The hypothesis is that these two types of agreements are largely complementary, where PTAs emphasize liberalization of investment in tandem with other trade-related provisions, and BITs emphasize the protection of investments and investor rights. The results of principal component analysis of provisions in PTAs and BITs support the hypothesis of complementarity. Additional analyses also show that investment provisions in PTAs draw heavily from those of BITs, but BITs draw less from PTAs.

After three decades of companionship, investment protection rules and trade agreements are heading for a divorce. Investment chapters have been included in preferential trade and investment agreements (PTIAs) since the late 1980s, but they have recently come under fire. The U.S. administration considers privately enforceable investment protection obligations as an unwanted incentive to offshore American jobs, and the EU Commission seeks to omit them to benefit from the accelerated ratification process reserved for trade agreements that fall under exclusive EU competency. After decades of coexistence, investment protection rules and trade agreements are thus likely to go their separate ways. This chapter empirically evaluates the impact of their thirty-year companionship to assess the implications of their looming split. It finds that investment chapters remain little more than a bilateral investment treaty plugged into a trade agreement. PTIAs and self-standing investment treaties do not vary systematically in investment protection content, and the wider trade agreement context does little to affect the interpretation of investment rules in PTIAs. In spite of their coexistence in the same treaty, there is thus little evidence of cross-fertilization between trade and investment protection rules in PTIAs. This absence of normative convergence suggests that their looming split merely formalizes the continuous normative distinction between trade liberalization and investment protection.