This chapter introduces the two contributions that constitute Part V, “Economics and institutional design”.

Arms control agreements present a dual puzzle: states often fail to reach them despite potential mutual benefits, and when agreements do emerge, they vary dramatically in their monitoring provisions – from basic self-reporting to intensive on-site inspections. Approximately 225 multilateral and bilateral agreements have sought to limit military capabilities or behaviors between states. This chapter introduces these empirical patterns and situates them within broader debates in international relations. While political scientists typically associate uncertainty with conflict and instability, this book argues that uncertainty – particularly from domestic political changes – can create opportunities for formal cooperation. The analysis focuses on monitoring provisions as a critical design feature that allows states to detect violations while potentially creating new security vulnerabilities through information exposure. Drawing on both institutionalist and security studies approaches, the book examines how states manage these trade-offs differently under varying conditions. The chapter previews the book’s key contributions: a new theoretical framework linking domestic political volatility to agreement design, comprehensive data on historical arms control agreements, and detailed case studies based on archival materials. This approach offers fresh insights for both scholars studying international cooperation and practitioners confronting contemporary security challenges.

Chapter 3 explains why the ICC makes the US so worried. The overarching fear is that the ICC might initiate politically biased investigations and prosecutions that target American troops scattered across the globe. This fear is the result of the US losing two key negotiating battles over the Court’s institutional design at the Rome Conference, the 1998 diplomatic gathering that established the ICC. The first is that the ICC has jurisdiction over all individuals – including those from states that, like the US, never joined the Court – when they are on the territory of an ICC member. The other is that the ICC has an independent prosecutor who can select his or her own situations to investigate without needing the permission of states or the UN Security Council. The combination of these two factors alarmed Clinton administration officials. Given America’s global military presence, its troops would be uniquely exposed to the ICC’s jurisdiction and might face an ICC prosecutor who was free to inject anti-American biases into the Court’s work. From the US perspective, the Rome Conference spawned to a new threat to America’s global military.

This chapter asks whether international courts are designed with institutional safeguards to preserve independence. It conceptualizes formal independence as the formal rules that aim to safeguard autonomous judicial decision-making. This elsewhere is referred to as de jure independence. The chapter presents an original measure of formal independence and estimates the formal independence of twenty-six ICs that have operated between 1945 and 2015. The chapter compares formal independence across these ICs and reveals significant variation in formal independence. It shows that rules pertaining to the selection and tenure of international judges as well as the managerial autonomy of ICs are the sources of most of the observed variation.

The institutional design of NJMs varies considerably in the manner they enable, empower or constrain worker and community struggles. Whereas the UNGPs effectiveness criteria, along with other key contributions to the NJM design literature, emphasise the importance of procedural fairness, across the cases we studied purely procedural efforts were insufficient to address the deep imbalances of power between business actors and aggrieved communities. However, in some cases, these imbalances were ameliorated by aspects of institutional design that the UNGPs effectiveness criteria leave implicit: the financial and human resources the NJM can mobilise, the authority it can command and the extent to which its design enhances its capacity to exercise leverage in support of human rights redress. Even where the NJM’s design provides leverage, NJM staff frequently hesitate to flex institutional muscle for fear of jeopardising crucial resources and relationships. As such, the usefulness of transnational NJMs’ interventions often depends crucially also on factors beyond institutional design, namely the extent to which aggrieved communities are able to draw on and effectively deploy other forms of leverage and influence.

When NJMs fail to deliver remedy, criticism is often first levelled against their institutional design: the policies, processes and powers that characterise their operations. Chapter 2 interrogates literatures that conceptualise and critique effective design, primarily theories of non-judicial governance and regulation within the business and human rights scholarship focused on NJMs and approaches captured under the term ‘new governance’. Four elements of institutional design receive particular emphasis in these literatures: efforts to establish accessible and fair non-judicial procedures, processes that support socialisation and learning, strong institutional capacity and resourcing and provisions to help motivate businesses to engage with non-judicial redress processes. This scholarship, though, often overlooks important areas of ambiguity, firstly, whether and how design can encompass and respond to the divergent purposes and aims that animate grievance claims and, secondly, implications for institutional design that arise from recognising the embedding of regulatory and redress processes in broader, and highly unequal, social relations.

Some propose that states tie hands by signing alliance treaties. The presence of an alliance treaty increases the audience costs of violating a commitment to defend another state, having the effect of tying hands. This chapter argues that states prefer to keep their hands untied to make it easier to avoid getting drawn into the wrong wars. Accordingly, when states design alliance treaties, they routinely include flexibility language in the treaties that enable them to stay out of conflicts involving embattled allies without violating the treaty, thereby reducing or avoiding the audience costs of abandoning an ally. The chapter demonstrates that all alliances since 1945 include such flexibility language, including alliances signed by the US and Soviet Union/Russia. Further, the chapter demonstrates that in every single post-1945 case when a state allegedly abandoned an embattled ally, the flexibility language of the treaty means that the decision to stay out of the conflict did not technically violate the treaty. On the rare occasions when states want to tie hands more tightly to bolster deterrence, they make verbal statements that de facto reduce the flexibility of the alliance treaty, though such verbal statements are crafted to tie hands minimally.

This chapter considers questions of immigration institutional design in light of lessons learned from how Caribbean home-care aides currently work and travel. The growth in paid home care has been largely staffed by migrant labor – with some care workers operating outside of the scope of their visas. While these workers may technically be noncompliant, the author argues that most of these workers are in fact “good types,” who would have been favorably screened ex-ante for elder-care visas. The chapter proposes that we urgently devise a system that permits temporary entry of elder-care workers. If migrant care workers are permitted long-term temporary visas in which they can work in the US for a few months per year over several years, they have every incentive to comply.

Guarantor institutions (such as electoral commissions and anti-corruption watchdogs, which supposedly comprise the so-called ‘fourth’ or ‘integrity’ branch of the state) are increasingly of interest to constitutional scholars. In a given political context, a guarantor institution is a tailor-made constitutional institution, vested with material as well as expressive capacities, whose function is to provide a credible and enduring guarantee to a specific non-self-enforcing constitutional norm (or any aspect thereof). Arguing that guarantor institutions are more trustee-like than agent-like in character, this chapter defends the claim that the design of any guarantor institutions should seek to ensure that it has: (i) sufficient expertise and capacity to perform its functions effectively; (ii) sufficient independence from political, economic, or social actors with an interest in frustrating the relevant norm it is meant to guarantee; and (iii) sufficient accountability to bodies with an interest in upholding the relevant norm.

This chapter identifies three shortcomings in our preparedness for the governance of future worlds of consumers and AI. If our governance is to be smart, there must first be a systematic gathering of regulatory intelligence (to understand what does and does not work). AI givernance will require new institutions that are geared for the kind of conversations that humans will need to have in the future to adjust to a radically different approach to governance