Why do states create weak international institutions? Frustrated with proliferating but disappointing international environmental institutions, scholars increasingly bemoan agreements which, rather than solving problems, appear to exist “for show.” This article offers an explanation of this phenomenon. I theorize a dynamic of deflective cooperation to explain the creation of compromise face-saving institutions. I argue that when international social pressure to create an institution clashes with enduring disagreements among states about the merits of creating it, states may adopt cooperative arrangements that are ill-designed to produce their purported practical effects. Rather than negotiation failures or empty gestures, I contend that face-saving institutions represent interstate efforts to manage intractable disagreement through suboptimal institutionalized cooperation. I formulate this argument inductively through a new multi-archival study of conventional weapons regulation during the Cold War, which resulted in the oft-maligned 1980 UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. A careful reconsideration of the negotiation process extends and nuances existing IR theorizing and retrieves its historical significance as a critical juncture and complex product of contesting diplomatic practices.

为什么国家要建立薄弱的国际机构？学者们对不断增多但又令人失望的国际环境机构感到沮丧，他们越来越多地哀叹这些协议非但没有解决问题，反而似乎是“作秀”。本文对这一现象进行了解释。我将偏向合作的动态理论化，以解释妥协的保全面子机构的创建。我认为，当创建一个机构的国际社会压力与各国之间关于创建该机构的优点的持久分歧发生冲突时，各国可能会采取设计不当的合作安排，以产生其所谓的实际效果。我认为，保全面子的机构不是谈判失败或空洞的姿态，而是代表了国家间通过次优的制度化合作来管理棘手分歧的努力。我通过对冷战期间常规武器监管的一项新的多档案研究归纳地阐述了这一论点，该研究导致了饱受诟病的 1980 年《联合国某些常规武器公约》。