Whether and how violence can be controlled to spare innocent lives is a central issue in international relations. The most ambitious effort to date has been the International Criminal Court (ICC), designed to enhance security and safety by preventing egregious human rights abuses and deterring international crimes. We offer the first systematic assessment of the ICC's deterrent effects for both state and nonstate actors. Although no institution can deter all actors, the ICC can deter some governments and those rebel groups that seek legitimacy. We find support for this conditional impact of the ICC cross-nationally. Our work has implications for the study of international relations and institutions, and supports the violence-reducing role of pursuing justice in international affairs.

Existing compliance research has focused on states’ adherence to international rules. This article reports on state and also non-state actors’ adherence to international norms. The analysis of warring parties’ behaviour in granting the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) access to detention centres between 1991 and 2006 shows that both governments and rebel groups adhere to the norm of accepting the ICRC in order to advance their pursuit of legitimacy. National governments are more likely to grant access when they are democracies and rely on foreign aid. Insurgent groups are more likely to grant access when they exhibit legitimacy-seeking characteristics, such as having a legal political wing, relying on domestic support, controlling territory and receiving transnational support.

Seventeen million people have died in civil wars and rebel violence has disrupted the lives of millions more. In a fascinating contribution to the active literature on civil wars, this book finds that some contemporary rebel groups actually comply with international law amid the brutality of civil conflicts around the world. Rather than celebrating the existence of compliant rebels, the author traces the cause of this phenomenon and argues that compliant rebels emerge when rebel groups seek legitimacy in the eyes of domestic and international audiences that care about humanitarian consequences and human rights. By examining rebel groups' different behaviors such as civilian killing, child soldiering, and allowing access to detention centers, Compliant Rebels offers key messages and policy lessons about engaging rebel groups with an eye toward reducing civilian suffering in war zones.

Whether and how violence can be controlled to spare innocent lives is a central issue in international relations. The most ambitious effort to date has been the International Criminal Court (ICC), designed to enhance security and safety by preventing egregious human rights abuses and deterring international crimes. We offer the first systematic assessment of the ICC's deterrent effects for both state and non-state actors. While no institution can deter all actors, the ICC can deter some governments and those rebel groups that seek legitimacy. We find support for this conditional impact of the ICC cross-nationally. Our work has implications for the study of international relations and institutions, and supports the violence-reducing role of pursuing justice in international affairs. One of the most important questions in international policy and research is whether justice is possible in a system dominated by self-regarding sovereign states. The International Criminal Court (ICC) provides a challenging opportunity to probe the possibilities for international law to reduce human suffering in inter-and intra-state conflict. The Court has jurisdiction in a domain where military and strategic logic generally prevails, though it does not have its own police force and must instead rely on domestic law enforcement or third parties to arrest people charged with crimes under its jurisdiction. The ICC's task is inherently difficult: it can prosecute state agents, including heads of state, as well as non-state actors such as rebel group leaders over whom international institutions traditionally have scant authority. Its goals are 4 ambitious: the attainment of peace and security, as well as justice for those who commit atrocities. Is the Court contributing to achieving these goals, as its original drafters envisioned? In particular, under what conditions can the ICC reduce egregious human rights violations against civilians? The question of the ICC's impact is important because the court has the authority to enforce international law against those who commit the most serious and systematic crimes. We examine the ICC's ability to deter one of the most dastardly international crimes: the widespread and intentional killing of civilians in states that have experienced civil wars in their recent past. We take a broad view of deterrence and explicate both its prosecutorial as well as social dimensions. Prosecutorial deterrence is a direct consequence of legal punishment: it holds when potential perpetrators reduce or avoid law-breaking for fear of being tried and officially punished. Social deterrence is a consequence of the broader social milieu in which actors operate: it occurs when potential perpetrators calculate the informal consequences of law-breaking. A judicial institution is at its most powerful when prosecutorial and social deterrence reinforce one another, which happens when actors threaten to impose extra-legal costs for noncompliance with legal authority. Recognizing this complementary relationship between formal pr...

This report describes a dataset on compliance with the laws of war in 20th century interstate wars. We introduce the dataset, discuss sources, and explain the coding schemes. The unit is a directed warring dyad in a given war for one of nine issues. We collect five dimensions of compliance, including quality of the data, and construct a single measure of compliance. Reciprocity exists in the data, and treaty law strengthens reciprocity by clarifying what acts constitute violations. Compliance varies across issues, matching the scope for individual violations. States are more likely to respond reciprocally to violations by individuals than to those that are state policy.