Stephen Chaudoin
Faculty, International Relations
Overview: Can international organizations (IOs) turn the tide of resistance to their authority? We consider a class of IOs bound by the complementarity principle: they only act when domestic institutions fail. IOs like the International Criminal Court (ICC) have placed great faith in complementarity as an argument to rally support for international action and spur domestic action. We evaluate the effectiveness of complementarity arguments using the largest survey experiment on the ICC to date, with more than 10,000 participants from five countries whose cooperation could be pivotal for the Court: Georgia, Israel, the Philippines, South Africa, and the United States. We find very limited evidence that complementarity arguments improve public support for either ICC investigations or domestic investigations. This suggests that a major argument thought to legitimate IOs may not restore public support. The local context heavily conditions whether pro-IO arguments resonate with the target public audiences.