The body of literature in political science and international law that tackles the question of what determines the effectiveness of global governance arrangements is continuously growing. Justice, a term central to political theory and increasingly salient in disciplines such as brain research, evolutionary biology, anthropology and experimental economics, has hardly been identified as one of the parameters of regime membership behavior and regime stability. The work of Albin and Albin/Druckman, however, has shown that it plays an important role in international negotiations and influences the effectiveness of negotiation outcomes. As compliance with regime rules is a central parameter of governance “effectiveness”, we explore in this paper the relationship between regime justice – as seen by the members – and members’ compliance with regime rules. After a brief sketch of the small body of work on justice in international relations, we first propose content analysis as a tool to measure the salience of justice claims in intra-regime discourses. Second, we conceptualize compliance with its numerous dimensions in order to identify cases of non-compliance and scale them according to their gravity. Third, we illustrate with selected empirical examples in the field of arms control (more specifically, the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, NPT) how members’ justice claims in a regime can lead to regime conflict, non-compliance and, ultimately, serious regime crisis. We conclude with some deliberations on the direction of future research on justice in international relations.
