Networks of protection

Abstract

The protection of citizens abroad is commonly understood as an exclusively state enterprise. However, participation in international law activities is, in reality, no longer limited to states. This chapter considers the protection of citizens abroad as a far more complex network of interactions. I explore the actors who drive and deliver the protection of nationals, the behaviours that constitute the practice of protection and the motivating factors for protective behaviour. The focus for this exploration rests on the case known as LaGrand that was brought by Germany against the United States before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The chapter explores how and why Germany sought to protect two of its citizens from the application of the death penalty and the role of networks and expertise in generating Germany's decision to intervene and the conduct of its intervention. The chapter is organised into three sections. Section I outlines the international legal framework for the protection of citizens abroad and some of the analytical problems it poses. It considers Anne-Marie Slaughter's theory of transgovernmentalism as a framework for addressing these issues and explains the limitations of her approach. Section II traces the actions that state and non-state actors took in their attempt to protect the LaGrand brothers. It also explores Germany's motivations in bringing the case, drawn from interviews conducted in 2013 with state and non-state actors connected with the legal proceedings. Section III examines how those networks of protection applied different techniques to motivate state intervention on behalf of the LaGrand brothers, including the manner in which some actors harnessed their expertise to shape the course of action. It also examines the different components of protecting citizens abroad and how the traditional state functions are distributed across a network of actors. I conclude that protecting citizens abroad can be understood as the actions of a network: a disaggregated state, where various parts of the state interact with a variety of non-state actors and respond to a variety of pressures, not all of them legal in nature. This more complex model of networks allows the process of coordination between actors within the network to be more visible, as well as the ability of networks to generate substantive values and norms.