Great powers play an important role in the establishment of international institutions, such as the chemical weapons prohibition regime. However, once international regimes exist, they display path dependent behavior over longer periods. This raises the question of great power impact on the norms of an international regime once it has been established. This working paper by Alexander Kelle first presents the norms of the CW prohibition regime and subsequently analyses the policies of the United States, Russia and China in relation to several regime norms. It concludes that the key norms of the CW prohibition regime and their implementation over the past 26 years have largely conformed to the expectations of path dependency.

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