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Why Do Nations Obey International Law?
Abstract
Why do nations obey international law? This remains among the most perplexing questions in international relations. Nearly three decades ago, Louis Henkin asserted that "almost all nations observe almost all principles of international law and almost all of their obligations almost all of the time."' Although empirical work since then seems largely to have confirmed this hedged but optimistic description, scholars have generally avoided the causal question: If transnational actors do generally obey international law, why do they obey it, and why do they sometimes disobey it?
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Citations
Cited by
Social Theory of International Politics
Wendt, A. (1999) · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511612183 · Cited by 7,664
Legitimacy and Authority in International Politics
Hurd, I. (1999) · International Organization · doi:10.1162/002081899550913 · Cited by 1,619
Why Comply? Social Learning and European Identity Change
Checkel, J. T. (2001) · International Organization · doi:10.1162/00208180152507551 · Cited by 1,451
Barnett, M., & Duvall, R. (2004) · Power in Global Governance · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511491207.001 · Cited by 831
On Global Order: Power, Values, and the Constitution of International Society
Hurrell, A. (2007) · doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199233106.001.0001 · Cited by 677
Metadata
- Authors
- Koh, H. H., Chayes, A., Chayes, A. H., & Franck, T. M.
- Venue
- The Yale Law Journal
- Publisher
- JSTOR
- Published
- 1997-06
- Volume
- 106
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 2599
- ISSN
- 0044-0094 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1495593927
- Cited by
- 1,188
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 32.26
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Koh, H. H., Chayes, A., Chayes, A. H., & Franck, T. M. (1997). Why Do Nations Obey International Law? The Yale Law Journal. https://doi.org/10.2307/797228
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.