POL 30820: International Organizations

This book offers a comprehensive examination of international organizations shaping global policy. Covering intergovernmental and nongovernmental bodies, it explores history, functions, internal governance, and issues spanning trade, health, and peace operations. Essays by leading scholars illuminate practical operations and conceptual tensions between nations, international authority, law, and politics, benefiting academics and practitioners.

This book analyzes how international organizations use depoliticization to appear apolitical while remaining politically active. Through diverse case studies, it reveals how professional habits, cultures, and individual tactics create overlapping practices that obscure political action. Offering a new analytical framework, it illuminates the hidden political dimensions of IOs’ everyday operations.

What is the role of international organizations in the international political system? The fourth edition of Clive Archer's widely used textbook continues to provide students with an introduction to international organizations, exploring their rise and development, and accounts for their significance in the modern international political system. International Organizations fourth edition: has been fully updated to take into account the considerable developments in the field since the last edition was published in 2001. continues to offer a unique concise yet comprehensive approach, offering students an accessible and manageable introduction to this core part of international relations. offers an authoritative guide to the literature about international organizations and provides advice on further reading.

Why do states exit international organizations (IOs)? How often does exit from IOs - including voluntary withdrawal and forced suspension - occur? What are the effects of leaving IOs for the exiting state? Despite the importance of membership in IOs, a broader understanding of exit across states, organizations, and time has been limited. Exit from International Organizations addresses these lacunae through a theoretically grounded and empirically systematic study of IO exit. Von Borzyskowski and Vabulas argue that there is a common logic to IO exit which helps explain both its causes and consequences. By examining IO exit across 198 states, 534 IOs, and over a hundred years of history, they show that exit is driven by states' dissatisfaction, preference divergence, and is a strategy to negotiate institutional change. The book also demonstrates that exit is costly because it has reputational consequences for leaving states and significantly affects other forms of international cooperation.

This book addresses how international organizations with a global reach, such as the UN and the WTO, have changed the mechanisms and reasoning behind the making, implementation, and enforcement of international law. Alvarez argues that existing descriptions of international law and international organizations do not do justice to the complex changes resulting from the increased importance of these institutions after World War II, and especially from changes after the end of the Cold War. In particular, this book examines the impact of the institutions on international law through the day to day application and interpretation of institutional law, the making of multilateral treaties, and the decisions of a proliferating number of institutionalized dispute settlers.

This book's statistical and legal analyses of international organizations' constitutions reveal new interpretations of international organizations law. It provides a map of international organizations' values, and a healthy start towards fully understanding that map, thereby helping global governance take a quantum leap forward.

Scholars have studied international organizations (IOs) in many disciplines, thus generating important theoretical developments. What are the concrete methodological challenges when doing research on IOs? This book compiles an inventory of the methods developed in the study of IOs under the five headings of Observing, Interviewing, Documenting, Measuring, and Combining. It does not reconcile diverging views on the purpose and meaning of IO scholarship, but creates a space for scholars and students embedded in different academic traditions to reflect on methodological choices and the way they impact knowledge production on IOs.