Legitimacy and Institutional Replacement: The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons and the Emergence of the Mine Ban Treaty
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract When and under what conditions is an existing international institution most likely to be replaced by a new one? Conventional international relations theories offer only partial insights into this question and seldom address it directly. But replacement occurs in a variety of important international contexts. For example, the United Nations replaced the League of Nations, the WTO replaced the GATT, and most recently, the Ottawa Convention banning landmines replaced Protocol II of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). I argue that the concept of legitimacy, commonly defined as “the belief that an institution ought to be obeyed,” and careful attention to the development of the existing institution are necessary to understand replacement. After developing a theoretical framework to conceptualize the relationship between legitimacy and replacement, this article traces the origins and development of the largely overlooked institutional predecessor to the Ottawa Convention: the CCW. It then shows how ideational change, driven by transnational efforts to delegitimate the CCW, paved the way for a shift in discourse from control to disarmament that made the creation of a new institution possible. The article concludes by seeking to generalize from the CCW experience through a preliminary discussion of other ways and cases in which legitimacy might affect institutional replacement and persistence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.062 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".