I thank Robert A. Blair for the thoughtful review and critical engagement with my book Committed to Rights: UN Human Rights Treaties and Legal Paths for Commitment and Compliance. I was particularly pleased that the book’s call to expand the study of treaty commitment beyond ratification was seen as a convincing argument and a beneficial path for both human rights and international relations scholars.

The central criticism that Blair raises is an important and challenging one: Does the book really disentangle and isolate the unique impact that human rights treaty commitment has from conditions that lead states to commit to treaties in the first place and from the other factors shaping compliance? This is a challenge with which scholarship examining treaty commitment, and human rights treaty commitment in particular, has wrestled since the burgeoning of the quantitative study of international human rights law in the late 1990s. As Blair notes, researchers deploy several strategies to tackle this question and distinguish between selection and treatment effects, including matching techniques, instrumental variable estimation, and complementary case study pairing; my book uses the last two.

I agree with Blair that these strategies are imperfect and frequently lead to more questions about the sequencing and motivations of various actors as they engage with international human rights law. He raises particularly good critiques related to the UN CRPD and CERD cases. Given President Johnson’s other efforts addressing racial discrimination in the United States, how can the signing of CERD be isolated and assigned the full weight of changes? In many ways, the cases offer illustrations of how the mechanisms of change can work in domestic contexts. Johnson was a supportive executive, I argue, who used treaty signature to signal support for the treaty rights before a divided US Senate could. In this case, signature was a more informative commitment act for examining domestic change than ratification, which occurred decades later after a supportive executive moved to embed rights changes. Limiting understanding of CERD commitment in the United States at the time to only an absence of ratification, which was the approach earlier studies took, served to overlook the nonbinding commitment, executive support, and ways NGOs and other groups could mobilize around signature leading up to ratification. I do agree, however, that Blair is correct to push for more disentanglement of how signature contributed to this process, even in this enhanced context.

Blair’s thoughtful critique of selection and treatment effects suggests an important additional question: At what point do we distinguish selection from treatment effects when it comes to treaty creation and compliance? Exploring rights commitments argues for broader analysis of when states became involved in the treaty-making process. However, given the nature of commitment, signature selects into ratification, and treaty negotiation can select into signature and ratification. The multiple layers and steps involved in treaty creation and commitment have, for the most part, been viewed separately or overlooked as components of treaty commitment.

In the book, I use strategies like instrumental variables, case studies, and specific analyses of state votes on treaty draft provisions to disentangle interests in sets of human rights issues from negotiations themselves and commitment. However imperfect, these strategies do address selection into treaty creation and commitment to a greater degree and lend support to the overall argument of the book that commitment actions should be disaggregated and contextualized in terms of domestic politics and that they matter for compliance outcomes.