Book
The Bankers’ Blacklist: Unofficial Market Enforcement and the Global Fight Against Illicit Financing (Jan 2022, Cornell University Press)
Trillions of dollars flow across borders through the banking system every day. While bank-to-bank transfers facilitate trade and investment, they also provide opportunities for criminals and terrorists to move money around the globe. To address this vulnerability, large economies work together through an international standard-setting body, the FATF, to shift laws and regulations on combating illicit financial flows. Morse examines how this international organization has achieved such impact, arguing that it relies on the power of unofficial market enforcement—a process whereby market actors punish countries that fail to meet international standards. The FATF produces a public noncomplier list, which banks around the world use to shift resources and services away from listed countries. As banks restrict cross-border lending, the domestic banking sector in listed countries advocates strongly for new laws and regulations, ultimately leading to deep and significant compliance improvements.
The Bankers' Blacklist offers lessons about the peril and power of globalized finance, revealing new insights into how some of today's most pressing international cooperation challenges might be addressed.
Shortlisted for the British International Studies Association IPEG Book Prize
Reviewed in The Review of International Organizations, International Affairs, Lawfare
Media coverage: “Who, What, Why” podcast, Financial Crime Digest
Selected Peer-Reviewed Articles
Your Silence Speaks Volumes: Weak States and Strategic Absence in the UN General Assembly (with Bridget Coggins, The Review of International Organizations, 2024)
Country participation in one-state, one-vote forums like the United Nations General Assembly often reflects underlying power asymmetries and endogenous political processes. Voting alignment is undoubtedly an important preference indicator; however, this paper contends that it is incomplete. Silence is politically significant as well. Weak states use absence as a form of institutional power that shields them from geopolitical pressure and competing-principals problems. While abstention is a public signal of neutrality that undercuts voting unanimity, the ambiguous intent of absence makes it a distinct form of political expression. We examine the politics of absences at the General Assembly, highlighting how states may be strategically absent from select votes for political reasons. Building on the Bailey, Strezhnev, and Voeten (2017) roll-call voting data, we distinguish strategic absences from other types of absence and provide evidence that such behavior is linked to US interests and competing-principals problems. Taking these non-random reasons for missingness into account provides a fuller picture of how weak states engage with international institutions and highlights how silence can be a consequence of larger political processes.
Strategies of Contestation: International Law, Domestic Audiences, and Image Management (with Tyler Pratt, Journal of Politics, 2022)
International relations scholars frequently argue that violations of international law generate political costs for governments. Yet we know little about whether governments can evade responsibility for noncompliance, which may be a low-salience issue for domestic audiences. We propose a theory of image management whereby leaders strategically contest international law violations to influence citizen perceptions of the government. Drawing on communications scholarship, we disaggregate government image into four underlying dimensions: morality, performance, lawfulness, and allegiance. A government’s response to violations is designed to influence the dimensions of image valued by their political coalition. We develop a typology of response strategies and test their effects in a survey experiment examining violations of the torture, trade, and chemical weapons regimes. Our results offer fresh insights for compliance scholarship. Governments can mitigate backlash and leverage allegations of noncompliance for political ends, but their strategies are constrained by the foreign policy preferences of supporters.
Winner: Best Article Award, International Collaboration Section, APSA
Protecting Trade by Legalizing Political Disputes: Why Countries Bring Cases to the International Court of Justice (with Christina Davis, ISQ, 2018)
How does economic interdependence shape political relations? We show a new pathway to support a commercial peace in which economic interdependence changes strategies for conflict management. The uncertainty arising from political disputes between countries can depress trade flows. As states seek to protect trade from such negative effects, they are more likely to bring their disputes to legal venues. We assess this argument by analyzing why countries bring cases to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Using data on 190 countries from 1960 to 2013, we find that countries are more likely to file ICJ cases against important trading partners than against states with low levels of shared trade. We conclude that economic interdependence changes the incentives for how states resolve their disputes.
Balancing law and politics: Judicial incentives in WTO dispute settlement (with Ryan Brutger, Review of International Organizations, 2015)
Can international courts ever be independent of state influence? If not, how do courts manage the tension between legal principles and political concerns? We address these questions through an analysis of one of the most independent international adjudication mechanisms – dispute settlement at the World Trade Organization (WTO). We find that the ad hoc nature of WTO panels, judicial hierarchy, and panelists’ concern for compliance create a set of incentives that encourage panelists to moderate rulings against the most powerful WTO members. Our analysis shows that WTO dispute settlement panels limit the negative effects of judgements against the United States and the European Union by reducing the scope of such verdicts through the use of judicial economy. We argue that WTO panels use this practice to balance the demands of the law with the concerns of powerful members, which results in a level of judicial restraint on the part of panels and increased prospects for compliance by the US and EU.
Contested Multilateralism (with Robert Keohane, Review of International Organizations, 2014)
“Contested multilateralism” describes the situation that results from the pursuit of strategies by states, multilateral organizations, and non-state actors to use multilateral institutions, existing or newly created, to challenge the rules, practices, or missions of existing multilateral institutions. It occurs when coalitions dissatisfied with existing institutions combine threats of exit, voice, and the creation of alternative institutions to pursue policies and practices different from those of existing institutions. Contested multilateralism takes two principal forms: regime shifting and competitive regime creation. It can be observed across issue areas. It shapes patterns of international cooperation and discord on key security concerns such as combating terrorist financing, halting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and banning certain conventional weapons. It is also evident on economic issues involving intellectual property, on environmental and energy issues, and in the realm of global public health. The sources of dissatisfaction are primarily exogenous, and the institutions used to challenge the status quo range from traditional treaties or intergovernmental organizations to informal networks, some of which include non-state actors. Some institutions are winners from the process of contested multilateralism; others may lose authority or status. Although we do not propose an explanatory theory of contested multilateralism, we do suggest that this concept provides a useful framework for understanding changes in regime complexes and the strategies that generate such changes.
Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters
“Rule and Resistance in the Anti-Globalization Era” (in Daase, Deitelhoff, and Witt, Rule in International Politics, Cambridge University Press, 2023)
Anti-globalist leaders form a distinct set of challengers to the global system because they share a common motivation: the desire to regain national sovereignty and reduce the power of international institutions. This chapter considers three different forms of anti-globalist resistance: (1) attempts to dismantle status quo regimes through unilateral action that challenges existing rules; (2) joining coalitions across states to transform existing multilateral institutions and reduce rules or obligations; (3) building new institutions or seeking alternative venues that favor state sovereignty over interconnectedness. Each strategy could transform the content of international rules, but with different implications for how we understand the nature of institutional authority. If international authority has moved beyond state consent and international institutions themselves now constitute a legitimate source of authority, anti-globalist leaders will find it difficult to escape the confines of institutional commitments through unilateral action. For strategic anti-globalists, then, the optimal way to undermine cooperation may be to work within the system itself, shaking the foundations of the post-1945 international order.