Law Commons^™

How To Influence States: Socialization And International Human Rights Law, Ryan Goodman, Derek Jinks

Duke Law Journal

Regime design choices in international law turn on empirical claims about how states behave and under what conditions their behavior changes. Substantial empirical evidence suggests three distinct mechanisms whereby states and institutions might influence the behavior of other states: coercion, persuasion, and acculturation. Several structural impediments preclude effective implementation of coercion- and persuasion-based regimes in human rights law--yet these models of social influence inexplicably predominate in international legal studies. In this Article, we first describe in some detail the salient conceptual features of each mechanism of social influence. We then link each of the identified mechanisms to specific regime design …