International civil servants (ICS) are largely excluded from the analysis of International Organizations (IOs) because states are assumed to be the determining force in shaping their behaviour. Even principal-agent and constructivist analyses often treat an IO's staff as a unit and are concerned primarily with states' capacities to control IOs. Examining the opportunities of ICS, rather than the choices of states, provides a better means of understanding the capacities of ICS to contribute to the operation of IOs, and especially when they participate in multilateral negotiations. We suggest that structure, competence, legitimacy and culture provide a framework for analysing ICS variable capacity. We use the Secretariat of the WTO, known as a 'member-driven organization', to illustrate how ICS can play a critical role in achieving the IO's objectives. A word on our title. It comes from Esse, non videri in the original, as quoted by a director at the WTO in an interview in April 2003. Adapted from the source document.
When and why do powerful countries seek to enact major changes to international order, the broad set of rules that condition behavior in world politics? This question is particularly important today, as Donald Trump's apparent disregard for the liberal international order and uncertainty over what China might seek to replace it with mean that queries about great power motives vis-à-vis order will remain at the forefront of debates over the future of world politics. In seeking to explain this phenomenon, prior studies have focused on the consensus- driven and inclusive origins of international orders. By contrast, I argue in this book that the propelling motivation for great power order building at important historical junctures has most often been exclusionary, centered around combatting other actors rather than cooperatively engaging with them. My core contention is that dominant actors pursue fundamental changes to order only when they perceive a major new threat on the horizon, a threat to their security or to their enduring primacy. When these actors seek to enact fundamentally new order principles, they do so for the purpose of targeting this perceived threat, be it another powerful state, a contrary alliance or a foreboding ideological movement. The goal of order building, then, is weakening, opposing and above all excluding that threatening entity from amassing further influence in world politics. Far from falling outside the bounds of traditional statecraft, order building is, to paraphrase Clausewitz, the continuation of power politics by other means.
International audience ; Taking as a starting point the communications at an international conference held in Paris in 2014, the article analyzes the construction of confidence in climate sciences and politics. How, by which methods and procedures, do climate modeling communities establish the validity of their models? What link can be established between the confidence in numerical simulations of global warming and in the capacity of the international system to successfully tackle the climate issue? The article shows that the existence of a close link between these different forms of confidence questions common belief that expertise should be completely separated from the political process. More generally, it examines the necessity of a " constitution " for the science-policy relationship at the global level at a time where new paradigms for research and for policy converge toward increasing importance of regional and local levels. L'année 2009 a été une année mouvementée pour les sciences et les politiques du climat : l'affaire dite du « Climategate », qui trouve ses origines dans le piratage de mails privés de chercheurs (Hulme, 2013), a été le pré-lude d'une attaque en règle contre les méthodes des cli-matologues et le Groupe d'experts intergouvernemental sur l'évolution du climat (GIEC). Parallèlement, la confé-rence climatique de Copenhague s'est soldée par un échec, ébranlant la confiance dans la capacité du système ; Cet article analyse, à partir d'un colloque international qui s'est tenu à Paris en 2014, la construction de la confiance à la fois dans les sciences et les politiques du climat. Comment, par quels méthodes et procédés, les communautés de modélisateurs établissent-elles la validité de leurs modèles ? Quel lien existe-t-il entre la confiance dans les simulations numériques du réchauffement et la capacité du système international à prendre en charge le risque climatique ? À partir du constat de l'existence d'un lien intime entre ces différentes formes de confiance, l'article met en cause une ...
International audience ; Taking as a starting point the communications at an international conference held in Paris in 2014, the article analyzes the construction of confidence in climate sciences and politics. How, by which methods and procedures, do climate modeling communities establish the validity of their models? What link can be established between the confidence in numerical simulations of global warming and in the capacity of the international system to successfully tackle the climate issue? The article shows that the existence of a close link between these different forms of confidence questions common belief that expertise should be completely separated from the political process. More generally, it examines the necessity of a " constitution " for the science-policy relationship at the global level at a time where new paradigms for research and for policy converge toward increasing importance of regional and local levels. L'année 2009 a été une année mouvementée pour les sciences et les politiques du climat : l'affaire dite du « Climategate », qui trouve ses origines dans le piratage de mails privés de chercheurs (Hulme, 2013), a été le pré-lude d'une attaque en règle contre les méthodes des cli-matologues et le Groupe d'experts intergouvernemental sur l'évolution du climat (GIEC). Parallèlement, la confé-rence climatique de Copenhague s'est soldée par un échec, ébranlant la confiance dans la capacité du système ; Cet article analyse, à partir d'un colloque international qui s'est tenu à Paris en 2014, la construction de la confiance à la fois dans les sciences et les politiques du climat. Comment, par quels méthodes et procédés, les communautés de modélisateurs établissent-elles la validité de leurs modèles ? Quel lien existe-t-il entre la confiance dans les simulations numériques du réchauffement et la capacité du système international à prendre en charge le risque climatique ? À partir du constat de l'existence d'un lien intime entre ces différentes formes de confiance, l'article met en cause une ...