Shifting Alliances: States, TANs, and the Making of the Rome Statute
Open AccessWhy do Transnational Advocacy Networks (TANs) sometimes succeed and other times fail to impact the outcome of international negotiations? More and more, international negotiations are characterized by the presence of a large contingent of TAN members. Even though states have the final say regarding the final agreement, TANs have nonetheless been shown to be very effective in achieving their goals. But that presence has not always translated into success. What explains these divergent outcomes?Moving beyond the facile and erroneous explanations whereby TAN presence is equated to TAN influence, this dissertation is an attempt to answer that question. I do so by analyzing the negotiation history and outcome of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Specifically, I look at the negotiation record of four important and contentious aspects of the Rome Statute: universal jurisdiction, crime of aggression, prosecutorial independence, and gender rights. Each one of them traces the interaction between and among the states and the NGOs from the (re)introduction of the possibility of an international criminal court in the immediate post-Cold War period to the present. They also map differently in terms of outcomes from the perspective of the NGO community.To account for these divergent outcomes, I first examine levels of adversarial state alliance cohesion and then TAN cohesion. I find that alliance/network cohesion makes a difference on whether TANs achieve most of their goals, some of them, or none at all. I define cohesion as the ability of a group to withstand both external and internal pressures. Generally speaking, its weakness or strength is a function of political, ideological, and historical factors. TAN cohesion or lack thereof, is important because it affects the quality of information, resource aggregation, network credibility, like-minded group support, and the effectiveness of `naming and shaming' strategies.Cohesion is important to consider because it also alerts us to the possibility of intra-network competition and contestation, thus bringing into question the assumption of uniformity of interests within these networks as well as by problematizing what is meant by success and failure.
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