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Multilateralism occupies a vast canvas. It means different things to different people. It is studied across many disciplines from political science and international relations to history, sociology, and international law. Its theorists are as diverse as its critics (Alvarez 2000). As the contributions to this special collection reveal, our understanding of multilateralism is constantly evolving with new research, experience, and insights.
In this comment, I reflect on international organizations as multilateralism's laboratories and agents. Multilateralism is a cyclical phenomenon at an international institution (Cohen 2018). My focus, therefore, is on a multilateral institution's life cycle and some of its legal and policy conundrums. I must caution, however, that I am neither a scholar nor an expert. My perspectives are shaped by my professional experience as an international institution's staff member and by a personal interest in the history, law, and practice of multilateral organizations.

AbstractIn 2019, wildfires in the Amazon renewed international concern about Brazilian environmental policy, led by Jair Bolsonaro. As one of the biggest repositories of the world's biodiversity, the Amazon Rainforest has been a source of concern in global environmental governance. Given this salience, one would expect that domestic governance would be highly permeated by professionals with international circulation and that transnational ties would be a central target of Bolsonaro's populist nationalistic perspective. In this article, I seek to understand whether and how professionals involved in policymaking in the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment are connected to national and international organizations, by analyzing the networks of career paths of high‐ranking staff in the Rousseff, Temer and Bolsonaro administrations. The data show a consistently low percentage of ties between professionals and international organizations. However, the types of international experience and knowledge that are deemed important shifted significantly under Bolsonaro.

Abstract
The study focuses on the emerging Second Polish Republic and its involvement in the international fight against the trafficking of women and children under the auspices of the League of Nations. In conflict with all neighbouring states, Poland was highly dependent on support from the new Western Entente-backed international system and in turn had to adhere closely to existing conventions and newly negotiated international policies. Using the example of the ratification process of the League of the Nations International Convention against the Traffic in Women and Children of 1921, the study shows that internationalism in the interwar period had a significant impact on national policymaking and state-building. Thus, it provides a better understanding of how anti-trafficking efforts in Poland interacted with policies deployed by the League of Nations and how international and transnational activism affected the construction of state institutions.

We publish a summary report on the second joint seminar of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), Primakov Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IMEMO RAS) and "World Economy and International Relations" Journal, dedicated to the relevant issues in the field of international security. The discussion collected such prominent experts in the field as Fyodor Voitolovsky, Director of IMEMO RAS, RAS Corresponding Member; Andrey Kortunov, RIAC Director General; Sergey Rogov, Academician, Director of the RAS Institute of the U.S. and Canadian Studies; Evgeny Buzhinsky, Chairman of PIR Center, RIAC Vice President; Dmitry Danilov, Head of the European Security Department of the RAS Institute of Europe; and Vasily Kashin, Deputy Director of the Center of Comprehensive European and International Studies, HSE University, and Leading Reseach Fellow at the RAS Institute of Far Eastern Studies.

Public health events, as the common concern faced by the international community, call for the joint response from all mankind. The outbreak of the COVID-19 has highlighted the problems confronting the global governance of international public health, such as limited functions of international organizations and difficulties in achieving objectives, poor collaboration between governance subjects and their limited performance, overlapping legal basis of governance and blurred core function, and lack of solutions to special problems. The corresponding approaches can be taken to improve the efficiency of the governance of global public health, including supporting the role of international organizations to achieve the objectives, enhancing coordination among international governance subjects to form synergy, promoting the compliance with IHR2005 to avoid conflict of law application and upholding the vision of a community with a shared future for mankind to jointly respond to the special problems.

Cette recherche part d'un géographe méconnu, Fernand Maurette, devenu fonctionnaire international au BIT. Elle se poursuit avec la découverte de son épouse Marie-Thérèse, directrice de l'Ecole internationale de Genève de 1929 à 1949, qui constitue le fil rouge de notre travail. Celui-ci ouvre dans quatre directions différentes : le milieu normalien et la géographie ; du socialisme réformateur au communisme ; les internationalismes et les organisations internationales ; la question du genre. L'étude des trajectoires des membres de ce clan familial (les Maurette, les Vigier et Paul Dupuy) s'inscrit dans l'histoire sociale et familiale des milieux internationalistes du début du XXe siècle jusqu'à la fin des années 1960. À partir de ces trajectoires, il est en effet possible de mettre en lumière les moments charnières d'un certain internationalisme français, à la jonction de plusieurs expériences internationales dans des domaines comme la science, l'éducation, la politique et les organisations internationales.

First published online: 09 June 2021 ; Ntina Tzouvala's book Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International Law (CaC) is a remarkable feat in international legal scholarship, not only for its core insight that the 'standard of civilization', far from being a relic of the past, remains ubiquitous and all-pervasive, but also for the way that the book engages with different theoretical and methodological approaches to international law without being polemical and, yet, still holding its own. CaC attempts to understand international law not in isolation but as part of its broader history, structure and, most importantly, embeddedness in political economy. Tzouvala demonstrates that 'civilization' is deeply anchored into international law's 'grammar and syntax', making the relative decline in the use of the term largely inconsequential. Moreover, treating "civilization" as an 'argumentative pattern' allows Tzouvala to explore the contradictions, indeterminateness and persistence of "civilization" both historically and in contemporary practise.

This article aims to address the issue of alleged hybrid warfare attacks on Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland. The scope of the article covers the Belarus operations conducted in 2021. Firstly, the author addresses the issue of pushing migrants from a descriptive perspective. Secondly, he debates whether Belarus operation was conducted within the scope of hybrid warfare, hybrid threat, and lawfare? The author concludes that the Republic of Belarus has operated lawfare falling within the hybrid threat spectrum. It means that the situation is not to be classified under the law of armed conflict from the perspective of international and non-international armed conflicts and ius ad bellum violation. Thirdly, the author claims that Belarus has violated international law, so certain legal redress is appropriate and justified. Belarus's actions may result in a court proceeding before the International Court of Justice and before other international institutions.

While international law has recognised a human right to science since 1948, the binding normative content of this right still needs to be clarified and specified. It is rarely discussed by states when they report on their obligations under the various international human rights treaties (UN and ICESCR), and receives scant attention by international human rights bodies. To advance our understanding of this under-studied and under-appreciated right, this chapter offers an overview of ways in which the right to science can be advanced and realised. The chapter is divided into three parts: the first section discusses the recognition of the right to science under international and regional legal instruments; the second presents a literature review; and the third discusses the use (mobilisation) of international adjudicative and political forums to advance the right to science and to shape its normative content.