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As international organizations become ever more prominent in global politics it is increasingly urgent to understand their power, their limits, and their effects. Now in its fourth edition, this leading textbook provides the definitive introduction to modern international organizations, from the legal charters of their beginnings, to the issues they engage with in the contemporary world. In his analysis of the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court and ten other prominent global institutions, Hurd combines legal, empirical, and theoretical approaches in an accessible and cohesive package. Fully revised and updated, this latest edition includes topical cases and controversies involving international organizations, such as Brexit, trade wars, environmentalism, forced migration and border disputes. It will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in international organizations, international institutions, global governance, and international law.

As international organizations become ever more prominent in global politics it is increasingly urgent to understand their power, their limits, and their effects. Now in its fourth edition, this leading textbook provides the definitive introduction to modern international organizations, from the legal charters of their beginnings, to the issues they engage with in the contemporary world. In his analysis of the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court and ten other prominent global institutions, Hurd combines legal, empirical, and theoretical approaches in an accessible and cohesive package. Fully revised and updated, this latest edition includes topical cases and controversies involving international organizations, such as Brexit, trade wars, environmentalism, forced migration and border disputes. It will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in international organizations, international institutions, global governance, and international law.

The politics of legitimacy is central to international relations. When states perceive an international organization as legitimate, they defer to it, associate themselves with it, and invoke its symbols. Examining the United Nations Security Council, Ian Hurd demonstrates how legitimacy is created, used, and contested in international relations. The Council's authority depends on its legitimacy, and therefore its legitimation and delegitimation are of the highest importance to states.

The idea that international law and institutions represent cooperative means for resolving inter-state disputes is so common as to be almost taken for granted in International Relations scholarship. Global-governance scholars often use the terms international law and cooperation interchangeably and treat legalization as a subset of the broader category of inter-governmental cooperation. This paper highlights the methodological and substantive problems that follow from equating 'global governance' with 'international cooperation' and suggests an alternative. The traditional model applies liberal political theory to the study of international institutions and interprets global governance as the realization of shared interests. It deflects research away from questions about trade-offs and winners or losers. In place of cooperation theory, I outline an overtly political methodology that assumes that governance – global or otherwise – necessarily favors some interests over others. In scholarship, the difference is evident in research methods, normative interpretation, and policy recommendations, as research is reoriented toward understanding how international institutions redistribute inequalities of wealth and power.

AbstractThe idea that international law and institutions represent cooperative means for resolving inter-state disputes is so common as to be almost taken for granted in International Relations scholarship. Global-governance scholars often use the terms international law and cooperation interchangeably and treat legalization as a subset of the broader category of inter-governmental cooperation. This paper highlights the methodological and substantive problems that follow from equating 'global governance' with 'international cooperation' and suggests an alternative. The traditional model applies liberal political theory to the study of international institutions and interprets global governance as the realization of shared interests. It deflects research away from questions about trade-offs and winners or losers. In place of cooperation theory, I outline an overtly political methodology that assumes that governance – global or otherwise – necessarily favors some interests over others. In scholarship, the difference is evident in research methods, normative interpretation, and policy recommendations, as research is reoriented toward understanding how international institutions redistribute inequalities of wealth and power.

Scholarship on international law in political science is dominated by a liberal paradigm that seeks to distinguish legal forms from political ones. The liberal approach offers a consensual model of international law in which legalization is a manifestation of intergovernmental cooperation in the pursuit of mutual goals. These two assumptions - that law is cooperative and that cooperation is a normative good - lead liberal global governance scholars away from key political questions about international legalization : namely, who wins and who loses. This results in the pathologies that Judith Shklar identified as 'legalism', when legal processes appear as charmed and neutral alternatives to politics. This article examines the liberal framework on global governance and law and contrast it with a competing political view. I show the differences between the two and outline the competing research agendas and policy advice that follows from them. The liberal model leads to the policy suggestion that decisionmakers should comply with international law, for self-interested and for more universal reasons, while the political alternative sees compliance as advancing some interests against others. With different theories of how law and politics are related, the two lead to competing interpretations of history as well as different policy prescriptions.

Scholarship on international law in political science is dominated by a liberal paradigm that seeks to distinguish legal forms from political ones. The liberal approach offers a consensual model of international law in which legalization is a manifestation of intergovernmental cooperation in the pursuit of mutual goals. These two assumptions - that law is cooperative and that cooperation is a normative good - lead liberal global governance scholars away from key political questions about international legalization : namely, who wins and who loses. This results in the pathologies that Judith Shklar identified as 'legalism', when legal processes appear as charmed and neutral alternatives to politics. This article examines the liberal framework on global governance and law and contrast it with a competing political view. I show the differences between the two and outline the competing research agendas and policy advice that follows from them. The liberal model leads to the policy suggestion that decisionmakers should comply with international law, for self-interested and for more universal reasons, while the political alternative sees compliance as advancing some interests against others. With different theories of how law and politics are related, the two lead to competing interpretations of history as well as different policy prescriptions.

The international rule of law is a political system of governance. It rests on the expectation that governments will abide by their legal obligations and so defines what counts as appropriate behavior for states. The relationship between law and politics in global governance is better understood as an empire of global legalism than as an anarchic world of sovereign states. Legal justification is the lingua franca of legitimation contests among governments, as states strive to show that their preferred policies are lawful and that those they oppose are unlawful. Seeing the world this way helps to show the political content of international law: neither a neutral framework that sustains all viewpoints nor an inherently progressive contribution to global order, international law is a political system of governance that advances some interests at the expense of others, and our attention should be directed toward assessing which interests are served by the turn to global legalism and at whose expense.

When an international crisis erupts it is common to hear experts say
that the situation would be improved if all parties uphold their
international legal obligations. From the Syrian war to Burma's massacres to
Guantánamo torture, faithful compliance with the law of nations is often
prescribed as part of the cure for policies gone wrong. My work is motivated
by curiosity about how international law comes to be seen as a universal
good and its effects when invoked as "good medicine for bad policies."
Compliance with international law often appears in policy and scholarly
analyses like a magical machine that transforms hot disagreements about what
should be done into cool solutions that serve the interests of everyone. My
work examines this idea with a degree of skepticism and holds it up against
some empirical cases. I suggest a return to pragmatic realism regarding the
politics behind the international rule of law.

AbstractThe ban on inter-state war in the UN Charter is widely identified as central to the modern international order–Michael Byers calls it 'one of the twentieth century's greatest achievements'. Even if it is only imperfectly observed, it is often seen as a constraint on state autonomy and an improvement on the pre-legal, unregulated world before 1945. In response to this conventional view, this article shows that the laws on war in the Charter are better seen as permissive rather than constraining. I make two points. First, by creating a legal category around 'self-defence', the laws on war authorise, and thus legitimate, wars that are motivated by the security needs of the state, while forbidding other motives for wars. Second, state practice since 1945 has expanded the scope of this authorisation, extending it in both time and space beyond the black-letter text of the Charter. The permissive effect of law on war has therefore been getting larger. These two effects suggest that international law is a resource that increases state power, at least for powerful states, and this relation between international law and power politics is missed by both realists and liberal internationalists.

AbstractScholars and activists commonly see international law in a privileged normative and political position in world politics, where international legal institutions are assumed to advance important goals such as international stability, human justice and even global order as a whole. I explore this attitude toward international law, which I call an 'enchanted' view, and contrast it to the 'disenchanted' alternative. Where the enchanted attitude presumes the normative valence and political wisdom of following international law, the disenchanted approach treats these as open questions for inquiry and discussion. The disenchanted approach is more empirically minded, and more politically open, than the enchanted, and leads to a distinct research program on legalization in international affairs – one that is attentive to the politics of law, the connections between law and power, the ambiguity that exists between legality and policy wisdom.