Yielding Sovereignty to AIIs
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principle of universal jurisdiction. In the field of security, all UN member states save the five
wielding a veto have yielded sovereignty to the Security Council to make binding decisions on
the use of sanctions and force. Finally, on the environment, two thirds of Montreal Protocol
member states can bind minorities to new regulations of ozone-depleting chemicals, and an
implementing committee can impose trade sanctions on non-complying parties.
We suggest that the widespread distribution of these institutions across geographic
boundaries and functional issue areas justifies examining AIIs as a class, rather than as a series
of unrelated cases. Combining such disparate phenomena raises obvious problems but does
allow us to look for broader patterns in the formation of these institutions. We hope our focus on
macro-trends can illuminate future research on narrower sets of cases.
The existing international relations literature on these cases has focused primarily on what
motives states have in delegating to authoritative institutions and on bargaining between states; in
other words, it has focused on state demand. For example, many liberal rationalists argue that
states delegate slices of sovereignty when international institutions help bring credibility to state
commitments (See Keohane, 1984; Moravcsik, 1998; Abbott and Snidal, 2000).
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Delegation
locks in agreements against future changes in preferences. Scholars working within
constructivism and sociological institutionalism counter that narrow cost-benefit analysis of
actors’ preferences is insufficient (See Perrow, 1986; Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998; Wendt,
1999; Powell and DiMaggio, 1991). While these scholars have not extensively addressed the
issue, their most likely explanation is that states give up sovereignty when doing so accords with
widely shared ideas or taken-for-granted norms.
Without taking sides in this important debate over actors’ motives, we hope to call attention
to international structural factors. Twenty years ago, the most visible theory of international
Convention