The internet is commonly defined as “a worldwide network of computer networks that use the TCP/IP network protocols to facilitate data transmission and exchange.” A related term is “cyberspace,” which has a broader connotation suggestive of the virtual worlds that emerge from the internet, including chat rooms, three-dimension game environments, and online forums. A primary feature of internet governance is self-regulation. From content to protocols to addressing schemes, numerous networked forms of self-regulation have helped govern the internet. One of the issues of significance to internet governance has to do with the governance processes associated with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the politics associated with the World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS). Other questions arising from internet governance include those relating to cybercrime, internet security, surveillance and privacy, and the idea of network neutrality. One problem that needs to be addressed with regard to internet governance is that there is no single regime for internet governance inasmuch as there are several multiple and overlapping governance domains—what W. H. Dutton calls the “mosaic” of internet governance. Future research should focus on whether to consolidate around a single regime with a single global governing body, as well as how to control the “arms race” on the internet.
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International Organization and Cybergovernance
Ronald Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski
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International Organization and Ending Conflicts
Alistair D. Edgar
International organization as an idea or an approach to political and social conflict management and resolution—now often referred to under the rubric of “global governance”—has been the subject of much discussion by scholars and practitioners, and has taken shape in numerous historical examples. A landmark figure in thinking about war, peace, and statecraft during the earliest period undoubtedly remains the classical Greek general and historian Thucydides (460–395 bce); his History of the Peloponnesian War, chronicling the conflict between the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta, features prominently in virtually all discussions of the subsequent emergence and development of ideas and practices of conflict management. Succeeding scholars have built upon Thucydides’ ideas. While the earliest theorists and philosophers brought out important discussions of war causation, and basic notions of political-social conflict management in divergent settings, political thinking about the context of state interactions and new mechanisms for constraining state behavior had not yet—by the early seventeenth century—reached the era of preparation for international organization. That would wait another 200 years. In the nearly three centuries from the Thirty Years War to the beginning of World War I, scholars of international organization identified a number of proposals that arguably demonstrate the development, growth, and deepening of thought about such mechanisms.
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International Organization and Environmental Governance
Joshua W. Busby
While some attempts to deal with transborder environmental issues have a longer history, the formal international organizations that have buildings and staff were mostly created in the shadow of World War II. As global environmental governance has evolved, the lexicon in academia has changed from talking about transnationalism and interdependence to writing about regimes and, more recently, institutional design and effectiveness. The actors worthy of study have also changed. The discipline has moved, from writing about states and formal international organizations, to discussing a variety of non-state actors including nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and public-private partnerships. The field has come full circle to talk about internal bureaucratic processes and the politics of particular organizations.
This article aims to provide a thematic and somewhat chronological overview of the broader field of international organizational and environmental governance. This updated survey identifies some new topics that not have been captured by earlier efforts and reviews the following central themes:
1. International Institutions And Regime Theory
2. Ratification and Compliance
3. Regime Effectiveness and Design
4. Bureaucratic Politics and Organizational Pathologies
5. The Rise And Role Of Non-State Actors
6. From Government To Governance: Private And Hybrid Models
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International Organization and Health/Disease
Kelley Lee and Julia Smith
Human history has been shaped by shifting patterns of health and disease. Many of the factors influencing those patterns have spanned national borders, such as human and animal migration, armed conflict, colonization, trade and investment, globalization, and environmental change. International studies scholars’ interest in health and disease has slowly evolved over time. After World War II, international health cooperation was accepted as a key function of the United Nations system, with the creation of the World Health Organization (WHO). However, health was deemed a largely technical field, alongside the activities of international health organizations. The limited scholarship produced during the postwar period was largely descriptive of technical and legal issues. It was not until the 1970s, when debates emerged about the appropriate forms of health development assistance, concerns about large commercial interests, and the role of WHO, that scholars began considering the politics of international health cooperation. The Declaration of Alma Ata on Health for All, Essential Drugs List, and International Code of Marketing of Breast Milk Substitutes were expressions of discontent in international health with a status quo perpetuating inequality among states. These initiatives then spurred accusations of “politicization” of WHO’s technical mandate, accompanied by the freezing of the organization’s budget. The study of international organizations and health began to apply critical theoretical approaches, locating health and disease within the liberal world order. From the 1990s onward, the proliferation of new institutional arrangements for international health cooperation prompted studies of this increasingly complex landscape. The term “global health” was coined to reflect the interplay of state and nonstate actors amid globalization, alongside the concept of global health governance (GHG). This encouraged scholarly exchange across international studies, social policy, law, and anthropology. International organizations with health-related impacts, such as the World Trade Organization, and powerful nonstate actors, such as foundations and commercial interests, were incorporated into GHG scholarship. Concurrently, new theoretical approaches to understanding collective action for global health emerged, notably realist notions of global health security, and social constructivist approaches to the framing of problems and solutions. Major disease outbreaks since the early 2000s, including SARS in 2003–2004, Ebola virus in West Africa in 2014–2015, and COVID-19 since 2020, have intensified scrutiny of GHG. The sharp rise in noncommunicable diseases alongside the globalization of market capitalism also drew growing attention. Amid renewed debate about WHO reform, analyses have focused on the lack of coherence among global health actors, weakness of legal and ethical frameworks for collective action, and inadequacy of resources.
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International Organization and Human Development
David C. Ellis
Human development as a concept seeks to make individuals the driving force behind state development. Even though international organizations (IOs) are formal agreements by and for the benefit of member states and have historically prioritized states’ interests, it can still be argued that human beings have long been the central concern of many IOs, even for some of the oldest surviving ones today. Nowadays, the human development framework appears to serve as the principal intellectual and normative construct regarding how to achieve national economic growth while building broad social justice and opportunity for individuals. Its allure derives as much from its coherent philosophical critique of past empirical development failures as it does from its incorporation of values and ethics appealing to a broad spectrum of professionals working in the development community. The human development approach was in part necessitated by the monopolization of economic development by states even from the advent of the enterprise in the 1950s. But despite the widespread adoption of the human development framework as an operative concept in the practice of development, it is not without controversy. Most of the critique is directed toward the underlying premises of the capabilities approach and the elements its adherents must elucidate in order to effectively implement its tenets in policy.
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International Organization and Terrorism
Peter Romaniuk
Before 9/11, the literature on terrorism and international organizations (IOs) was largely event driven. That is to say, the modest nature of the debate reflected a modest empirical record of IO engagement in responding to terrorism. Moreover, this period saw a correlation between the way states acted against terrorism through IOs and the nature of subsequent debates. Famously, states were (and remain) unable to agree on a definition of “terrorism,” precluding broad-based action through IOs. The findings presented in this literature were furthermore often quite bleak. The immediate post-9/11 period, however, was much more optimistic. This period saw an unprecedented increase in action against terrorism in IOs, primarily through the Security Council resolution 1373. Resolution 1373 elaborates a broad—and mandatory—agenda for counterterrorism cooperation. This resolution has had significant and ongoing consequences for the ways IOs are utilized in the effort to suppress terrorism. Furthermore, this and other IO engagements with terrorism brought about an increase in scholarly interest in the area, even giving rise to a sense of optimism in the literature. Thus, from the pre- to the post-9/11 period, there are elements of both continuity and change in the way scholars have discussed terrorism in the context of IOs.
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International Organization and Vulnerable Groups
Dennis Dijkzeul and Carolin Funke
The manner in which international organizations (IOs) deal with vulnerable groups (VGs) has implications for the study of International Organization. Vulnerability provides an uncommon, but useful, vantage point from which to examine some of the strengths and shortcomings, as well as the relevance and challenges, of IOs. For IOs, the questions of “who is (considered to be) vulnerable” and “who does what, when, and how to address vulnerability?” need to be answered from both an empirical and a normative perspective. In this respect, it is important to highlight the different definitions, disciplinary perspectives, and evolving paradigms on vulnerability.
Addressing the plight of VGs, specific IOs help people at risk or in need, especially when states are either unwilling or unable to do so. Yet VGs have usually struggled to make their voices heard, while structural causes of vulnerability have been hard to address. When aid arrives, it often is late, inadequate, or has unexpected side effects. Implementation of IO policies to support VGs usually lags behind norm development. Still, IOs have carried out considerable work to support VGs.
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International Organizations and Criminal Justice
Adam M. Smith
One of the primary goals of the United Nations (UN) is to provide justice. The vast majority of mentions of “justice” in the UN Charter relate to the creation of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), one of the UN’s five principal organs. However, this body is not empowered to take cases on behalf of aggrieved individuals or even to prosecute individual malefactors. Rather, it is “justice” for states that is its goal. Meanwhile, the treaties signed at the 1948 Peace of Westphalia radically delimited the arena of international affairs. Most importantly, Westphalia held as paramount the noninterference by other states in the internal affairs of other members of the international community. Rejecting the logic of Westphalia, the notions of “humanitarian intervention” and the “responsibility to protect” refer to the legal right and/or obligation for a state to interfere in another state for purposes of humanitarian protection. Consequently, the UN established the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in order to address the carnage ongoing in the Balkans, as well as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which targeted that country’s 1994 Hutu–Tutsi violence. Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court (ICC), a non-UN institution, is the first permanent international tribunal devoted to justice in the wake of mass crimes. Each of these post-Cold War international tribunals have been concerned with the enforcement of International Humanitarian Law (IHL). Ultimately, however, the international community continues to hold fast to central elements of Westphalian protections.
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International Organizations and Economic Governance
Wesley W. Widmaier
Global economic governance refers to efforts to organize, structure, and regulate economic interactions. In substantive terms, economic governance deals with a host of policy challenges, including the definition of basic property rights, efforts at monetary and fiscal cooperation, ando concerns for the “macroprudential regulation” of financial markets. The Global Financial Crisis has demonstrated not only the importance of macroeconomic and regulatory cooperation, but also the role of crises in redefining the purposes of economic governance itself. Debates in the fields of international relations (IR) and international political economy (IPE) over global economic governance have revolved around strategic interactions, social psychological forces, and the post-crisis emergence of new agents and international organizations. In applied IPE settings, these debates more explicitly pertain to the systemic importance of hegemonic power, multilateral interactions, or intersubjective interpretations. These views intersect with neorealist, neoliberal, and constructivist assumptions regarding systemic interactions. Over the 1990s, IR and IPE scholars would increasingly seek to move beyond both the structural materialism associated with hegemonic stability theory and the structural idealism associated with “first-generation” Wendtian constructivism. Future research should focus on broader questions of whether the Global Financial Crisis will spark renewed theoretical creativity and contribute to an enhanced policy relevance, or whether IR and IPE will continue to work to mask the role of power in limiting such possibilities.
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International Organizations and Power
Rodger A. Payne and Nayef H. Samhat
Power plays an important role in the formation of international organizations (IOs), including the formal institutions established by nation-states to promote collective action at the intergovernmental level. Power is commonly defined as the ability or authority to act, to accomplish a task or to create something new. Those who wield power are typically seen as having the ability to influence or even control the behavior of others. The willingness of states to employ material (or “hard”) power to accomplish their goals—whether those goals primarily reflect the interests of the strongest states or the shared preferences of many states—has long been the subject of scrutiny by international relations (IR) scholars. More recent scholarship approaches the topic from different perspectives, with particular attention to both the power generated by collective action and the collective identity created during the recognition and pursuit of common purposes. According to Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, there are four types of power: compulsory, institutional, structural, and productive. This typology can be linked to the way four major schools of IR theory view IOs: realism, neoliberalism, constructivism, and critical theory. Realist and neoliberal institutionalist schools use compulsory or institutional views of power to explain the development of regimes and their effects, while social constructivists and critical theorists rely on productive or structural power to tackle the meaning and importance of regimes. Scholars argue that regimes serve a cooperative function very similar to more formal IOs and provide a rationalist account of regime formation and behavior.
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International Organizations and Preventing War
Martin S. Edwards and Jonathan M. DiCicco
International organizations (IOs) such as the United Nations play an important role in war prevention. In theory, IOs reduce the risk of war between belligerents by improving communication, facilitating cooperation, and building confidence and trust. In practice, however, IOs’ war-preventing capacities have sparked skepticism and criticism. Recent advances in the scholarly study of the causes of war have given rise to new and promising directions in research on IOs and war prevention. These studies highlight the problems of interstate and intrastate wars, global and regional organizations, preventive diplomacy and peacekeeping, and the relationship between IOs and domestic institutions. They also offer novel insights that both complement and challenge studies of traditional concepts such as collective security. An interesting work is that of J. D. Fearon, who frames war as a bargaining process between rational states. Fearon articulates a central puzzle of international relations: since war is costly, the question that arises is why rational leaders of competing states choose to fight instead of pursuing less costly, nonviolent dispute settlements. Three general mechanisms account for rational, unitary states’ inability to identify an alternative outcome that both would prefer to war: bluffing about private information, commitment problems, and indivisibility of stakes. Despite the obvious progress in research on IOs and war prevention, there remain methodological and theoretical issues that deserve consideration for further investigation, two of which are: the interaction of domestic and international organizations, and the implications of variations in IO design.
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International Organizations and Respect for International Law
Kendall W. Stiles
International organizations (IOs) have effectively modified the structure of international law. For more than six decades, IOs have echoed the aspirations of humankind, in pursuit of the ideal of realization of justice, and have furthermore contributed to that end. IOs are provided with privileges and immunities that are intended to ensure their independent and effective functioning. These are specified in the treaties that give rise to the organization, which are normally supplemented by further multinational agreements and national regulations under international law. Rather than by national jurisdiction, legal accountability is intended to be ensured by legal mechanisms that are internal to the IO itself and by access to administrative tribunals. In the course of many court cases, where private parties tried to pursue claims against IOs, there has been a gradual realization that alternate means of dispute settlement are required, as states have fundamental human rights obligations to provide plaintiffs with access to court in view of their right to a fair trial. Otherwise, the organizations’ immunities may be put in question in national and international courts.
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International Regime Complexity
Laura Gómez-Mera
A regime complex is an array of overlapping international institutions and agreements that interact to govern in a particular issue area of international relations. International regime complexity refers to the international political dynamics that emerge from the interaction among multiple overlapping institutions within regime complexes. Scholars have identified several factors explaining the emergence of regime complexes and the growing regime complexity in world politics. Some have emphasized the functional rationale for creating institutional linkages to contain negative spillovers across regimes. Others have focused instead on actors’ incentives, pointing to the various expected benefits of governing through regime complexes rather than through separate comprehensive institutions.
Scholars have also disagreed about the consequences of regime complexes and, in particular, about the extent to which regime complexity facilitates or hinders international cooperation. The early literature tended to emphasize how institutional proliferation and fragmentation contributed to regulatory conflicts, thus undermining global governance outcomes. By contrast, other works provide a more nuanced account of the effects of regime overlaps, showing that under certain conditions regime complexity contributes to the effectiveness of cooperation. A rich body of empirical evidence drawn from the study of regime complexes in several issue areas, including environmental, trade, security, migration, and public health governance, suggests that what matters is not the fragmentation and overlaps per se but how they are managed.
The increasing institutional density and overlaps in international politics in the 21st century has generated significant interest among scholars of international relations (IR). The literature on international regime complexity and regime complexes has evolved theoretically and empirically since the beginning of the 12st century. Three main questions have guided and informed theoretical debates and empirical research on regime complexes. First, what are regime complexes and how are they composed? What is meant by international regime complexity? Second, what causes regime complexity and how do regime complexes emerge? And third, what are the effects and consequences of regime complexity?
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International Relations and Outer Space
Dimitrios Stroikos
Although the study of the international politics of space remains rather descriptive and undertheorized, important progress has been made to the extent that there is already a growing literature examining certain aspects of space activities from an International Relations (IR) theory perspective, reflecting the broader surge of interest in the utilization of space for civilian, military, and commercial purposes. In this regard, this is the first systematic attempt to outline this emerging and vibrant multidisciplinary subfield of IR. In doing so, it covers a substantial body of research on the politics of space that builds on realism, liberalism, constructivism, Marxism, critical theory, poststructuralism, feminism and gender studies, postcolonialism, and eclecticism. The study also discusses a distinctive approach concerned with examining the process of space policy decision-making at different levels of analysis, what can be called “Space Policy Analysis (SPA).” The study concludes by briefly considering possible avenues for future research.
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The International System–International Society Distinction
Tim Dunne and Richard Little
The central feature of the English School is now usually considered to be its commitment to the proposition that international relations (IR) take place within an international society of shared norms and some shared values. However, an exclusive focus on norms has the effect of denuding the school of the more pluralistic dimensions that were advocated by some of the founding members of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics. Hedley Bull, in particular, stressed that to account for international order it is necessary to view IR from three divergent perspectives: the international system, the international society, and world society. The early British Committee discussions, directed toward delineating the “fundamentals” of international theory, used the terms international society, international system, and states system interchangeably. But the idea of a states system was distinctive to the emerging English School. A distinguishing marker of the English School is the claim that not only is there a need to accommodate societal norms in theoretical accounts of world politics, but that there is also a systemic logic, and that these analytics together have explanatory power in considering how the world hangs together. The essential elements of the school’s thinking were most fully and effectively realized in The Expansion of the International Society, the central work where the international system–international society distinction is employed. This grand narrative represents a crucial contribution to the field of IR but one that has been very generally underappreciated across the discipline. To generate a deeper understanding of the two concepts, it is clear that much more research needs to be carried out on international societies and systems around the world.
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Inter-Organizational Relations: Five Theoretical Approaches
Ulrich Franke
The number of organizations involved in world politics has long been increasing and so has, consequently, the number of relations among them. For scholars of international studies, it is of central importance to examine these inter-organizational relations. The state-centrism in international relations, however, impeded the discipline’s engagement with this phenomenon for some decades. It was only in the mid-2000s that this began to change. Since then, the study of inter-organizational relations in world politics has mostly drawn on five theoretical approaches: sociological neo-institutionalism, resource dependence, network accounts, regime complexity, and classical pragmatism. These approaches will be introduced; for the sake of comparability, all five are presented in the same way, by carving out their theoretical tradition and key concepts, their core argument and causal logic, as well as their understandings of organizations and how they relate. Each presentation offers a brief look at how the respective approach has been applied.
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The Meanings of the (Global) South From a Latin American Perspective
Élodie Brun
The concept of the Global South receives much attention and study, but not all perspectives are equally visible. Scholars who work on the topic from Latin America are still largely ignored. The definitions they propose are eclectic in their sources and inclusive and flexible as far as epistemological and ontological issues are concerned. They agree that the concept, whether named with the adjective “global” or not, serves to denote a set of actors characterized by high diversity but unified by their unfavorable position in the world, as they suffer from global asymmetries. Studying and centering the Global South means revising the chronology of global history to understand these actors’ specific trajectories. However, Latin American scholars differ regarding the role of the state and the scope of their critical views. Most of them consider the state an important actor of the Global South, but critical authors argue that civil society and academia are more important for promoting change. Some of them reflect on how to improve the early 21st-century system, whereas others explicitly promote visions of emancipation from it.
In most cases, when researchers reflect on the usefulness of the (Global) South concept, their concern includes dissatisfaction with the adjective “global.” Their reflection leads them to propose alternative, mainly state-centered expressions that aim to enhance the agency of the (Global) South, such as the self-designated South, geopolitical South, and relational South. The plural meanings of the (Global) South reveal the political and sometimes idealistic aspirations associated with it in Latin American contributions. As such, the concept cannot be dissociated from its potential for political mobilization.
Article
Member-State Structures in Federations: Creation and Implications
George Anderson
While member-state structures—the number, relative sizes, and demographic characteristics of states in federal regimes—could be thought to be one of the defining features of different federations, the comparative literature has paid relatively little attention to this important topic. There is the well-known distinction between “coming together” and “holding together” federations, but this has not led to comparative examinations of how these different formative experiences relate to the member-state structure of a federation, its evolution over time, and the processes for defining new or revised member-states. There has been more comparative attention to differences between “ethnic” and “territorial” federations, but often with limited linkage to other variables, such as the number and relative sizes of the member-states. For example, the literature on consociational power-sharing arrangements in central federal governmental institutions has largely neglected consideration of how the member-state structure and the pattern of territorial cleavages in the society affect the likelihood or form of power-sharing arrangements. This relates to the need to see the political geometry of federations in their broader social context: how the member-state structure compares with the underlying social and territorial cleavages in the country. While these cleavages may affect the member-state structure of the federation, they will certainly affect the political dynamics as institutional arrangements and societal pressures interact.
Article
Middle Powers
Marion Laurence
Formal diplomatic recognition of “middle powers” began with the Congress of Vienna, but the concept gained increasing currency after World War II because medium-sized countries like Canada used it to distinguish themselves from smaller states and secure a relatively favorable position in the postwar order. Early definitions of middle powers focused on states that lacked the system-wide influence of great powers but whose resources and capacities were recognized as being more significant than those of small states. The term’s exact meaning remains contested, but early definitions capture three important dimensions of the concept. First, it is inherently relational, from both a material perspective and a social perspective, and often used as a residual category. Some scholars define middle-power status using material factors like geographic size or population, while others emphasize social roles and recognition, but all of these approaches focus on a state’s position, roles, and status relative to other states. Second, the middle-power concept is both state-centric and practitioner-adjacent. National policymakers invoke, reify, and continually reinvent the concept to achieve specific foreign policy objectives. Third, the middle-power concept is bound up with wider debates about global order. Middle powers were long conceptualized as good international citizens and champions of the liberal world order. The rise of “emerging” middle powers raises questions about their orientation toward existing global institutions. Going forward, the most pressing questions about middle powers and their foreign policy behavior will be linked to broader conversations about geopolitical change and the future of contemporary global governance arrangements.
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Multilateral Diplomacy
James P. Muldoon Jr. and JoAnn Fagot Aviel
Multilateral diplomacy is the management of international relations by negotiations among three or more states through diplomatic or governmental representatives, but it can also be engaged in by representatives of non-state actors. Multilateral negotiation is characterized by multi-parties, multi-issues, multi-roles, and multi-values. The level of complexity is far greater than in bilateral diplomacy as is the level of skill needed to manage that complexity. It can be based on multilateralism, or have multilateralism as a goal, but it can also be pursued by those who do not. Multilateralism can be defined as global governance of the many, and a major principle is the opposition to bilateral discriminatory arrangements. Classic diplomatic studies focused on bilateral diplomacy. However, the growth of international organizations in the 20th century increased interest in multilateral diplomacy, which has developed since its origins in 1648. Increasing attention has been paid to the role of non-state actors and new forms of diplomacy affected by globalization and the digitization of information. In the 21st century, multilateral diplomacy faces unique challenges and calls for reform of international organizations and global governance.
