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Reputation And International Law, Andrew Guzman

Andrew T Guzman

Among the reasons that states comply with international law in the absence of coercive enforcement mechanisms is a concern for their reputation for compliance with international legal rules. Such a reputation is valuable because it allows states to make credible commitments to one another in an effort to overcome problems of cooperation. To date neither the international relations nor the international law literature has developed a theory of reputation that explains in detail how states acquire a reputation for compliance, how they lose it, and how it affects behavior. This paper seeks to provide such a theory. It examines how …