Cooperation Failure or Secret Collusion? Absolute Monarchs and Informal Cooperation
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Cooperation Failure or Secret Collusion? Absolute Monarchs and Informal Cooperation Melissa Carlson 1 & Barbara Koremenos 2 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Despite sharing attributes that scholars argue promote international cooperation, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have few formal international agreements with each other. Does this absence of formal agreements imply a cooperation failure? We argue that absolute monarchies frequently cooperate with each other but do so informally. At the domestic level, absolute monarchs pursue their personal interests by unilaterally and nontransparently developing and implementing policies. These norms of domestic policymaking engender an absolutist logic, which shapes how absolute monarchs selectively use informal and formal cooperation at the international level. When cooperating with each other, absolute monarchs maximize mutual private benefits through similarly unilateral and nontransparent policymaking, producing secret, cartel-like informal agreements. Using the 10 Million International Dyadic Events data, we develop a data set of informal and formal cooperation from 1990 to 2004. We find that joint absolute monarchy dyads have higher levels of informal cooperation and lower levels of formal cooperation than joint democratic dyads and dyads of mixed regime types. We also draw on the Continent of International Law dataset to demonstrate that, when absolute monarchs enter into agreements with leaders of other regime types, they strategically accept the formal design mechanisms necessary for optimal cooperation. We assess the causal mechanisms underlying the absolutist logic through an in-depth case study of the informal, secret 2014 Riyadh agreements that outlined security cooperation between the Gulf monarchies. Keywords International cooperation . Informal cooperation . Secrecy, Authoritarian
regimes
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-02009380-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Melissa Carlson [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Carlson M., Koremenos B.
1 Introduction The extent to which pairs of states engage in formal cooperation varies in dramatic and, as explained below, surprising ways. The United Nations Treaty Series (UNTS) features the most comprehensive list of formal international agreements to date. Article 102 of the United Nations (UN) Charter encourages states to register their agreements with the UN, stating that: 1. Every treaty and every international agreement entered into by any Member of the United Nations after the present Charter comes into force shall as soon as possible be registered with the Secretariat and published by it. 2. No party to any such treaty or international agreement which has not been registered in accordance with the provisions of paragraph 1 of this Article may invoke tha
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