Doctoral Dissertation Research: Assessing the Conditions Under Which Nations Implement International Anti-Atrocity Laws

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Large bodies of research examine why states construct and ratify international legal agreements. Yet relatively little research assesses the conditions under which states are likely to go further and incorporate international legal rules into their domestic laws. This study contributes to our understanding of why and when states incorporate international accords into their legal systems through examination of criminal prohibitions against genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and torture. These norms are designed to work primarily through domestic courts, so in order to fulfill their function, states must pass criminal laws that define and allow their courts to prosecute these offenses. This research will produce a new, publicly available dataset on the worldwide spread of anti-atrocity laws since World War II. Through analysis of the patterns by which these laws have been adopted, this research will shed new light on more general mechanisms that facilitate the implementation of international law.Specifically, this study hypothesizes that states are likely to implement anti-atrocity laws during large-scale processes of criminal code reform, because such reforms empower legal experts to identify and codify laws - like anti-atrocity laws - that they believe embody how a modern criminal code should look. To test this argument against a variety of alternatives drawn from the literatures on human rights and norm diffusion, this study uses time-series statistical analyses of an original and comprehensive dataset on the spread of national criminal laws against genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and torture since 1945. To verify and further probe the causal mechanisms underlying the statistical results, this study investigates a single case that is particularly puzzling for existing theories, that is Guatemala's adoption of these laws in 1973.