
How can international institutions foster cooperation given that they lack enforcement capability? One view, quite simply, is that they can't. This view is shared by
realists and many outside the academy.
Many would argue this critique is unfair. It is too easy to jump from "can't control rogue states" to "completely worthless" or "false promise" or what have you. Even states that view one another as friends sometimes fail to reap all the possible benefits of international cooperation due to coordination problems, collaboration problems, etc, and institutions may help such states leave a little less money lying on the ground. There's also
pretty strong evidence that UN peacekeeping works, particularly when it has the consent of all the parties involved. Sure, that's an important caveat, but we shouldn't trivialize the large number of lives that have likely been saved as a result of the UN's efforts.
But let's set those things aside. Is the best we can say about the UN that it helps those who want to be helped but is of no real consequence to the behavior of "rogue" states? I would argue that the answer is "sort of, but only if we adopt a fairly extreme definition of 'rogue'." If we don't define "rogue" states as those that
do misbehave, but instead as those who
would like to, then the answer is likely that the UN does not just allow the good guys to do a little bit better on the margins, but actually changes the intentions of those we might otherwise see as bad guys.
Look below the fold to see why.