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The international regulation of whaling has been a tremendous success. It has reduced whale hunting dramatically from its peak in the 1960s and brought almost all species of whales out of danger of extinction. Today, whaling conservation stands as a--or perhaps the--paradigm of a successful international regime. Yet the international organization responsible for this success is itself in such crisis that it may not survive.
The International Whaling Commission (IWC) is the international organization responsible for regulating whale hunting. Created after World War II, it now comprises both the main whaling nations and the main anti-whaling nations, and the split between the two is so stark that for years the organization has been barely functioning. Its opposing blocs of anti- and pro-whaling states have mutually exclusive understandings of what the regime permits and evenly divided power. Their mutual vetoes ensure that the dysfunctional status quo prevails, and the idea of "success" is coming to look increasingly unclear. The rules that the commission designed decades ago remain in place today, but the members cannot agree either to enforce them or to change them. Chief among these rules is the ban on commercial whaling, which has existed since the mid-1980s. Despite this ban, several members continue to openly hunt whales, arguing with technical legal reasoning why the ban does not in fact apply to their behavior. The 2010 annual meeting of the IWC presented what may have been the last chance to confront these differences directly, but it ended in a spectacular diplomatic failure, as I shall describe below.
The problems of the IWC vividly illustrate the larger dilemmas of international law and organization, and so they are of interest to scholars beyond the domain of whales and whalers. These include problems of supermajority decision rules, changes brought about by new members, contested amendments to the mandate of an organization, and the push and pull of civil-society groups. Disagreement over the substance of the whaling regime has been displaced; it has been recast as a set of disputes over legal technicalities regarding how and when states are allowed to make reservations to treaties and what counts as "scientific" research on whales. The whaling regime has thus become a microcosm of...