Description
What does compliance mean in international law and how is this meaning constructed? At its core, international law represents standards that states are expected to comply with in their words and deeds, shaping how international relations are constituted and carried out. But how do actors decide what behaviors or words comply with international law and which ones are forbidden? Drawing on theories of rhetoric and compliance in international law, this paper argues that compliance is often a spectrum where many behaviors may be arguably compliant at any given time, but that the scope of this spectrum is open to construction and contestation by states and other actors. In particular, when drafting a treaty, actors have a unique opportunity to construct the meaning of compliance. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative text analysis approaches, this paper analyzes how actors constructed – through repeated social interactions and argumentation – the scope, or meaning, of compliance with the 1949 Geneva Conventions. In doing so, this paper illustrates how argumentation and social interaction is key to constructing and reconstructing the meaning of compliance in international law, challenging binary views of compliance and calling attention to the different scopes of compliance contained even within the same treaty.
