38 Xenakis S., Cheliotis L. Committee for the Prevention of Torture, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT), respectively. Greece readily lends itself as a case study through which to advance understanding of the effectiveness of pressure from the European human rights regime towards national compliance with ECHR provisions on incarceration. On one hand, as a relatively weak state within Europe, Greece might reasonably be expected to have been more likely to succumb to pressure from powerful continental actors to align its policies and practices with the Convention. On the other hand, Greece has a long and turbulent history of engagement with the ECHR, including an exceedingly poor record of compliance with a number of its provisions. Crucially for present purposes, Greece’s non-compliance has concerned conditions of incarceration with increasing frequency over the last twenty years or so, as attested by a long series of damning reports by the CPT during this timeframe and the concurrent upsurge in the number of convictions of the country by the ECtHR for violation of Article 3 of the Convention, which prohibits inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. We begin by reviewing extant research, primarily but not solely from the fields of Law and International Relations, on the nature and effectiveness of pressure through which international human rights regimes seek to promote national compliance with their rules and norms. In so doing, we outline the main arguments that can be distilled from this literature to explain non-compliance, and proceed to test their validity in the context of Greece with particular reference to conditions of incarceration over two historical periods: first, from the mid-twentieth century, when Greece joined the CoE and signed the ECHR, until the fall of the country’s seven-year military dictatorship in 1974; and second, the ensuing decades, including the time elapsed since a coalition government led by the left-wing Syriza party assumed power in 2015, shortly after the collapse of a centrist two-party system that had been in place since the restoration of democracy. We conclude by summarising our findings on the causes behind Greece’s longstanding non-compliance with the ECHR in the field of incarceration, also highlighting the implications of these findings for the study of international human rights regimes and the effectiveness of their interventions inside nation-states. The Greek case suggests that, in conjunction with select institutional capacity constraints, a range of domestic and international pressures, material as well as social, may combine to offset international pressure for national compliance with international human rights regimes. This not only adds impetus to warnings against mono-causal approaches that are bound to overlook the possibility of multiple forces operating simultaneously and cumulatively to produce non-compliance; it also calls attention to the diversity and potentially competing nature of influences stemming from the international sphere. The efficacy of international pressure on national human rights performance: A brief review of the literature ‘Realist’ approaches to international relations have typically underscored the fundamental inequality of the international system, encapsulated in the dictum ‘the strong do what they can, the weak do what they must’, recorded by Thucydides. From such perspectives, international regimes emerge and survive according to the whim of stronger states, and weaker states can be expected to comply with such regimes, whether promptly with