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Though provided for in several treaties, including three universal human rights treaties, resort to interstate conciliation has been sparse. In 2018, however, the first three human rights interstate conciliations were initiated under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). While two of these have been suspended by mutual agreement, the third, Palestine v. Israel , is ongoing after the CERD Committee has concluded that it has jurisdiction to establish a conciliation commission. This article examines how suited conciliation is to advance the goals of interstate communications in human rights treaties, as well as conciliation more broadly. It also tries to identify critical factors that may determine the success or failure of such conciliations, particularly by drawing on lessons learned from the recent conciliation between Timor Leste and Australia under the UN Convention for the Law of the Sea, which successfully concluded with a delimitation treaty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rational choice approaches to reducing terrorist violence would suggest raising the costs of terrorism through punishment, thereby reducing the overall expected utility of terrorism. In this article, we argue that states should also consider raising the expected utility of abstaining from terrorism through rewards. We test effects of repressive (or punishing) and conciliatory (or rewarding) actions on terrorist behavior using the newly developed GATE-Israel dataset, which identifies events by Israeli state actors toward Palestinian targets on a full range of counterterrorism tactics and policies from 1987 to 2004. Results show that repressive actions are either unrelated to terror or related to subsequent increases in terror, and conciliatory actions are generally related to decreases in terror, depending on the tactical period. Findings also reveal the importance of understanding the role of terrorists’ constituencies for reducing violence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]