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There is significant and growing interest in better understanding hierarchy in the international system, especially in relation to intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). Acknowledging the existence of hierarchy in a system implies that there are different social positions (higher/lower), but not why or how a specific differentiation came to be used, nor how it is structured, contested or resolved. This article is interested in contributing to these questions, particularly in the context of heterarchical settings (where more than one hierarchy is present), which is also not fully understood. It uses the first years of the International Labour Organization (ILO) as a springboard to reflect upon hierarchy within the so-called 'civilized' group of countries in the immediate aftermath of World War I. This IGO was the first to (1) introduce statistical data to rank countries, with criteria designed to 'objectively' gauge industrial power and (2) establish a geographic allocation of countries in its main decision-making body's structure. Non-European countries and non-great powers had critical roles in establishing these novel ways of dealing with hierarchies and their institutional design in IGOs. One hundred years later, these discussions still resonate with several ongoing cases of contestation in IGOs over 'fair' hierarchical structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informal institutions are important platforms for renegotiating global governance, but there is disagreement on how they operate and challenge the United States (US). Realists view some informal institutions like Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) as counter-hegemonic entities, while rational institutionalists focus on their structure and performance in specific areas. However, neither approach explains the internal dynamics that make these institutions robust and potentially counter-hegemonic. To fill this gap, we first develop a new convergence approach for analysing informal institutional dynamics, and then we apply this approach to examine BRICS robustness and BRICS–US relations. Our BRICS Convergence Index measures policy convergence of the BRICS states using a novel data set of BRICS cooperation on 47 policy issues between 2009 and 2021. Using data on US policy preferences on the same issues, we also identify the key sites of BRICS–US contestation. We find an overall increase in BRICS policy convergence and limited divergence from US preferences across a wide range of policy issues. However, since BRICS has engaged with more security issues after 2015 and substantively deepened its cooperation, its capability to counter US influence has grown. Our convergence-focused analysis of informal institutions embraces members' agency and pathways for institution building, while identifying the issues that bind rival countries. As such, it helps explain how informal institutions gain robustness and provides empirical insights into the rise of new powers and global governance reform efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Anthropocene has given rise to growing efforts to govern the world's ecosystems. There is a hitch, however, ecosystems do not respect sovereign borders; hundreds traverse more three states and thus require complex international cooperation. This article critically examines the political and social consequences of the growing but understudied trend towards transboundary ecosystem cooperation. Matchmaking the new hierarchy scholarship in International Relations (IR) and political geography, the article theorises how ecosystem discourse embodies a latent spatially exclusive logic that can bind together and bound from outside unusual bedfellows in otherwise politically awkward spaces. We contend that such 'ecosystemic politics' can generate spatialised 'broad hierarchies' that cut across both Westphalian renderings of space and the latent post-colonial and/or material inequalities that have hitherto been the focus of most of the new hierarchies scholarship. We illustrate our argument by conducting a multilevel longitudinal analysis of how Caspian Sea environmental cooperation has produced a broad hierarchy demarking and sharpening the boundaries of the region, become symbolic of Caspian in-group competence and neighbourliness, and used as a rationale for future Caspian-shaped cooperation. We reason that if ecosystemic politics can generate new renderings of space amid an otherwise heavily contested space as the Caspian, further research is warranted to explore systemic hierarchical consequences elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that transitional justice (TJ) has recently been standardised: There is now a two-tiered global standard of TJ which structures policy responses and academic thinking. TJ comprises criminal justice, truth-telling, reparation and institutional reform – four core elements in a 'comprehensive' approach. The standard involves specifications for design, procedure and performance and draws on a selection of seemingly unambiguous international legal norms. Paradoxically, it claims to eschew a one-size-fits-all formula, while promoting uniformity in diverse contexts. It is moreover unclear whether its implementation generates beneficial effects in society. Building on existing research on international standardisation as an international political and sociological phenomenon, the article analyses the recently developed TJ standard and presents the first account of the process of TJ standardisation. It demonstrates how processes of 'generification' and 'localisation' make practices transferable and establish the means to facilitate their replication in and across different contexts and settings. These processes are illustrated drawing on existing scholarship from around the world that highlights the acceptance and contestation of and resistance to the standard. After analysing these processes, the article discusses the implications of TJ standardisation for societies, scholarship and global governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International parliamentary institutions (IPIs), which give parliamentarians regular opportunities to communicate with their foreign counterparts, have become a common feature in global governance. Recent research has shed light on why IPIs are created, on the similarities and differences in their institutional design, and on the reasons that lead members of national parliaments to engage with them. By contrast, there is little systematic empirical research on whether and how IPIs affect global politics. This article addresses this question by assessing their ability to influence states in relation to the position they take on issues of global concern and to how they treat their own citizens. The study identifies several mechanisms of IPI influence, leading to the hypothesis that more frequent opportunities for parliamentarians to interact with their foreign counterparts within IPIs leads in time to greater similarity in the foreign policy positions expressed by their governments and affects how those governments protect the civil rights of their citizens. A statistical analysis spanning multiple international organizations, member states, and decades indicates that IPIs offer a distinct contribution to convergence in foreign policy. By contrast, participation in IPIs is not robustly associated with civil rights protections. The finding that IPIs can be consequential on which policies governments promote internationally even though such institutions typically lack substantial authority may be encouraging for advocates of further international parliamentarization and specifically the creation of a United Nations parliamentary assembly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article undertakes an empirical investigation of the relationship between structural inequalities and legitimacy beliefs in global governance. Normative theory often emphasises inequality as a major source of injustice in global politics, but we lack empirical research that examines the implications of inequality for legitimacy in concrete situations of global governance. This paper draws on large mixed-method survey evidence regarding inequality perceptions and legitimacy beliefs at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a key site of global Internet governance that has given particular priority to issues of diversity and inclusion. Our analysis arrives at four main findings. First, participants in ICANN do perceive substantial structural power asymmetries and often find them to be problematic. Second, persons on the perceived subordinate side of these power stratifications tend to observe larger inequalities and to find them more problematic than persons on the perceived dominant side. However, third, these perceptions and concerns about inequality almost never associate with legitimacy beliefs towards ICANN, even among people in structurally subordinated positions and among people who express the greatest worries regarding power inequalities. Fourth, in forming legitimacy perceptions, participants at ICANN generally prioritise other aspects of institutional purpose, procedure and performance, unconnected with inequality. This lack of a relationship between perceptions of inequality and legitimacy beliefs suggests that, however sympathetic policy elites at ICANN might be towards greater equality in principle, they are unlikely to give it precedence in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International functionalism as proposed by David Mitrany envisions non-territorial functional agencies to supplant the states system. Mitrany makes no provision for democracy in functional agencies. Instead, he assumes that the policies of international technocrats would be 'technically self-determined' and uncontested – a stance several critics deem antidemocratic and naive. A second, related criticism holds that even if functional agencies were formally democratic, democracy could not operate effectively since functional polities would be too 'thin' and fragmented to sustain democratic commitments among their members. The article qualifies the first charge and rejects the second. First, defined as an institutional decision-making principle, 'technical self-determination' is Mitrany's add-on to the underlying functionalist logic, not an inseparable part of it. That logic instead holds that institutions work best if their form and scope of authority follow their function and that function-specific agencies therefore could meet some needs better than the state. Contra Mitrany, this does not privilege technocratic over democratic decision-making and it does not imply that functional agencies would be free from political conflict. Nor, second, would functional agencies necessarily be unsuitable for democracy in practice. Several strands of democratic theory suggest that even people who do not share a 'thick' communal identity can develop a commitment to meet shared needs democratically. If one accepts this, it loosens functionalism's technocratic stigma, highlights its potential as a democratically viable alternative to both state-centric and supranational models of international order and broadens our conception of possible democratic futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities both large and small, more and less economically advanced, are deeply involved in efforts to address the most challenging and complex issues of contemporary global governance, ranging from climate change and conditions of insecurity to human migration and public health. Yet this puzzling phenomenon is largely ignored within International Relations (IR) scholarship, and only partially theorized by scholars working in other fields of inquiry. Our premise in this article is that attempts to understand and assess city participation in world politics are augmented by focusing on the global identity of the city, since understanding what cities do in world politics is shaped by who cities (think they) are on the global stage. In proposing a subtle shift, from the passively labeled global city to what we call the globally engaged city, we direct analysis to the political and discursive forces shaping, delimiting, and informing this novel role for the city as a world-political actor. We propose that city identity is now fractured into local and global dimensions and set out two analytically distinct contexts in which the global identity of the city is forged through a process of differentiation from the nation-state. Our framework highlights in particular the politics of recognition shaping how the globally engaged city is defined and diffused. Through two empirical vignettes we illustrate the value of our framework as a means for IR scholarship to bring cities in from the analytic hinterlands and better understand their (potential) impact on the world stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elites are central in creating, operating, defending and contesting international organisations (IOs), but little research is available about their attitudes toward these bodies. To address this gap, this article offers the first systematic and comparative analysis of elite perceptions of IO legitimacy. Building on a unique multi-country and multi-sector survey of 860 elites undertaken in 2017–19, we map and explain elite legitimacy beliefs toward three key IOs in different issue-areas: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Integrating public opinion research and international relations theory, the article advances an explanation of elites' legitimacy beliefs that emphasises their satisfaction with the institutional qualities of IOs. We contrast this argument with three common alternative explanations, which respectively highlight utilitarian calculation, global orientation and domestic cues. The analyses show that elites' satisfaction with institutional qualities of IOs is most consistently related to legitimacy beliefs: when elites are more satisfied with democracy, effectiveness and fairness in IOs, they also regard these IOs as more legitimate. These findings suggest that the prevailing debate between utilitarian calculation, global orientation and domestic cues approaches neglects the importance of institutional satisfaction as an explanation of attitudes toward IOs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ecology of governance organizations (GOs) matters for what is or is not governed, what legitimate powers any governor may hold, and whose political preferences are instantiated in rules. The array of actors who comprise the current system of global governance has grown dramatically in recent decades. Especially notable has been the growth of private governance organizations (PGOs). Drawing on organizational ecology, I posit that the rise of PGOs is both required and facilitated by disagreements between states that block the creation of what might be otherwise effective intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). In a form of "double-negative regulation," states block IGOs, which in turn leave open niches that are then filled by PGOs, which then both complement and sometimes substitute for state law. The organizational ecology approach outlined here extends and refocuses inquiry in systematic ways that give us a fuller understanding of how and why PGOs have emerged as one of the most striking features of the contemporary world order. The key innovations in this paper are to (a) shift the level of analysis from single agents or populations of agents to the entire field of GOs, including states, IGOs, and PGOs and (b) draw on principles of ecology to understand the composition and dynamics of systems of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the relationship between law and international order. Building on legal research concerned with transnational law, we argue that domestic courts are endogenous sites of international political change. National courts are constitutive of international order by generating new rules, adjudicating transnational disputes, and bounding state sovereignty. We illustrate the ways in which national courts create new political opportunities by updating three core international relations theory debates. Recognizing the role of domestic courts as global adjudicators enhances our understanding of regime complexity and international forum shopping. By re-interpreting aspects of conventional international law, and engaging in cross-border dialogue, domestic courts challenge our understanding of international diffusion and judicialization. By redefining the boundaries of state authority and sovereignty, national courts create potential for conflict and cooperation. A transnational law perspective illustrates the porous nature between domestic and international spheres, highlighting how domestic courts have become adjudicators for state and non-state actors that operate across mainstream levels of analysis. Our approach calls on scholars to move beyond analyzing national legal systems as mechanisms of compliance to instead consider domestic courts as co-creators of international order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1945, US judges have extended numerous "domestic" US laws (including securities and antitrust laws) to govern economic transactions taking place "abroad". However, they have generally failed to extend US labor and employment laws to govern employer–employee relationships outside "US territory". Through a close reading of federal court decisions and drawing on recent work in the field of critical legal studies, this article makes an argument for centering the study of jurisdiction in International Relations scholarship and for approaching states as instantiated in their jurisdictional assertions. I suggest that such an approach enables us to capture the geographies—including the imperial geographies—of US law in the "normal," everyday course of affairs. In particular, such an approach allows us to see that, since the mid-20th century, the legal authority and legal relations of the US government have come to be organized around the notion of the national economy (rather than simply around, for example, notions of territory or citizenship). What this means is that it is increasingly a posited relationship to this national economy that determines whether people and corporations, wherever in the world they are located, are subjected to or protected by US law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sovereign credit ratings importantly influence the borrowing costs of governments in international capital markets. Yet, there is limited understanding of how credit-rating agencies determine sovereign bond ratings. I provide theoretical justification and empirical evidence to support the proposition that a substantial presence of established global banks, acting as foreign direct investors, enhances the perceived creditworthiness of the host countries that have weak domestic institutions. Foreign banks can render the host countries' commitments to make good on their debt obligations more credible by encouraging the transparency in the financial system, disciplining their fiscal policies, and mitigating the incentives for and impact of bank bailouts. Statistical evidence from countries in emerging Europe shows that countries with high levels of foreign bank ownership tend to be assigned better sovereign credit ratings and find it easier to obtain credit at lower interest rates in sovereign bond markets. My findings are robust to various estimation techniques, to extensive controls for alternative determinants of credit ratings, for the endogeneity of foreign bank entry, and for sample-selection bias. Interviews with bankers and senior analysts at credit-rating agencies were used to complement quantitative analyses. This article is the first attempt in the literature on sovereign borrowing and debt to examine whether private market agents, such as global banks, can enhance the government's international creditworthiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Great powers routinely face demands to take on special responsibilities to address major concerns in global affairs, and often gain special rights for doing so. These areas include peace and security, global economic management, development, and egregious violations of human rights. Despite the rise in the importance and centrality of global environmental concerns, especially climate change and issues covered by the new Sustainable Development Goals, norms or institutions that demand or recognize great power responsibility are notably absent. This absence is puzzling given expectations in several major strands of International Relations theory, including the English School, realism, liberalism, and constructivism. Drawing on the reasoning behind these expectations, the absence of great power responsibility can be explained by a lack of congruence between systemic and environmental "great powers," weak empirical links between action on the environment and the maintenance of international order, and no link to special rights. Instead, the institutionalized distribution of environmental responsibilities arose out of North–South conflict and has eroded over time, becoming more diffuse and decentered from ideas of state responsibility. These findings suggest a need to rethink the relationship among great powers and special rights and responsibilities regarding the environment, as well as other new issues of systemic importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars charting the emergence of transnational public spheres often focus on the socio-spatial sites that are generated by civil society organisations in their interactions with the institutions of global governance. These sites can reflect either strong public spheres within the formal decision-making structures of international regimes, or segmented and general public spheres on their periphery. In practice, they all suffer key democratic deficiencies in the ability to either communicatively generate public opinion or achieve collective will-formation. I argue that if civil society organisations can successfully weave together both general and segmented public spheres on the periphery of international regimes, their individual democratic deficiencies could be addressed. To demonstrate evidence of these interconnected 'informal public spheres', I turn to the nuclear non-proliferation regime, where public deliberation has been largely invisible and ineffectual within the formal decision-making structures of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The emergence of a new civil society organisation-led 'humanitarian initiative' on the periphery of the regime, comprising multi-stakeholder initiatives in conjunction with civil society organised social forums, reflects the interconnection of segmented and general public spheres. This innovative initiative has effectively enhanced transnational public debate on disarmament, while gaining crucial political traction within the regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article investigates how sovereignty is performed, enacted and constructed in an everyday setting. Based on fieldwork and interviews with international embedded experts about the elusive meaning of 'local ownership', we argue that while sovereignty may, indeed, be a model according to which the international community 'constructs' rogue or failed polities in 'faraway' places, this view overlooks that these places are still spaces in which contestations over spheres of authority take place every day, and thus also spaces in which sovereignty is constructed and reconstructed on a daily basis. Local ownership, then, becomes our starting point for tracing the processes of the everyday enactment of sovereignty. We make the case that sovereignty should not be reified, but instead be studied in its quotidian and dynamic production, involving the multiplicity of actors reflecting the active production of the state beyond its presumptive existence as a homogeneously organized, institutionalized and largely centralized bureaucracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International Relations scholars have long neglected the question of leadership in international organizations. The structural turn in International Relations led to an aversion to analysing or theorizing the impact of individuals. Yet, empirical studies suggest that different leaders affect the extent to which international organizations facilitate cooperation among states and/or the capacity of a global agency to deliver public goods. It is difficult to study how and under what conditions leaders have an impact due to the challenges of attributing outcomes to a particular leader and great variation in their powers and operating context. We offer a starting point for overcoming these challenges. We identify three different types of constraints that executive heads face: legal-political, resource and bureaucratic. We argue that leaders can navigate and push back on each of these constraints and provide illustrations of this, drawing on existing literature and interviews with executive heads and senior management of international organizations. Executive heads of international organizations may operate in a constrained environment but this should not stop scholars from studying their impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has moved from a strong focus on mitigation to increasingly address adaptation. Climate change is no longer simply about reducing emissions, but also about enabling countries to deal with its impacts. Yet, most studies of the climate regime have focused on the evolution of mitigation governance and overlooked the increasing number of adaptation-related decisions and initiatives. In this article, we identify the body of rules and commitments on adaptation and suggest that there are more attempts to govern adaptation than many mitigation-focused accounts of the international climate regime would suggest. We then ask: to what degree are adaptation rules and commitments legalized in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change? We examine the degree of precision and obligation of relevant decisions through an extensive analysis of primary United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change documents, secondary literature on adaptation initiatives and institutions, interviews with climate change experts and negotiators, and participant observation at climate negotiations. Our analysis finds that adaptation governance is low in precision and obligation. We suggest that this is partly because adaptation is a contested global public good and because ‘package deals’ are made with mitigation commitments. This article makes a vital contribution to the global environmental politics literature given that adaptation governance is under-studied and poorly understood. It also contributes to the legalization literature by highlighting how contested global public goods may be governed globally, but with low obligation and precision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an empirical study that aims to draw out core elements of an assemblage theory of global governance. Situating assemblage theory in the third, practice-oriented generation of global governance research, I argue that it provides us with a feature-rich toolbox sensitive to the routine matters of international cooperation, the role of artefacts and the vitality of territories of governance. To showcase the advantages of an assemblage approach, I study a paradigmatic case: the organization of the international community’s fight against piracy off the coast of Somalia. This effort has not only been very successful, with no major piracy incident reported from 2012 to 2016, but also a ‘miracle’ that can be explained by the close cooperation of all actors involved. I zoom in on one of the core components of this cooperation, the so-called Best Management Practices, which organize state–industry relations. I present a detailed study of the making of the Best Management Practices and the territory of authority and expertise that it established, and show how it became a core tool of governance. The case study documents the analytical power of assemblage theory for understanding global governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The production of transnational knowledge that is widely recognized as legitimate is a major source of influence for international organizations. To reinforce their expert status, international organizations increasingly produce global benchmarks that measure national performance across a range of issue areas. This article illustrates how international organization benchmarking is a significant source of indirect power in world politics by examining two prominent cases in which international organizations seek to shape the world through comparative metrics: (1) the World Bank–International Finance Corporation Ease of Doing Business ranking; and (2) the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development FDI Regulatory Restrictiveness Index. We argue that the legitimacy attached to these benchmarks because of the expertise of the international organizations that produce them is highly problematic for two reasons. First, both benchmarks oversimplify the evaluation of relative national performance, misrepresenting contested political values drawn from a specific transnational paradigm as empirical facts. Second, they entrench an arbitrary division in the international arena between ‘ideal’ and ‘pathological’ types of national performance, which (re)produces social hierarchies among states. We argue that the ways in which international organizations use benchmarking to orient how political actors understand best practices, advocate policy changes and attribute political responsibility thus constitutes ‘bad science’. Extending research on processes of paradigm maintenance and the influence of international organizations as teachers of norms or judges of norm compliance, we show how the indirect power that international organizations exercise as evaluators of relative national performance through benchmarking can be highly consequential for the definition of states’ policy priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The years immediately preceding the First World War witnessed the development of a significant body of literature claiming to establish a ‘science of internationalism’. This article draws attention to the importance of this literature, especially in relation to understanding the roles of non-governmental organizations in world politics. It elaborates the ways in which this literature sheds light on issues that have become central to 21st-century debates, including the characteristics, influence and legitimacy of non-governmental organizations in international relations. Among the principal authors discussed in the article are Paul Otlet, Henri La Fontaine and Alfred Fried, whose role in the development of international theory has previously received insufficient attention. The article concludes with an evaluation of potential lessons to be drawn from the experience of the early 20th-century ‘science of internationalism’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transparency is an important concept in International Relations. The possibility of realizing transparency in practice operates as a central analytical axis defining distinct positions on core theoretical problems within the field, from the security dilemma to the function of international institutions and beyond. As a political practice, the pursuit of transparent governance is a dominant feature of global politics, promoted by a wide range of actors across a vast range of issue areas, from nuclear proliferation, to internet governance, to the politics of foreign aid. Yet, despite its importance, precisely what transparency means or how the concept is understood is frequently ill-defined by academics and policymakers alike. As a result, the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of approaches to transparency in International Relations often sit in tension with their wider theoretical commitments. This article will examine the three primary understandings of transparency used in International Relations in order to unpack these commitments. It finds that while transparency is often explicitly conceptualized as a property of information, particularly within rationalist scholarship, this understanding rests upon an unarticulated set of sociological assumptions. This analysis suggests that conceptualizing ‘transparency as information’ without a wider sociology of knowledge production is highly problematic, potentially obscuring our ability to recognize transparent practices in global governance. Understanding transparency as dialogue, as a social practice rooted in shared cognitive capacities and epistemic frameworks, provides a firmer analytical ground from which to examine transparency in International Relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains the design and development of funding rules at international organizations? I investigate this question in the context of the United Nations system, which has undergone a dramatic shift in financing. Long associated with mandatory contributions, the United Nations increasingly relies on voluntary resources earmarked by individual donors. Previous studies have investigated the financing puzzle from a behavioral perspective and have found that wealthy donors use voluntary funding to rein in costs and constrain international organization programs. Providing an alternative theoretical approach, I investigate the financing puzzle from an institutional design perspective. I provide original United Nations funding rule data to demonstrate that it is not only funding practices, but also underlying funding rules, that have changed over time. I theorize how states with favorable views of the United Nations that sought to expand its activities — rather than those that desired to constrain it — had incentives to introduce funding rules that offered more flexibility and control to donors. I test the argument with a longitudinal case study of funding rule design and change at United Nations economic development institutions. The article expands the institutional design literature by integrating funding rules as a consequential design component and provides a novel explanation for changes in United Nations financing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The turns to pragmatism and practice theory in recent years are indicative of a fragmented discipline searching for the ends of International Relations theory. While diverse and contested, both bring forth conceptual language -- habit, habitus, field, or practice -- that promises to reorient the field on different grounds, with different implications for thinking about the vocation of International Relations. This article considers the contributions made possible by pragmatism in light of the turn to practices, outlining a "pragmatic International Relations" that is tasked with a political project: constituting the public in an age of global governance. It does so through a reading of Dewey that foregrounds his political commitments to democracy as a form of publicly inclusive inquiry. Rather than severing the normativity inscribed in Dewey's social theory, this article demonstrates how his political values were productive of his theoretical practice. As such, we argue that Dewey does not dispense with metaphysics in order to attend to political problems, but, instead, locates metaphysics as constitutive of the political problem itself: democracy in the age of expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The participation of non-state actors in multilateral institutions is often portrayed as one way of decreasing the perceived legitimacy deficit in global governance. The literature on non-state actors has identified several ways in which these actors can enhance the legitimacy of intergovernmental organisations and global governance arrangements. Three partially competing normative arguments, or rationales, for the inclusion of non-state actors in international policymaking — functionalism, neocorporatism and democratic pluralism — have been identified. Whereas functionalism highlights the contribution of non-state actors to output legitimacy in terms of expertise, neocorporatism emphasises the inclusion of affected interests, and democratic pluralism claims that non-state actors increase input legitimacy through procedural values. These three normative arguments thus offer different understandings of the motives for the inclusion and representation of non-state actors in international negotiations and diplomacy. Through a single case study of United Nations climate diplomacy, we analyse the extent to which the three rationales for non-state actor inclusion are found in views held by state and non-state actors participating in the annual United Nations climate change conferences. Our results show that different actor groups place varying degrees of emphasis on the different rationales for non-state actor inclusion, even though the neocorporatist rationale remains most favoured overall. We discuss the implications of our findings for the democratic legitimacy of increasing participation of non-state actors in intergovernmental affairs and recent trends in the participation of non-state actors in the international climate change policymaking process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the consequences of increasing regime complexity and institutional proliferation on global governance? Does the growing density and overlaps among institutions facilitate or hinder the ability of states to manage transnational threats through cooperation? This article argues that the impact of regime complexity on the effectiveness of cooperation depends not only on the nature of spillovers among overlapping regimes, but also on the cross-institutional strategies of states and non-state actors. I distinguish between two types of strategies through which actors can take advantage of institutional overlaps: (1) “opportunistic” or non-cooperative attempts by states to bypass legal commitments, which tend to undermine the goals of cooperation; and (2) “cooperative” strategies by intergovernmental organizations, civil society organizations, and other principled actors. These actors also engage in regime shifting, forum linking, and other cross-forum strategies to promote their institutional mandates and normative agendas. To probe the plausibility of these theoretical claims, I focus on the case of the anti-trafficking in persons regime. The overlaps between anti-trafficking laws and the migration, labor, and human rights regimes illustrate the different ways in which intergovernmental organizations and their allies in society can exploit institutional overlaps to promote greater cooperation and expand the regime complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As governor of the world’s pre-eminent sporting event, the International Olympic Committee exercises considerable power on the world stage. It has also been widely accused of corruption, corporate greed, and hypocrisy. However, for all of the media attention that the International Olympic Committee receives, it has seldom been examined theoretically and in the context of global governance. Why have so few stakeholders, including the states that host the events and field the teams, engaged in serious efforts to hold it accountable for its actions? In addition, what can the experience of the International Olympic Committee tell us about accountability in global governance more generally? Drawing from conceptual treatments of accountability, we argue that the challenges of the International Olympic Committee are rooted in the organization’s social position and social power. The IOCs position in international society dilutes the base of potential accountability holders and exacerbates collective action problems, while its social power allows it to maintain a reputational shield to guard against meaningful accountability efforts. The article concludes by considering whether these dynamics ripple beyond the experience of the International Olympic Committee into other areas of global governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the large emerging economies of Brazil, India and China can easily be counted among the most important contemporary structural changes in the global political economy. This article attempts to determine whether these countries have a common institutional model for governing their economies and addresses the implications of these commonalities for global economic institutions. The approach consists of three major steps: first, a general ideal type for encompassing capitalism in these large emerging economies is constructed, and dubbed ‘state-permeated market economy’; second, we compare these countries empirically, with regard to the features highlighted by the ideal type and in contrast to other varieties of capitalism; and, finally, we extrapolate some long-term implications for the global economic order, based on the assumption that foreign economic policies will be informed by domestic institutional structures. Based on these three steps, we conclude that a further deepening of the liberal global order is highly unlikely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Nations remains the principal international governmental organisation for promoting human rights. However, serious concerns focus on persistent compliance gaps between human rights standards and domestic practice. In response and against a backdrop of growing regime complexity, United Nations human rights agencies have increasingly sought to bypass states by coordinating new forms of non-state and private authority. International Relations scholarship has captured this governance arrangement using the concept of orchestration, defined as when an international organisation enlists and supports intermediary actors to address target actors in pursuit of international governmental organisation governance goals. This article explores the implications of an orchestration topology for human rights governance by analysing national human rights institutions in the context of an established global human rights regime and its dedicated orchestrator: the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. I use the experience of national human rights institutions to further refine the concepts of managing versus bypassing states to capture how networked intermediaries are affected by, and respond to, new opportunities within international governmental organisation structures. The article identifies the conditions under which orchestration may be particularly well-suited to a human rights governance function. It further examines the analytical limitations of this mode of influence for addressing a multi-level compliance gap, as well as what the analysis means for international organisations and understanding orchestration more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this critical comment on the global democracy debate, I take stock of contemporary proposals for democratizing global governance. In the first part of the article, I show that, empirically, many international institutions are now evaluated in terms of their democratic credentials. At the same time, the notions of democracy that underpin such evaluations are often very formalistic. They focus on granting access to civil society organizations, making policy-relevant documents available online or establishing global parliamentary assemblies to give citizens a voice in the decision-making of international organizations. In the second part, I challenge this focus on formal procedures and argue that a normatively persuasive conception of global democracy would shift our focus to areas such as health, education and subsistence. Contrary to much contemporary thinking about global democracy, I thus defend the view that the institutions we have are sufficiently democratic. What is needed are not better procedures, but investments that help the weaker members of global society to make effective use of the democracy-relevant institutions that exist in contemporary international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars increasingly acknowledge that international institutions interact with each other, especially across issue areas such as trade and environment. However, scholars continue to dispute whether, and under what conditions, such regime interplay has positive or negative impacts on the effectiveness of international institutions. Existing scholarship debates whether international regimes may be compromised by inconsistencies, or whether enhanced reputational benefits make governments more likely to uphold commitments across components of a regime complex. This article examines how institutional complexity affects state behavior. Specifically, it analyzes how governments respond to regime inconsistency, and whether they continue adhering to their commitments in the absence of material or sociological non-compliance costs. The study tracks how state preferences and behavior changed over time when exposed to inconsistent international legal commitments regarding trade and regulatory rights in the South Pacific swordfish fishery. In this case, both World Trade Organization and United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea rules were at stake, and both dispute settlement forums accepted jurisdiction over the case. Nonetheless, Chile and the European Community resorted to negotiation outside of — but still bounded by — these established rules. Thus, this study finds that when multiple regimes regulate a particular situation, bargaining continues to take place within the boundaries established by those rules. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How can democracy best be pursued and promoted in the existing global system? In this article, I propose a novel suggestion: democratization should occur at the level of international regime complexity. Because each issue-area of world politics is distinct, we require tailor-made (as opposed to one-size-fits-all) responses to the global democratic deficit. I conceptualize global democracy as an ongoing process of democratization in which a set of core normative values are more or less satisfied. I explicate equal participation, accountability, and institutional revisability as those key standards. I argue that the democratization of regime complexes should occur across two distinct planes: (1) the realm of multilateral negotiations; and (2) institutional forms of democratic experimentalism between rule-makers and rule-takers. I evaluate and defend the potential of this argument by analyzing the intellectual property rights regime complex. Because intellectual property rights represent a ‘tough case’ for global democrats, we should be optimistic about the democratization of alternative regime complexes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What factors influence the faithfulness of international organizations (IOs) to mandates assigned to them by member states? Although recent literature treats international organization agents as autonomous actors in global politics, most work continues to treat the bureaucracy of an international organization as a unitary actor. I argue that the unitary actor assumption limits our ability to assess how internal factors such as fragmentation influence agent faithfulness. When we conceive of international organization bureaucracies as collective agents — those including more than one bureaucratic actor and subject to internal fragmentation — international organization faithfulness can be more fully explained. Specifically, fragmentation limits faithfulness by inhibiting the effectiveness of principals’ control mechanisms (i.e. oversight and agent screening and sanctioning). These arguments are illustrated using a case study of the World Health Organization and its efforts to improve health systems between 1982 and 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, we have witnessed deliberative democracy take a ‘civil society turn’ to address the democratic deficit of global governance. In light of the present circumstances of world politics, it is argued that civil society offers a rich soil for reformulating democracy globally. This article engages in this debate with particular focus on democratic agency. It investigates the notion of democratic agency built into this deliberative civil society view with regard to its democratic qualities. This is done by problematizing a common feature underlying this view, here called the ‘separability premise’, which presumes that it is possible to define democracy as two or more separate core democratic qualities or mechanisms — most importantly, inclusive participation, accountability, authorization and deliberation — and that democracy increases the more one or more of these are strengthened. The article defends the thesis that the proposed political subject is not equipped to be a democratic agent insofar as the deliberative civil society view does not fulfil two basic requirements for an arrangement to qualify as minimally democratic, namely, political equality and political bindingness. The article concludes that insofar as we wish to hold on to a deliberative conception of democracy, something along the lines of Habermas’s two-track view is still our best bet for accommodating these two conditions, even in a transnational context, since it is able to avoid the problems connected with the separability premise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article challenges the assumption that the boundaries of state versus non-state and public versus private can readily be drawn. It argues that the roles of actors — as state or non-state — and the forms of authority — public or private — are not pre-given but are forged through the process of governing. Drawing on neo-Gramscian and governmentality perspectives, it suggests that a more dynamic account of the state can offer a more nuanced means of analysing the process of governing global environmental affairs. In order to understand this process and the outcomes of governing climate change, we argue that analysis should focus on the hegemonic projects and programmes through which the objects and subjects of governing are constituted and contested, and through which the form and nature of the state and authority are accomplished. We suggest that this is a process achieved and held in place through ‘forging alignment’ between diverse social and material entities in order to achieve the ‘right disposition of things’ through which the will to govern climate change can be realized (Murray Li, 2007a). We illustrate this argument by examining the governing of climate change in two global cities, London and Los Angeles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over recent decades a judicialization process of international dispute settlement procedures has taken place. Yet, the judicialization of procedures remains meaningless if the procedures are not used and accepted by disputing states in practice. Prominent theoretical approaches point to different conditions under which this is to be expected. Realism emphasizes the international distribution of power, institutionalism stresses the importance of the institutional design of international dispute settlement procedures, and liberalism points to the domestic institutional setting of the participating states. The article confronts these theoretical expectations with states’ actual dispute settlement behavior in the international trade regime, the United Nations Security Council, the European human rights regime and the regime on the protection of endangered species in the 1970s/80s and 1990s/2000s, respectively. Its main finding is that, compared to realism and liberalism, institutionalism fares better in explaining the judicialization of states’ dispute settlement behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article develops a model for analysing international regime formation in the environmental domain. It is argued that current approaches to understanding how regimes emerge and develop are too narrow, and fail to account for the dynamic interplay between states and markets which induce the emergence of ‘tipping points’ leading to more extensive and stringent international institutions. The article demonstrates the central role of tipping points in regime formation using the example of international climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article challenges the optimism common to liberal IR and IL scholarship on the ‘rule of law’ in global governance. It argues that the concept of the ‘rule of law’ is often employed with sparse inquiry into the politics of its practical meaning. Specifically, the article focuses on liberal research that advocates the emergence of a ‘global’ judiciary, and the claim that judicial governance will marginalize state power and authority. Rather than employ a zero-sum conception of power, this article regards a prospective global legal system less as a constraint on state power and more as a rationale for rule ‘through’ law by vested actors. To make the argument, Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ is combined with Barnett and Duvall’s notion of ‘productive power’ to denote how legal techniques of power are integral to the construction of social ‘truth’ and consequently the governance of conduct. This is further associated with Koskenniemi’s critical scholarship on the power of law’s perceived objectivity and universality. In this vein, the article questions how liberal scholars use the American judicial model (the Marbury ideal) to claim that an institutionalization of ‘global’ judicial authority can deliver the rule of ‘no one’ in global governance. A governmentality perspective is then applied which suggests that the lack of supreme constitutional rules at the global level makes judicial governance less a check than a means to propagate normative standards conducive to dominant state power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article revisits a fundamental question of international political economy: when does cross-border economic interdependence become a source of power. The view that economic interdependence is a source of potential power, not just mutual benefits, has a long lineage traceable to political realism, organizational economics, Ricardian trade theory, and structural Marxism, and researchers typically focus on preferred causal variables in isolation. Despite important contributions, little attention has been paid to understanding the interactions of multiple perspectives on asymmetric interdependence, or to making sense of contradictory expectations of the various models. As a consequence scholars engaged in globalization debates, such as those about policy convergence or private actor governance, frequently talk past one another. To deduce expectations about the relationship between power and interdependence, we build a model synthesizing standard approaches that analyze the effects of market size and market scope separately, and then add the critical variable of jurisdictional boundaries. By decoupling geography and authority, our analysis produces a respecification of classic interdependence models and advances core international political economy debates concerning power dynamics in a globalized economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Intellectual property rights (IPRs) ultimately delineate the way in which knowledge is created, owned, controlled and diffused, domestically and now globally. They have always been contested because knowledge is both a form of capital and a public good, but these contests have become more acute since the WTO TRIPs Agreement came into force in 1995. As a result of new frames and linkages propelled by various actors between IPRs and other issue-areas, the current intellectual property regime has become complex and somewhat inconsistent. This article contributes to a better understanding of the concrete mechanisms and processes through which various global regimes come to overlap with each other in the area of IPRs, of the actors that are involved in these processes, as well as of the consequences of such developments for the governance of IPRs and global governance more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scepticism about the possibility of a democratically governed global polity is often rooted in beliefs about ‘necessary conditions’. Some democracy scholars consider a transition to global democracy to be incompatible with necessary conditions for democratic governance, while some International Relations scholars consider it to be incompatible with necessary conditions for international structural change. This article assesses hypotheses and evidence about democratic transitions within states and transformations in the interaction among states and concludes that arguments based on necessary conditions are not compelling. This suggests that global democracy may be unlikely but it is not impossible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Emerging powers such as Brazil and Germany increasingly articulate their desire for leadership in global governance. Examples comprise the bids for permanent membership in the UN Security Council and the founding of the G20 at the WTO meeting in Cancun. Emerging powers, however, often fail to achieve their goals. This article focuses on followership as a core condition for success and failure of emerging power leadership in global governance. I argue that in order to perform successfully, any leadership must be accepted by followers and that followership depends on the credible inclusion of the interests and/or ideas of potential followers into the leadership project. This argument is tested in case studies on Brazil's and Germany's bids for structural power in the UNSC, for directorship in international organizations and for policy positions in the WTO trade negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transnational rule-making organizations have proliferated in the area of sustainability politics. In this article, we explore why these organizations share a set of core features that appear overly costly at first sight. We argue that norms that evolved out of the social interaction among transnational rule-making organizations account for this phenomenon. Thus, in the early 1990s, an organizational field of transnational rule-making has gradually developed in the field of environmental politics. Responding to a broader social discourse about global governance that stressed a need for innovative forms of cooperation among different societal sectors, this organizational field gained in legitimacy and strength. A set of commonly accepted core norms, the increasing density of interaction among the field's members, and the success and legitimacy ascribed to the field's key players by the outside world helped to solidify the organizational field until it eventually developed a 'life of its own'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a conceptual framework for the systematic analysis of the interaction between international institutions as a first step towards building a theory of international interaction. It examines how international institutions may exert causal influence on each other's development and effectiveness and suggests that four general causal mechanisms can elucidate the distinct routes through which influence travels from one institution to another. Institutional interaction can thus rely on transfer of knowledge, commitments established under an institution, behavioural effects of an institution, and functional linkage of the ultimate governance targets of the institutions involved. The article also puts forward hypotheses about the likely effects of specific types of institutional interaction for governance within the international system. The causal mechanisms and types of interaction are mutually exclusive models that help analyse real-world interaction situations. They may also serve as a basis for the systematic analysis of more complex interaction situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The WTO's decision-making model of executive multilateralism has been widely criticized for its lack of accountability to civil society. However, through the mechanism of the amicus curiae brief, non- government organizations and other civil society actors have found a way of directly ‘inserting’ the public interest concerns of civil society into the dispute resolution arm of the WTO, which has proved to be more amenable to ‘critical public reason’ than the trade negotiation arm. This article critically explores both the text and context of the amicus briefs submitted in the transatlantic biotech dispute and highlights their role in generating a green cosmopolitan public sphere that seeks more reflexive modernization and facilitates horizontal forms of regime accountability. Cosmopolitan public spheres are conceptualized as specialized, intermediary structures, with multiple strategic and communicative functions, that mediate between supra-national governance structures and regional and domestic civil societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]