Ruling from the Shadows: The Nature and Functions of Informal International Rules in World Politics
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Informality is a fact of international life. Plethora of unwritten rules, unofficial processes, informal meetings, unconventional practices, and ad hoc bodies govern the international system. Interviews, memoirs, narratives, and other forms of communication by seasoned diplomats all point to the fact that decisions that have consequential impacts on international politics are taken in informal settings, and numerous studies show that informal institutions fundamentally shape domestic political life. Yet, systematic and explicit accounts of the nature and functions of informal international rules (IIRs) is rare in international relations (IR) scholarship. The oversight means that we are left with many unanswered questions regarding the manner in which informal rules exist and interact in the international system and, in turn, how they shape international political outcomes. This article addresses this gap in knowledge by outlining core characteristics of IIRs and their functions in international political life. The analysis shows that key IIRs are embedded in formal institutions. Thus, while IIRs are distinct from formal international rules and should be studied in their own right, it will be a fundamental error to approach informal rules with a binary mindset.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it