Balancing International Commitments and Democratic Accountability: Exit clauses in international investment agreements (with Sujeong Shim) International Studies Quarterly,  June 2025, 69(2), sqaf012.

• Journal version

Growing international relations literature examines when states exit international institutions and why. International agreements, however, differ in how easy it is for signatory states to withdraw from them. Why do some states sign up to treaties that are difficult to terminate, while others prefer treaties that are easy to withdraw from? We investigate this phenomenon in the context of bilateral investment agreements, exploiting variation in the flexibility of their exit clauses. We argue that the regime type as well as capital importer-exporter dynamics explain states' preferences over flexibility in treaty termination. In general, democracies prefer agreements that are easier to terminate to reflect any changes in domestic political preferences and because democracies face less credibility costs. However, when capital importing states are autocratic, capital exporting states, regardless of their regime type, prefer hard exit clauses to lock in their partner state for a longer time. To test our arguments, we have constructed an original dataset of termination features in over 2,500 international investment treaties, and find strong and supportive evidence for our claims. The paper contributes to the understanding of durability in international institutions, as well as negotiations over economic agreements.

Women in International Negotiations: Evidence from the Council of the European Union (with Tom Hunter)

• Working paper

Can individuals make a difference to international negotiations? Individuals in negotiations face different structural pressures depending on their visible identity characteristics. This is especially true for women, who simultaneously face gendered stereotypes about appropriate behavior, but also underestimation of their professional competence because of their historical under-representation internationally. We theorize that women negotiators have incentives to adjust their negotiation strategies to navigate such structural pressures: when career pressures dominate, women prioritize strategies that demonstrate their toughness as negotiators and professional skills. But when short-term pressures to achieve support for their proposals dominates, they instead adopt more gender-stereotypically congruent negotiation rhetoric to appear diplomatic and likeable. Leveraging novel data on the identities of 700 negotiators and 3,500 negotiation statements at the Council of the European Union in 2011-2016 and large language models (LLMs), we uncover gender differences in negotiator tendency to indicate flexibility and willingness to compromise. Women tend to use less flexible strategies, especially when the gender composition in the negotiation does not require confirming to gendered expectations. In addition to providing a unique insight into real international negotiations, our findings contribute to the understanding of how individuals navigate contradicting structural pressures in international organizations, and how improving representation of underrepresented groups influences world politics.

Why  states  publicly  admit  to  breaking  international  law (with Yuan Yi Zhu)

Why do states sometimes publicly admit to breaking international law and continue breaking it? Past cases of such explicit breach illustrate a phenomenon whereby a government can benefit from openly admitting to breaking international law, even if it intends to continue with the breaching act after the public admission. We argue that an explicit breach can serve as a powerful tool to initiate change in international law favourable to the breacher: by publicly voicing their disagreement and demonstrating defiance, states can put pressure on the other members in the legal regime and successfully shape related agreements to match their preferences. However, states differ in their ability to benefit from the strategy of explicit breach. Only states that enjoy high international legal standing, defined by their past compliance and embeddedness in international legal regimes, can credibly initiate such change, as their disobedience has more detrimental consequences to the legal regime in question. Otherwise, the other states are more likely to punish the defiant state, reflecting badly on them, and hence making the strategy unattractive. Paradoxically, the strategy of explicit breach can only be used sparsely, as every instance of breach in turn corrodes the states international legal standing.