I. Introduction
Relations between states are not governed by any central authority, and therefore
states do not have to be bound by international laws. Yet states have chosen to sign
formal commitments to regulate behavior among them. Beginning in the nineteenth
century, states began to codify rules that encouraged cooperation, and in the twentieth
century, the number of multilateral agreements created increased greatly. International
laws and agreements number in the thousands and expand a vast number of issue areas.
The negotiations of multilateral agreements are often long and laborious
endeavors. But we, as international relation scholars, actually know very little about
what occurs during the bargaining of such agreements. While we know how some of the
more famous agreements were created, we know very little about the process of creating
multilateral agreements in general. To really have an understanding of cooperation
between states, more needs to be known about the process of creating these agreements.
This paper is part of a larger project in which data on the actual negotiations of a large
number of multilateral agreements across multiple issue areas is being collected in order
to systematically test a number of hypotheses derived from existing theories of
international cooperation and bargaining.
Among the questions yet to be answered is how long do the negotiations over
these agreements take? The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and the 1993
Chemical Weapons Convention both took more than 10 years and 20 years, respectively,
to negotiate. Efforts to draft the International Cocoa Agreement of 1972 took close to 16
years (not including previous attempts to create an international commodity agreement
for cocoa prior to and after World War I and after World War II). Attempts to negotiate
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Convention