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What affects Americans’ sensitivity to international laws and norms on the use of force? A wealth of recent IR literature tackles this question through experimental surveys using fictional scenarios and treatments to explore precisely when Americans would approve of government policies that would violate the laws of war. We test whether such survey experiments may themselves be affecting public sensitivity to these norms—or even Americans’ understanding of the content of the norms themselves. We show that being invited to express a preference regarding war crimes in survey settings has a negative impact on Americans’ understanding of US legal and ethical obligations in war and that reporting previous findings can inflate support for war crimes. We conclude with suggestions for future experimental survey design in international relations and international law.

How does the discourse of international law facilitate extraterritorial state violence? This paper synthesizes insights from International Relations, comparative politics, and legal studies in order to explore how the sovereign foundations of international law may render “frontier territories” exceptionally vulnerable to external military intervention. I argue that international law’s focus on sovereignty constitutes frontier territories as “ambiguous,” which leads to discursive conflicts over how to define these spaces, what is considered “legal” and “illegal” action within them, and who gets to define their status. All of this creates a conducive environment for powerful international governments to denigrate frontier territories as “lawless,” by rhetorically constructing them as exceptional legal spaces that do not deserve the same protections as areas ordered by sovereign ideals. To illuminate this empirically, I conduct a discourse analysis of 16 distinct legal documents from the Obama White House, including internal memorandums and public speeches on the legal standing of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

Public opinion polls on national security issues are often seen as indicators of the strength of international human rights norms. By contrast, we hypothesise that the very act of answering poll questions can weaken citizens’ understandings of important international human rights laws and norms in the very moment they are being measured. We ground this discussion empirically by analysing a new dataset of post-9/11 survey questions on two US national security policies at odds with international human rights norms: ‘enhanced interrogations’ and ‘targeted killing’. In so doing, we encourage a widened research agenda on how international legal and normative understandings are transmitted to the public through surveys. We conclude by highlighting substantive implications for norm scholars and policy implications for norm advocates.