Abstract. This paper puts forward a view on conditional commitments as causal rules, using action language K as the specification framework. The proposal builds upon an operational notion of social context, in such a way that conditional commitments are represented as rules in context. This approach enables the manipulation of conditional commitments in terms of the manipulation of the social interactions which provide their social contexts. Moreover, it allows the programmer to exploit the ASP metatheory underlying action language K to analyze, simplify and transform commitment-based protocols.