International agreements are known to elicit cooperation based on their stringency, clarity, and enforceability. Yet, it is puzzling that states regularly enter binding and far-reaching agreements whose implications they know little about. Twenty-first century trade faces a major obstacle in non-tariff measures (NTMs), like national product standards, which slow down the flow of goods and raise consumer prices. Still, institutional commitments to dismantling regulatory barriers remain vague, both at the WTO and in preferential trade agreements (PTAs). This paper asks: what allows states to cooperate in the absence of strong and clear rules? I introduce the notion of deferred contracting (DC) to theorize how states can cooperate and make concessions on costly regulatory commitments after treaty ratification so as to avoid domestic vetoes. I argue that a more institutionalized pursuit of DC leads PTA members to converge more in their national product regulations. I introduce a novel dynamic measure of regulatory distance in product standardization built using principal component analysis (PCA), and covering 90 countries between 1995 and 2020. Difference-in-differences estimation with matching reveals that bilateral PTAs with more institutionalized DC fora reduce regulatory distance between members states more than other agreements. Relying on a mixed-method approach, I complement my statistical findings with a case study on the EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA). Existing literature has long established that institutionalized cooperation revolves around visible commitments formalized during politically contested negotiations. This study reveals that, in fact, the politics of treaty implementation is no less fruitful in producing new policy decisions in the shadow of vague and incomplete contracts.

Studies have discussed how international enforcement actions often backfire, prompting violating states to abandon cooperation. Yet we still know little about whether these events can prompt states to cooperate more. We argue that treaty- enforcement episodes exposing clear violations prompt states to strengthen enforcement mechanisms in future agreements, sending a signal that offsets the reputational damage caused by the enforcement action. We test this argument looking at international investment agreements (IIAs) negotiated following investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) claims, using a PanelMatch difference-in-differences design and a novel dataset of 2,501 IIAs. We find that states accused of directly expropriating investors strengthen ISDS enforcement provisions in subsequent treaties relative to states facing softer allegations or no enforcement. We complement these results with case study on Chile. Our findings reveal that international cooperation can be sustained in the wake of violations, when restoring reputation is better served by stringent commitments than withdrawal.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has reshaped the global economy, extending connectivity across industries, infrastructure, and daily life in ways that generate both enormous value and growing vulnerability to cyber threats. Yet international governance of IoT cybersecurity remains nascent and often fragmented. Why do we observe international cooperation in some contexts and fragmentation in others? We argue that two factors shape governance of IoT: industry cybersecurity risk and the geopolitical relationship between states. In low-risk sectors such as consumer IoT, regulatory political economy dynamics apply, and international standards bodies and the WTO provide institutional frameworks within which states can coordinate on common rules and contest divergent ones. In high-risk sectors like critical infrastructure, security concerns displace economic ones, and outcomes follow geopolitical lines: coordination among allies, deliberate fragmentation among adversaries. Drawing on original data on national cybersecurity policies and specific trade concerns raised at the WTO, we show that geopolitical coalitions have become the dominant organizing logic of regulatory cooperation in this domain. Allied pairs show stronger substantive alignment in high-risk sectors, while fragmentation concentrates along adversarial lines. Our findings contribute to research on the securitization of international political economy and speak to the conditional authority of international organizations, based on the risk levels of technology across different domains. As billions more devices come online, the question of how their security is governed has never been more consequential.

In December 2019, the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Appellate Body (AB) ceased to function after the United States blocked new appointments, paralyzing dispute settlement and weakening the WTO’s enforcement capacity. We leverage this quasi-exogenous episode to examine when and how international institutions sustain cooperation. We argue that third-party enforcement does not uniformly sustain cooperation, since the value of enforcement depends on the type of trade relationship. Enforcement is most consequential in trade involving contract intensive goods, where exchange relies on enforceable agreements and relationship specific commitments. Such relationships raise exit costs, weakening the credibility of termination threats and increasing incentives for opportunistic profit extraction through trade distortions such as tariffs, subsidies, and import requirements. We expect WTO dispute settlement to be especially important for politically misaligned dyads and for dyads without alternative legal venues such as preferential trade agreements. We test these expectations with a difference in differences design comparing changes in members’ trade restrictions before and after the AB crisis and estimates heterogeneous effects by geopolitical alignment and PTA coverage. Results show that international legalization disciplines state behavior contingently on the nature of the interstate exchange.

Why does the EU still lack integration around a common and binding investment screening mechanism (ISM) despite rising global tensions and security concerns? Why is there still significant variation in how EU Member States govern incoming international investment? The literature identifies a political tradeoff for EU governments between attracting FDI and fostering domestic security, shaped by factors like public debt levels, the intensity of R&D in national industries, and the extent of incoming Chinese investment. Yet, we still know little about the role that international institutions play in these government decisions. This paper explores the dense network of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) that individually tie many EU member states to non-EU countries. It argues that being part of BITs with non-EU countries reduces Member States' propensity to introduce ambitious investment screening rules. It finds that a wider network of BITs leads EU Member States to design less comprehensive and stringent ISMs, all else equal. These findings point at an understudied paradox: international institutions like BITs have been designed to foster EU member states’ integration with non-EU economies. At the same time, these agreements limit internal EU integration around a common and binding investment-screening regime. The paper complements explanations for the EU’s lack of a unified ISM that only look at its lagging security integration, pointing at the role of competing economic institutions instead.