UCLA

A growing number of increasingly authoritarian states, such as the Russian Federation, People’s Republic of China, Hungary and Turkey, have spent the better part of the 21st century seeking to challenge the existing international order. These efforts have broadly centered around undermining existing international norms and molding new ones better suited to their governance models. The most prominent example of these authoritarian backed challenges to the "Old Order" came on February 24, 2022 as Russian missiles landed in Kyiv in what became the opening salvo of the first full-scale interstate conflict on the European Continent since 1945. However, even prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its status in the international community over the past decade was as precarious as it was contentious. The 2014 annexation of Crimea directly challenged almost 50 years’ worth of international legal norms and jurisprudence developed in the aftermath of World War II through its participation (or lack-thereof) in international organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). While the Russian Federation is far from the only authoritarian actor seeking to reshape the international system, this dissertation seeks to examine how – in both the international and domestic political sphere – these states have ushered in a "New Normal" for international relations. Building on Ginsburg (2020) and the growing prevalence of "authoritarian international law" that has in many ways typified authoritarian states challenges to the post-1945 international system, this dissertation first focuses on autocratic regimes’ increasing obstruction of international organizations such as the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) from expanding and crystalizing international legal norms that have served as staples of the "traditional" world order. Following this examination of authoritarian driven shifts in the international legal system this research demonstrates how domestic politics in both autocratic and democratic states in the form of differing public preferences toward crisis bargaining could potentially help explain the recent emergence of significant interstate conflict in an international system that for the most part had been devoid of such wars since 1945. Finally this work closes by providing the reader with an in-depth qualitative examination of just how domestic institutions in autocratic regimes such as the Russian Federation have contributed to the establishment of a "New Normal" by altering interactions in supranational norm building organizations such as the ECHR. Despite this project’s extensive focus on Russia, such approaches could also be applied to several other contexts. While this would require additional data collection that is not described here (should it be possible) it might provide some broader conclusions about how domestic judiciaries impact international organizations like the ECHR in the world more broadly. As a whole, the questions mentioned throughout this dissertation represent a broad overview of attempts to study the impact of the shifting international order on international human rights courts, specifically the ECHR. As such this dissertation makes a novel contribution to the study of a shifting international order and its impacts in the human rights arena and will hopefully help foster similar research on other countries or even other contexts or international bodies like the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights.