Norms, interests, and the construction of international prohibition regimes: A comparative case study of the banning of landmines and extraterritorial bribery

Conventions signed in 1997 brought the old practices of the use of landmines in wars and conflicts and of bribery in international business transactions to an end. What caused states to suddenly come together and sign these landmark accords?; This work is a comparative case study of the international landmine ban and the international extraterritorial bribery ban. It undertakes an empirical investigation from a social constructivist perspective to examine the processes through which the two prohibition regimes came to be constructed. It tries to determine the impact of normative and ideational factors in influencing the understandings of state interests. Did the norms against landmines and business bribery help change states' perceptions and lead them to construct regimes to proscribe these practices? In order to answer this, the study proposes and tests seven hypotheses that try to establish some general principles involved in the formation of ban regimes. The study also explores the role of Transnational Advocacy Networks and Epistemic Communities in diffusing a norm to state decision makers.; In the landmines case, United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) documents for the years 1993-1997 provide the material for original primary research. The documents and publications of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are used for primary research in the bribery case.; The research finds that while norms do affect states' interests significantly in both cases, their impact is quite uneven across states and is intermingled with other factors that cannot easily be branded as ideational or normative. These material or "real" factors played an important role in how some states conceived their policies with respect to both practices. Thus, compared to the alternative perspectives, neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism, social constructivism provides the most cogent understanding of both cases, but by itself cannot explain either case completely.