Legitimacy and Institutional Replacement: The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons and the Emergence of the Mine Ban Treaty

When and under what conditions is an existing international institution most likely to be replaced by a new one? Conventional international relations theories offer only partial insights into this question and seldom address it directly. But replacement occurs in a variety of important international contexts. For example, the United Nations replaced the League of Nations, the WTO replaced the GATT, and most recently, the Ottawa Convention banning landmines replaced Protocol II of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). I argue that the concept of legitimacy, commonly defined as “the belief that an institution ought to be obeyed,” and careful attention to the development of the existing institution are necessary to understand replacement. After developing a theoretical framework to conceptualize the relationship between legitimacy and replacement, this article traces the origins and development of the largely overlooked institutional predecessor to the Ottawa Convention: the CCW. It then shows how ideational change, driven by transnational efforts to delegitimate the CCW, paved the way for a shift in discourse from control to disarmament that made the creation of a new institution possible. The article concludes by seeking to generalize from the CCW experience through a preliminary discussion of other ways and cases in which legitimacy might affect institutional replacement and persistence.