This chapter looks at the assumption that there is a relationship in world politics between international organization and peaceful change. That premise is the working hypothesis behind many of the chapters in this book, and it provides the justification for the scholarly search for empirical patterns between IOs and change. When international relations is assumed to be comprised of a mechanical ontology (causal mechanisms that lead from initial conditions to predictable effects), then it makes sense to employ a scientific methodology indebted to Isaac Newton. But the shifty concepts of world politics, such as conflict, peace, change, and stability, are not well-suited to machine-like regularity. Concepts such as change are subjective or ambiguous and hence make for poor variables. The chapter examines the gap between methodology and ontology that emerges in the effort to find causal mechanisms that link the practice of international organization to the outcomes of peaceful change.

This chapter explains the legal and political features of the United Nations. It begins with a short introduction to the UN Charter, which shows the framework of international law that defines, limits and empowers the organisation. It then puts these into a more practical setting, which emphasises how the United Nations is at the same time an actor, a forum and a resource for governments.

The distinctive features of regional organizations arise from the fact that they strive to integrate a smaller set of countries but they often aim to reach across a wider range of substantive issues than the other international organizations in this book. The regional organizations in this chapter are vastly different from each other but they face the same challenge of integrating members on an almost limitless range of policies. They approach this challenge diversely: the EU has created powerful central authorities, including a bureaucracy and a legal hierarchy between the center and the member states; in contrast, the AU, ASEAN, and the OAS leave most powers of decision in the hands of meetings of their heads of government. These are more typical of regional international organizations in that they could in theory make forceful collective decisions but in practice their main contribution is as a forum in which intergovernmental negotiation takes place.

The WTO is founded on commitments that governments make to each other in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. These rules provide a structure for international trade in which governments are generally restricted in when they can raise tariffs on imports and whether they can discriminate among their trading partners. This chapter examines the contemporary framework for international trade and its main rules, including national treatment, bound tariffs, and most-favored nation, as well as the WTO’s dispute settlement process. The Shrimp-Turtle case provides an illustration of how these rules interact with international politics to create new political dynamics.

The biggest sports events in the world are the Olympics and the World Cup soccer tournament. These huge multinational spectacles are constructed around nationality: competitors represent their countries, each country gets one team, and national rivalries are encouraged. The Olympics and World Cup are remarkable examples of international cooperation and governance. And yet the organizations most responsible for global sports are not public international organizations. They are not public entities at all. The largest global sports spectacles, including the Olympics, the World Cup, the Tour de France, and many others, are controlled by private organizations that have governmental power in the sense that they regulate and constitute the domain of global sports. They have ultimate authority over who participates and on what terms. Their decision-making is usually invisible to the public and comes into view only at moments of unusual controversy such as the doping scandals and corruption. This chapter examines FIFA, the International Olympic Committee, and the Court of Arbitration for Sport. These are the private global agencies responsible for the football World Cup, the Olympic Games, and dispute resolution within the global sports domain.

The WHO is designed to take advantage of the benefits of cooperation on health. It provides a loosely centralized agency where governments can share information about health and threats to health and get assistance in dealing with both new emergencies and long-running problems. COVID-19 provides an illustration of the WHO’s capacity and limits in the face of new threats to health. More than any other organization in this book, the WHO has taken on partnerships with private organizations to fund and organize its programs, and the organization therefore provides an intriguing illustration of the hybridization of global authority between public agencies and private foundations.

The ICC launched in 2002 to judge cases against individuals accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. It is unique among international institutions in this book in that it imposes its obligations upon individual persons rather than governments. This chapter shows the powers and limits on the authority of the ICC to punish people for large-scale atrocities. The practical power of the ICC is shaped by both the difficulty of apprehending people and the active work of those who wish to remain insulated from accountability.

The ILO was created in a period of globalization in the early nineteenth century to help governments agree on health and safety protections for workers. These labor standards were renewed after World War II and today the ILO is the primary global agency at the interface where governments and labor meet on a global scale. This chapter looks at the authority of the ILO in both theory and practice. The theory is provided by the legal texts of the ILO’s conventions and agreements, and a case study on Myanmar’s long-running violations of the rules provides insight into some of the lived experience of the rules.

International organizations are established by international treaties that set out their powers and limits and the obligations toward international institutions even though few such institutions have the power to enforce their decisions. The politics of international organizations therefore arises in the dynamic between obligation, compliance, and enforcement.

This chapter describes the IMF and the World Bank, the two big international financial institutions created after World War II to stabilize the global economy. The two have similar goals and mechanisms but work with different instruments and in different contexts. Both pool the resources of their members and use the money it raises to make loans to governments with specific needs. The IMF lends to countries experiencing critical balance-of-payments problems. It makes short-term loans of foreign currencies that the borrowing country must use to finance the stabilization of its own currency or monetary system. As a precondition to the loan, the Fund generally requires that the borrower change its policies in ways that the Fund believes will enable monetary stability in future. The World Bank makes longer-term loans to pay for specific projects related to development or poverty reduction. Most Bank loans are tied to a particular project undertaken by the borrowing government. The Bank and the Fund are twinned institutions in the sense that they share a common origin and many structural features, but their practices and purposes are very different. As a result, they contrast each other in ways that are useful for exploring the mix of law and politics in global affairs.

The ICJ is the primary court for legal disputes among governments. It hears cases in which one country claims that another country has violated its obligations under international law. This chapter introduces the ICJ by examining its legal foundation in the Statute of the ICJ, and shows its powers and limits in practice by looking at the cases of Belgium v. Congo (on genocide) and Australia v. Japan (on rights and obligations for whale hunting under the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling).

This chapter examines the law and politics of migration and refugees in global governance. Most governments are committed to an international refugee regime that requires them to welcome and support refugees, but also many governments wish to prevent refugees and other migrants from crossing borders into their countries. This contradiction provides fuel for legal and political disputes, with migrants bearing the human costs. The dynamics illustrate ways in which legal obligations and politics preferences weave around and through each other, sometimes in conflict, sometimes together, in surprising combinations.

The United Nations was designed to be the central world institution for peace and security, with the Security Council at its core. This chapter looks at the law and history of the UN’s role in international peace and security, along with the secondary role played by the General Assembly. The Security Council is at the intersection of law, politics, and enforcement in world politics. The chapter looks at the formal powers given to the Security Council in the UN Charter and then examines how the practical life of the Council since 1945 has been both more than and less than what the Charter says. Case studies of mass killings in Sudan, Rwanda, and Syria show the limits of Council power under the influence of the US, Russia, and other powerful governments.