UC Irvine

Large bodies of research examine why states construct and ratify international legal agreements, yet little research has investigated the conditions under which states are likely to go further and legislate international legal norms into their domestic laws. The question is important, because the creation and ratification of treaties are often not enough for them to work as they are designed to – the enforcement of international law today increasingly depends on states enacting domestic implementing legislation that incorporates international legal rules into their domestic laws. To investigate why they do so, I examine the conditions under which states worldwide have legislated one set of international legal norms into their domestic laws: criminal prohibitions against genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity – also known collectively as “atrocity crimes.” Drawing on research on norm diffusion and professional communities in policymaking, I propose a new theory to explain the spread of these laws. In brief, I argue that the adoption of domestic anti-atrocity laws around the globe since World War II has largely been the result of choices made by technocratic legal experts who were appointed by governments to lead national criminal code reform projects. Though implementing international law has not motivated governments to initiate such reforms in the first place, legal experts have nonetheless used their delegated authority to codify norms – like anti-atrocity laws – that they believed embodied how a “modern” criminal code should look.

To test this theory, I use a multi-method research design. First, using time-series statistical methods and an original dataset I constructed documenting the existence and timing of national criminal laws against genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in every country in the world that has adopted them since World War II, I find strong support for my hypothesis that states that undertake wholesale reforms of their national criminal codes are more likely to adopt national anti-atrocity laws. Second, drawing on interviews and archival research in the field, I conduct an in-depth case study of a particularly puzzling case of atrocity criminalization – Guatemala in 1973 – and find strong support for the causal mechanisms I theorize to be underlying these statistical correlations.