Description
The function of reservations in international treaty law represents an ongoing theoretical and empirical oversight in International Relations (IR), especially outside the familiar area of human rights treaties. While reservations are officially acknowledged in Articles 19 to 23 of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, the prevailing perception of them tends to be overly legalistic. This viewpoint obscures their significant political role, particularly for smaller and medium-sized states that operate within international systems influenced by unequal power dynamics. This disconnect is particularly noticeable within the International Drug Control System—an area influenced markedly by the interests of powerful nations, notably the United States, yet seldom examined through the perspectives of strategic opposition or normative debate.
In IR theory, treaties have often been regarded as mechanisms of cooperation or tools for institutionalizing norms. Liberal institutionalist perspectives, in particular, argue that treaties reduce uncertainty, facilitate coordination, and promote compliance among states. Yet these accounts tend to overlook how reservations—particularly those issued by less powerful states—function as vehicles for pushing back against dominant norms. The sparse IR literature that engages with reservations typically does so only in the context of human rights regimes, often framing them as instruments of evasion, obstruction, or normative underperformance. This framing overlooks the possibility that reservations may be rational acts of sovereignty assertion or culturally grounded forms of resistance within normatively coercive systems, specifically in Latin America.
A methodological and geographic bias in existing literature compounds this theoretical neglect. Most studies focus on European or North American treaty behavior, relegating Latin American cases to the margins. As a result, significant episodes of norm contestation—such as Peru’s reservations to drug control treaties concerning the cultural significance of the coca leaf—are treated as exceptions rather than as valuable data points for rethinking global norm dynamics.
