This article introduces the Continent of International Law (COIL) research project on international agreement design. COIL stems from the conviction that the International Organization subfield's focus on the couple hundred international organizations with physical headquarters had to be...

When states face an international cooperation problem requiring enforcement, when do they decide to make that enforcement formal versus informal? I introduce a research design for investigating how informal mechanisms might be relevant to formal international agreements. I present an overall...

An examination of a random sample of international agreements that are conditional on four issue areas shows that only about one out of every two agreements has any dispute resolution provision. This observation begs for an explanation, and which half needs explaining depends on where one is...