Principled and Pragmatic Exit: Understanding Treaty Withdrawal

States have withdrawn from publicly registered treaties more than 5,000 times over the past century. Yet exit is usually treated as a rare, nationalist rupture. This book argues that withdrawal masks two very different logics.

Pragmatic exits occur when a state constrained by a treaty leaves to avoid the costs of violation. The Philippines' withdrawal from the ICC while under investigation for extrajudicial killings is one example. Principled exits occur when states abandon agreements they see as normatively outdated. The mass withdrawals from early twentieth-century labor conventions with regressive provisions on gender, child labor, and colonialism fall into this pattern. The interaction between state characteristics and treaty design, especially legalization, shapes which kind of exit occurs.

Exit is also, paradoxically, a sign of the legal order's strength. States leaving treaties use the procedures international law gives them. Withdrawal can also mark the end of a norm's life cycle rather than an attack on it.

The book combines an original dataset of treaty exits and machine-learning-coded measures of legalization for over 30,000 treaties. It also draws on more than sixty-five interviews with officials in Geneva, The Hague, and elsewhere. The project was supported by the National Science Foundation and the University of Washington eScience Institute.