This new textbook introduces readers to the nature, structure and purpose of international organizations (IOs). Taking a broad, issues-based approach, the book goes beyond a conventional focus on topics like security and finance to cover global health, migration, food security, and technology. In addition to providing cases of the best-known intergovernmental organizations such as the UN and the World Trade Organization, this text gives space to a wide variety of other bodies, including international non-governmental organizations, non-state actors and multinational enterprises. It looks at the motivations behind regional cooperation with case studies of the European Union and the African Union, and at human rights with reference to bodies as diverse as the International Criminal Court and Amnesty International. Assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, International Organizations uses a range of pedagogical tools and visual features to guide understanding. These include: graphs to illustrate key trends; regional and world maps to illustrate wealth, democracy and development; tables of major international treaties and organizations; chapter previews; and lists of key terms and organizations. The text also makes use of IOs in Theory, IOs in Action and Spotlight boxes to answer focused questions and provide more detail on how IOs operate in different parts of the world. This contemporary survey is an essential text for those studying global governance and international organizations.
Abstract How is staff recruitment in regional organizations institutionalized? This article focuses on explaining the determinants of staff recruitment institutionalization in regional organizations (ROs). It is important to understand how ROs recruit their regional staff, as ROs have become players with an increasing influence in global governance, and as regional (and international) bureaucracies constantly contribute to the reshaping of power relations with member states. The institutionalization of staff recruitment offers an insightful and innovative way of unpacking the way ROs operate and exert agency. In this perspective, the article examines an RO from the Global South, the Central American Integration System (SICA), and argues that member states institutionalize staff recruitment for fear of losing control to a powerful combination of regional bureaucracy and international donors. This single-case study will be comparable with many Global South ROs that share similar characteristics, and will provide generalizable results in the realm of RO studies. This article sheds light on a very poorly known case among ROs and helps to extend the empirical scope of International Public Administration (IPA) studies beyond the "Global North," and consolidate the field of comparative regionalism. To develop the argument, the article uses empirical material from several pieces of in-depth fieldwork conducted within SICA since 2009. It analyses official legal documents and internal documents relating to staff regulation, and uses semi-structured interviews focused on practices of recruitment standards. Keywords: Staff recruitment, Regional organizations, Institutionalization, Regional bureaucratic autonomy, External interventions
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Over the past few decades, Political Science has seen an increasing institutionalization of Scholarship on Teaching and Learning (SoTL) through journals, book series, and professional associations. Over at PS: Political Science and Politics, we add to this body of literature by making the case for a pedagogical practice borrowed from Professional Military Education (PME)—the staff […]
Abstract While International Relations scholarship has increasingly addressed questions of race, the literature on international organizations (IOs) has been slower to do so. In particular, it has neglected how race functions within IO workforces. Building on sociological theories of racialized organizations, we develop the concept of racialized IOs. Like domestic organizations, racialized IOs are characterized by enhanced or inhibited agency of racial groups, racialized distribution of resources, credentialing of whiteness, and decoupling of formal rules and informal practices along racial lines. However, there are also two important differences. First, since IOs rely on member states for resources, their secretariats need to accommodate powerful white-majority countries (macro-level pressures). Second, since IO workforces are diverse, their employees may bring a range of racial stereotypes that exist in their societies into their professional practice (micro-level pressures). Using the case of UN peacekeeping, we demonstrate how the four features of racialized organizations operate in light of these macro- and micro-level pressures. We show that locally hired peacekeeping staff face constraints on exercising agency; that non-white peacekeepers perform more dangerous jobs than their white counterparts; that whiteness serves as a proxy for desirable skills while non-white peacekeepers' knowledge is devalued; and that peacekeepers from white-majority countries receive special treatment or deviate from UN-wide procedures.
AbstractBy nearly every measure, power in the international system is concentrated, meaning that most states lack significant power resources. And yet international relations theory tends to focus on the behavior of great powers. This special issue instead explores the strategies that "weak" states use in the context of international organizations both to advance their interests and to resist pressure from stronger states. We define weakness as a relative lack of power across one or more dimensions. While the literature, to the extent it has focused on weak actors, has too often defined weakness solely in material terms, we adopt a broader conception that builds on the influential typology of power by Barnett and Duvall (Barnett and Duvall, 2005a, Barnett and Duvall, International Organization59, 39–75, 2005b). A multidimensional conceptualization of power allows analysts to show how actors that are weak in one dimension (often material power) may be stronger on other dimensions, giving them greater capacity for action than is often recognized. From this framework we create a typology of "strategies of the weak" that emphasizes the agency of weaker actors to make the most of their positions. The contributions to the special issue, summarized here, illuminate and substantiate many of these strategies across a diverse range of international organizations, understood as both forums and actors. As the articles show, these alternative theoretical mechanisms help explain how and why seemingly weak states sometimes fare better than a simplistic assessment of their material capabilities might suggest. By deepening our understanding of weakness and how it influences state behavior, the volume advances our theoretical understanding of how power is built, wielded, and resisted in and through international organization.
"International organizations (IOs) are essential and controversial actors in global governance, working on just about every imaginable issue that states cannot easily address individually. The Second Edition of International Organizations in World Politics offers a comprehensive overview of major IOs and regional organizations and their role in global governance. Tamar Gutner presents a variety of theoretical approaches to analyzing the roles and impact of large IOs, including the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization, and examines their historical development, governance structure, activities, and performance. For each IO, a detailed case study illuminates the constraints and challenges it faces in areas of contemporary global challenges like conflict resolution, development, the environment, trade, and financial crisis. The Second Edition includes updated coverage of IOs' responses to major world issues like the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and other geopolitical tensions"--
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Anke Reinhardt International governmental organizations are not, at least not primarily, research organizations. There are exceptions: For example, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI) were both created to conduct research. But the vast majority of international organizations have other functions: facilitating international cooperation, regulating international […] The post Explaining Research Activities of International Organizations appeared first on Ideas on Europe.
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Anke Reinhardt International governmental organizations are not, at least not primarily, research organizations. There are exceptions: For example, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI) were both created to conduct research. But the vast majority of international organizations have other functions: facilitating international cooperation, regulating international […] The post Explaining Research Activities of International Organizations appeared first on Europe of Knowledge.
The fourth edition of this award-winning text has been thoroughly revised and updated to capture nearly a decade of new developments affecting global governance: the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the rise of populist nationalism, implementation of the SDGs, the youth climate-justice movement, and much more. There is also an entirely new chapter on human security. As before, the authors provide a comprehensive, in-depth examination of the full range of international organizations.
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Yesterday, a bluesky discussion focused on whether the Federation of Planets was essentially the UN with US domination or something else. While I have written far more here about Star Wars, I have actually used Star Trek more in my teaching, and I have watched far more Trek (there is simply many more hours of Trek content). Plus having written about NATO (the ebook is less than $18!), I have a few views on the matter.To start, what is the United Federation of Planets and what is Starfleet? The Federation is an alliance of planets, more so than it is a true federation a la the US. Not even a confederation like Canada. How so? The planets still have their own foreign policies--we see plenty of meetings of diplomats from members to various proceedings. Note, diplomats, not just leaders or representatives. Just as I always like to make fun of Texas secessionists for having their embassy in Texas when it should be in Washington, DC or London or some place beyond the territory of the "country" it is representing, federal units (with the funky exception of Quebec) don't have embassies and ambassadors. This is a short cut, a bit of evidence, for the basic idea that the units in the federation are more independent, more akin to nation-states than they are to units in a federal country. So, yeah, the name is deceptive. Starfleet adds to the confusion because it is the military (despite denials) of the Federation. This would make the Federation appear more like a country if it had a monopoly--if Starfleet was the only armed force within the federation. However, I seem to remember various planets within the fed having their own armed starships including Vulcan. So, despite the name, the Federation is not akin to a single country. It is easier to dispense with the idea that the Federation is the European Union. How much of the series and movies are about economic regulations and subsidizing agriculture? Ok, more directly, the European Union, despite many attempts, does not really have a military, and it does not have a common foreign policy. The EU forces that have shown up in Bosnia and elsewhere only do so (this will be brutal, sorry) after NATO has done all of the heavy lifting. It was NATO that ended the Bosnia conflict, it was NATO that compelled Serbia to let peacekeepers into Kosovo, it is NATO deterring the Russians from attacking the Baltics, and so on. In trade negotiations, the EU acts as a single actor and with great power. In other stuff? Not so much. Which leaves the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Clearly, from the name and from Gene Roddenberry's idealism, the United Federation of Planets is just a spacey UN, right?* The stuff above that makes the Federation not a country but many countries or nation-states works toward the UN idea--a bunch of different sovereign entities constantly negotiating, sending diplomats hither and yon to settle all kinds of issues. The big questions are what is the Federation for and what is Starfleet for? The classic answer is collective security: to deter aggression by any member against any member by providing assurances that any target of aggression will receive assistance from the rest of the community. Until Alexander Wendt has his way, the entire imagination of the role of the UN is focused on members. The UN is a universal organization...on Earth--the only countries that are not in the UN are Taiwan and ... depending on how you count the Vatican and Palestine and various unrecognized separatist folks. The key things about this notion of collective defense are that no member is excluded from its protection, and it is not aimed at any particular aggressor. The UN does not have a standing military, but has "sent" massive interventions when the membership have agreed, to thwart North Korea's aggression in 1950 (because the Soviet diplomats were stupidly boycotting the UN Security Council at the time) and Iraq's in 1990-91. In both cases, it was really the US military and some allies under a UN banner in the former and nearly so in the latter. One could argue that Starfleet is mostly a Terran/American endeavor and its activities are simply under a federation banner. But again, the aim is at members. In the original Trek, maybe some of it was aimed at fostering peace among members, but for most of Trek's history, Starfleet was aimed at protecting its members from non-members.Which gets us to NATO, which is not really a collective security organization, but a collective defense organization. It is not so much aimed at protecting Greece from Turkey, but all of the members from external threats--mostly the Soviet Union/Russia but also terrorism, maybe China, etc. "An attack on one is an attack on all", Article V, the heart of the alliance, is aimed at outsiders. All of NATO's military endeavors have been on the border of or entirely outside the territory of its members. Kind of like how much of Starfleet's activities are at the borders, patrolling nearby neutral zones, or going beyond to intervene, despite the Prime Directive, in non-members. How many episodes are akin to the Kosovo effort? A boodle. Of course, the parallel is not perfect, since Starfleet is a coherent military organization from the academy to the command staff and in between, which NATO is not. Its captains may buck orders (Kirk more so than others, but all of them did so), but not because their home country/planet had different rules than the Federation for operating in place x or y. That is, the Steve and Dave book on the Federation would focus far less on the political systems of members states and far more on the personalities of individual ship captains, compared to our work on NATO (our book and articles focused mostly on whether countries had coalition governments or not, what kinds of coalitions they had, and personality of presidents and prime ministers only kicked in if there were no coalitional bargaining).Of course, there is no perfect parallel between the Federation and an existing Terran international organization, but given the focus of the Federation and the activities of Starfleet, NATO appears to be the closest, and I didn't even discuss enlargement. * I'd argue that Babylon 5 comes a lot closer to that, but that is a post for another day.
As tariffs have fallen dramatically over the past decades, behind-the-border measures—such as technical barriers to trade (TBT) and sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures—have become increasingly important for international trade policy. To facilitate trade, governments sign trade agreements in which they agree to base such measures on international standards. But who actually develops these standards? This book takes a close look at the International Organization for Standardization and the Codex Alimentarius – two prominent standard-setting organizations in the area of TBT and SPS – to investigate how international standardization influences the design of international trade agreements, and vice versa.
Abstract This article investigates how superpower rivalry affects public perceptions of international organization (IO) legitimacy in the hegemon. We argue that the representation of a superpower rival state at an IO in the form of its key decision maker's nationality can dampen the IO's perceived legitimacy within the rival power. We test this argument using a survey experiment in the United States under President Trump, where we manipulate the nationality of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) judge who casts a tie-breaking vote against the United States. Our results show that when the judge is Chinese, there is a strong and robust dampening of Americans' perceptions of the ICJ's legitimacy, with no comparable effect arising when the judge is from other countries, including Russia. Replication of the experiment in the United States under President Biden offers external validity for our findings, which may have important implications for the future of the liberal international order.
Global mindset is an emerging concept, influenced by globalization, that can support companies' growth in international settings and help develop a more effective, skilled workforce that can be open and adaptable. This book presents an analysis of current global mindset knowledge and explores how national culture and international business behaviors affect global mindset development in business process outsourcing organizations in both managerial and non-managerial groups.
The authors outline how processes of skill development and their final impact differ within multinational enterprises among managers and non-managers and present the implications on how to apply it in various seniority, talent groups. The theoretical and practical research discusses and emphasizes the need to involve employees in international relationship building, developing international know-how, and focusing on the methods of communication and management in business, because they stimulate the development of global mindset among managers and non-managers contributing to further business success.
This book will find an audience with researchers and astute students within international business, cross-cultural management, and business process outsourcing in particular. It will also be a valuable resource for those researching and operating in global teams.