Assessing the Adequacy of the CBW Prohibition Regimes for the Challenges of the 21st Century

Multilateral prohibition regimes are more than the legal texts — the BWC and the CWC in our area of concern — on which they are based. In addition to this legal dimension, the concept of ‘international regimes’ captures the political dimension of states acting on their own (on the domestic level) and interacting with one another (on the international level) in the implementation of these legal arrangements. As states participate in international regimes out of their own free will there is an expectation that they will strive to comply with the stipulations of the regime. In addition, as these regimes are often created to overcome collective action problems, i.e. situations in which individual state action to address a problem would yield sub-optimal results, states participating in a regime can be expected to have an interest in adapting a regime when the character of the underlying problem, which led to the regime’s creation in the first place, changes.