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This chapter begins by discussing the role of the WHO in the politics of global health, its mandate, authority and funding, with particular emphasis on the governance of emerging infectious diseases. As an intergovernmental organisation, the WHO derives its legitimacy and authority from its member base, and this has influenced its ability to act in the field of global health insofar as individual state interests often forestalled an international cooperative response. On the other hand, since the end of the Cold War, emerging infectious diseases have increasingly been identified as posing a serious global risk, which triggered a discourse of global (public) health security, promoted especially by some Western WHO members and the organisation itself. This discourse has motivated new institutional developments in the WHO and in global health governance more generally. Specifically, it elevated the WHO to be the main actor in coordinating global disease surveillance and containment in global health emergencies. The chapter then shows how the governance of emerging infectious diseases over the past two decades has been plagued by the ceaseless discursive struggles between state sovereignty and global health security, and this despite the WHO’s new central role and relative autonomy. The chapter traces this tension in the global response to three consecutive international infectious disease outbreaks preceding the Covid-19 pandemic. The conclusion discusses the dynamics of international collaboration in response to the current, still unfolding, pandemic as well as the challenges faced by the multilateral WHO moving forward.

This chapter seeks to analyse new forms of climate change cooperation involving the US, the EU and China, and the challenges influencing their competition in renewables following the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement under the four-year presidency of Donald Trump (2017–2021). By rethinking traditional multilateralism, it is argued that a new dynamic of climate cooperation that involves not only states but also sub-state and non-state actors is emerging. The EU-China partnership in mitigating climate change can be better understood through operationalisation of the concept of multilevel multilateralism. More precisely, this multilevel partnership incorporates entities above the state level (engaging the EU as a supranational institution), EU member states (intergovernmental level) and sub-state actors (city, company, NGO). On the basis of these different levels of analysis, the chapter proposes sets of favourable and disadvantageous factors that impact the implementation of the global climate obligations. The four-year de facto withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on the part of the United States has pushed a variety of actors to try to bridge this gap and thereby strengthened the multilateral setting of climate talks, in which China and the EU emerged as global leaders with aligned interests in fighting climate change and advancing energy transition.

The evolution of sanctions from comprehensive to targeted has favored the inclusion of for-profit actors in the policy process. Sanctions are used to deal with security challenges and while the role of for-profit actors in the provision of public goods has been investigated, less has been said about their role in the provision of security. This chapter investigates the role of for-profit actors in the implementation of sanctions. More specifically, this chapter suggests a typology of regulatory environments that facilitates explaining and understanding the behavior of for-profit actors in implementing targeted sanctions. By looking at the quality of instructions provided by state authorities and their capacity to monitor the implementation of such decisions, the chapter argues that overcompliance, uneven and lack of compliance are more likely in certain regulatory environments rather than in others. The theoretical framework is tested on the case study of the restrictive measures of the EU. The data for this research was collected through semi-opened interviews and focus groups held in Brussels from 2013 to 2015.

EU sanctions on Russia created concerns among its members. It is well known that sanctions impose a cost on their targets as well as on the senders, as lamented by European governments, but the costs of EU sanctions on its members have not been fully explored. This article intends to fill this gap by looking at the cost of EU sanctions on Russia. Who is bearing the cost among EU countries? This article argues that sanctions had a redistributive impact across the EU. Whereas exports fell for all countries, with Germany, Italy and Finland in the leading positions, the article shows that there are economic sectors that increased their exports to Russia after the imposition of sanctions, which occurred particularly in countries as Greece, Sweden, Luxembourg and Bulgaria. This conclusion is reached by looking at the export flows from individual EU member states divided by SITC sectors to Russia.

The increasing privatization of military and stability operations has received considerable scholarly attention. Existing scholarship, however, has largely focused on the privatization of state foreign policy, overlooking the empirical analysis of international organizations' use of commercial actors in the conduct of crisis management operations. The present study fills this gap by investigating the role of commercial contractors in supporting European Common Security and Defence civilian and military missions. By doing so, the article intends to advance the empirical knowledge of the privatization of foreign policy activities and the scope, determinants and future prospects of EU reliance on commercial actors for CSDP crisis management operations.

Over the last two decades, the European Union (EU) has increasingly relied on the use of restrictive measures in its external action; however, this has not been accompanied by an attentive evaluation of their effectiveness. In this Issue Paper, Francesco Giumelli and Paul Ivan focus on the case studies of Iran, Belarus, Syria and Myanmar (Burma) and explore ways of understanding the effectiveness of EU restrictive measures by providing a framework for assessment which looks at: the role of sanctions in an overall foreign policy strategy; the purpose and goals of the policy in terms of coercing, constraining and signalling; the impact of sanctions and the costs incurred by the EU; and the sanctions’ comparative utility. After evaluating the four case studies, the authors argue that restrictive measures positively contribute to shaping the EU’s external relations but that there is a need for a careful evaluation of what sanctions are supposed to achieve in order to build the proper expectations upon which their effectiveness can be judged. In order to improve the monitoring mechanisms of sanctions at the EU level, the authors recommend the creation of an EU panel of experts who would be tasked with monitoring sanctions, a measure which would enhance the evaluation of sanctions and could potentially improve the way in which they are integrated into the EU external action.