Peer-reviewed publications

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Evading International Norms: Race and Rights in the Shadow of Legality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020, human rights series). 

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Racism and Antiracism in the Liberal International Order. Accepted. International Organization. (accepted version available here)

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Formal racial equality is a key aspect of the current Liberal International Order (LIO). It
is subject to two main challenges: resurgent racial nationalism and substantive racial
inequality. Combining work in International Relations with interdisciplinary studies on
race, I submit that these challenges are the latest iteration of struggles between two
transnational coalitions over the LIO’s central racial provisions, which I call racial
diversity regimes (RDRs). The traditional coalition has historically favored RDRs based
on racial inequality and racial nationalism. The transformative coalition has favored
RDRs based on racial equality and non-racial nationalism. I illustrate the argument by
tracing the development of the liberal order’s RDR from one based on racial nationalism
and inequality in 1919 to the current regime based on non-racial nationalism and limited
equality. Today, racial nationalists belong to the traditional coalition and critics of racial
inequality are part of the transformative coalition. The stakes of their struggles are high
because they will determine whether we will live in a more racist or a more antiracist
world. The paper articulates a comprehensive framework that places race at the heart of
the liberal order, offers the novel concept of “embedded racism” to capture how
sovereignty shields domestic racism from foreign interference, and proposes an agenda
for mainstream International Relations that takes race seriously.

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Emergent Flexibility in Institutional Development: How International Rules Really Change. with Erin R. Graham. Forthcoming. International Studies Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqaa049 

(also available here) 

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How do formal international institutions change and adjust to new circumstances? The conventional wisdom in International Relations (IR), outlined by rational design, is that the answer lies in designed flexibility, which allows states to adjust agreements. Drawing on rich but disparate literatures across subfields of political science — especially constructivism and historical institutionalism — we propose an alternative, which we call “emergent flexibility.” Emergent flexibility is a property of international institutions that is not intentionally crafted by rule-makers when a rule is formally established, but is subsequently discovered, activated, and accessed by creative rule-users in ways unintended by designers. Rich case studies trace how rule-users have accessed emergent flexibility through the legal interpretive strategy of subsequent practice to change rigid rules of the UN Charter and the European Convention on Human Rights. A key implication of emergent flexibility is that, contrary to rational design expectations, international institutions designed to be rigid can adjust to unforeseen circumstances even in the absence of formal redesign, allowing cooperation to continue. The broadening of flexibility from designed to emergent reveals the politics of flexibility between formal design moments, provides a more nuanced notion of intentionality, and equips us to better address fundamental positive and normative questions of institutional development.

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Is the Good News About Law Compliance Good News About Norm Compliance? The Case of Racial Equality. 2018. International Organization. 72 (2): 351-385.

(also available here)

 

ABSTRACT: The most important international human rights norms are legalized or codified in international treaty law. Yet pernicious practices at odds with these norms endure and sometimes even increase after legalization. According to conventional wisdom, this is because agents commit to but do not comply with international law and the underlying norms. This explanation is important, but is insufficient when norm violations persist despite law compliance. Drawing on a rich interdisciplinary literature, this study develops a theory of evasion to explain why norm violations persist even when states technically comply with the law. Because legalization transposes social norms into international law imperfectly, it creates gaps between laws and the underlying norms. Due to these norm-law gaps, legality and normative appropriateness will diverge. States caught between opposing pressures from pro-violation and pro-compliance groups exploit this gap through what I call evasion. Evasion is the intentional minimization of normative obligations through technical compliance with international law but violation of the underlying norms. Based on a comprehensive and cohesive combination of sources and methods, including 143 semi-structured elite interviews and the discourse analysis of 1451 texts, I demonstrate the theory’s empirical purchase in the cases of the French expulsion of Roma immigrants and the Czech school segregation of Roma children. Under the cover of technical compliance with the law, these states violated the norm of racial equality. The argument cautions that the good news about law compliance is not necessarily good news about norm compliance, broadens our understanding of norm violators’ agency, and has practical implications for human rights advocacy.

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Evading International Law: How Agents Comply With the Letter of the Law but Violate its Purpose. 2017. European Journal of International Relations. 23 (4): 857-883.

(also available here)

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ABSTRACT: Despite the widespread nature of evasion (bad-faith compliance), this interesting phenomenon is under-studied in International Relations. Even the most sophisticated typologies of compliance and rule following overlook evasion. This is problematic because evasion is essentially a false positive that looks like genuine compliance but can have the effect of violation. Drawing on purposivist legal theory, this article offers an in-depth discussion of evasion. It articulates what evasion is, why it occurs, how it relates to designed flexibility, and how it impacts accountability. Evasion entails intentional compliance with the letter of the law but violation of the purpose of the law in order to minimize inconvenient obligations in an arguably legal fashion. Three original case studies illustrate the empirical purchase and generalizability of evasion in International Relations. Evasion contributes a more nuanced understanding of compliance, cautions that legality sometimes hinders accountability, and offers policy recommendations to counter undesirable evasion. The article concludes with promising directions for a research program on evasion.

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The Color of Threat: Race, Threat Perception, and the Demise of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902-1923). 2013. Security Studies. 22(4): 573-606.

(also available here)

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ABSTRACT: Race is understudied in International Relations generally and International Security specifically. To mitigate this omission, this article provides a racial theory of threat perception. It argues that, under certain conditions, racial prejudices embedded in racial identities shape threat perceptions and generate behavioral dispositions. In the first step, racial similarity deflates threat perceptions, while racial difference inflates them. In the second step, deflated threat perceptions facilitate cooperation among racially similar agents, while inflated threat perceptions facilitate discord among racially different agents. Using extensive archival and secondary sources, the article illustrates the explanatory value of the theory in the case of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902-23).

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