the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea included meetings of the UN
Seabed Committee from 1968 through 1970, meetings of a preparatory committee from
1970 through 1973, and finally the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the
Sea, which held 11 sessions (and intersessional meetings) from 1973 until the agreement
was finalized in 1982. On the other hand, the 1937 Nyon Agreement was negotiated and
agreed to in just four days, all 13 Hague Conventions of 1907 were negotiated in just
under four months, and the negotiations for the 1971 Convention for the Suppression of
Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Civil Aviation lasted for a little less than a year.
These examples lead us to an even more interesting question: Why do some
international agreements take so much longer to negotiate than others? What accounts
for the variation in the lengths of multilateral negotiations? Does the number of states
involved lead to longer negotiations? Does the type of problem being faced affect the
length of negotiations? Does the involvement of certain states or non-state actors aid or
impede negotiations? The ability to answer these sorts of questions is important not only
for theoretical reasons but may have important policy implications as well.
The purpose of this paper is to gain a better understanding of how long
international negotiations last and to examine the variation in the duration of these
negotiations. The following section is a brief review of the existing literature on
international negotiations. In this section, I derive three testable hypotheses based on
propositions from the literature concerning the duration of international negotiations. In
the third section, I test these hypotheses using data collected from 113 multilateral
agreements. The final section concludes and offers implications for future research.
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Convention