This timely new title examines the importance and impact of major international organizations and their role in global governance. International Organizations in World Politics focuses on the most influential IOs, including the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization. For each organization, author Tamar Gutner describes their birth and evolution, governance structure, activities, and performance. A second chapter on each organization presents a case study that illuminates the constraints and challenges each IO faces. Regional organizations and issues are also examined, including the European Union and the euro crisis, as well as a case study on the African Union’s peace operations.

This timely new title examines the importance and impact of major international organizations and their role in global governance. International Organizations in World Politics focuses on the most influential IOs, including the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization. For each organization, author Tamar Gutner describes their birth and evolution, governance structure, activities, and performance. A second chapter on each organization presents a case study that illuminates the constraints and challenges each IO faces. Regional organizations and issues are also examined, including the European Union and the euro crisis, as well as a case study on the African Union’s peace operations.

At a time when greater transparency is needed, this book advances a novel explanation of America's efforts to advance greater transparency in international relations. Marquardt argues that American statesmen have long sought to secure an American-dominated international system to encourage states to be more open and forthcoming about their internal affairs. Yet the United States routinely uses its calls for military transparency in particular as a policy instrument to discipline its rivals and therefore paradoxically contributes to greater tension in international relations. In contrast to conventional thinking about transparency in relation to overcoming power politics and promoting international cooperation, this book explores the relationship between America's power and international security competition. Though analytically distinct, openness and transparency have served the same strategic goal; ensuring America's position of preponderance in the international system.

For more than twenty years, Global Environmental Politics has provided an up-to-date, accurate, and unbiased introduction to the world's most pressing environmental issues. This new edition continues this tradition while covering critical new developments in the field. Through case studies on key issues such as climate change, toxic chemicals, and biodiversity loss, the authors detail the development of major environmental regimes. With new material on the adoption of global Sustainable Development Goals and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development; the December 2015 Paris Climate Change conference; and recent meetings of major conventions on desertification, biological diversity, and more; the authors present a comprehensive overview of contemporary international environmental politics. Global Environmental Politics is vital reading for any student wishing to understand the current state of the field and to make informed decisions about which policies might best safeguard our environment for the future.

From Rwanda to Somalia to the former Yugoslavia, one feature of the post-Cold War world has become dreadfully clear. Ethnic conflicts are escalating, and with them demands for international intervention. But legally most ethnic conflicts are "internal" matters. How are international organizations, their resources stretched woefully thin, to know when intervention is appropriate or possible? This volume addresses the changing nature of relations between war-torn multiethnic states and international organizations, particularly the United Nations and its agencies. Are the established norms that limit intervention in ethnic conflicts adequate to contemporary conditions? Can international organizations meet the increasing demand? If not, what are the consequences of the disparities between established norms, current capabilities, and expanding expectations—and how might these disparities be narrowed? The contributors explore the desirability and potential effectiveness of international interventions in ethnic conflicts. Detailed studies of two specific cases of severe and violent tensions, in Lebanon and Yugoslavia, complement the general discussion with particular insights into the risks and exigencies of international attempts to manage ethnic civil war. A deeply thoughtful overview of one of the most pressing and perplexing issues confronting the world today, this volume clarifies the changing role of international organizations in an increasingly fragmented world.

This book aspires to establish a dialogue among the studies of sustainable development, global environmental politics, comparative regionalism, and area studies of Eurasia. The chapters in this book reflect deep knowledge of the authors of the main trends in environmental politics at global, international, and national levels before the invasion in Ukraine in 2022. First, the book looks into the role and impact of international organizations such as the European Union (EU), European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Arctic Council (AC,) and Global Forums on Climate Action on post-Communist states, but also the role of nation-states (e.g., Russia, Kazakhstan, and China). Second, the book explores relatively new international organizations, such as the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), the Eurasian Development Bank, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). How do the EAEU, EDB, and the SCO matter, if at all, in promoting an environmental agenda? How do the EU, EBRD, and the AC advance the environmental agenda across the post-Communist region? This book aspires to answer these questions and to shed more light on the challenges to sustainable development in post-Communist Europe, Central Asia, and Eurasia. With a new foreword and afterword, this book will appeal to students, scholars and researchers of political science, international relations, area-studies as well as practitioners and policymakers working in international organizations and dealing with challenges of sustainable development. The other chapters were originally published as a special issue of Problems of Post-Communism.

Characterizes the three distinct types of informal governance and provides a normative assessment of them.

The study of international relations, has traditionally been dominated by Western ideas and practices, and marginalized the voice and experiences of the non-Western states and societies. As the world moves to a "post-Western" era, it is imperative that the field of IR acquires a more global meaning and relevance. Drawing together the work of renowned scholar Amitav Acharya and framed by a new introduction and conclusion written for the volume, this book exposes the narrow meaning currently attached to some of the key concepts and ideas in IR, and calls for alternative and broader understandings of them. The need for recasting the discipline has motivated and undergirded Acharya's own scholarship since his entry into the field over three decades ago. This book reflects his own engagement, quarrels and compromise and concludes with suggestions for new pathways to a Global IR- a forward-looking and inclusive enterprise that is reflective of the multiple and global heritage of IR in an changing and interconnected world. It is essential reading for anyone who is concerned about the history, development and future of international relations and international relations theory.

International Organizations (IOs) are important actors within global social governance. They provide forums for exchange, contention and cooperation about social policies. Our knowledge about the involvement of IOs varies significantly by policy fields, and we know comparatively little about the specific roles of IOs in social policies. This volume enhances and systematizes our understanding of IOs in global social governance. It provides studies on a variety of social policy fields in which different, but also the same, IOs operate. The chapters shed light on IO involvement in a particular social policy field by describing the population of participating IOs; exploring how a particular global social policy field is constituted as a whole, and which dominant IOs set the trends. The contributors also examine the discourse within, and between, these IOs on the respective social policies. As such, this first-of-its kind book contributes to research on social policy and international relations, both in terms of theoretical substantiation and empirical scope.

This unique handbook brings together a team of leading scholars and practitioners in order to map, synthesize and assess key perspectives on cooperation and rivalry between regional and global organizations in world politics. For the first time, a variety of inter-disciplinary theoretical and conceptual perspectives are combined in order to assess the nature, processes and outcomes of inter-organizational partnerships and rivalries across major policy areas, such as peace and security, human rights and democratisation as well as finance, development and climate change . This text provides scholars, students and policy-makers of International Relations with an exhaustive reference book for understanding the theoretical and empirical dimensions of an increasingly important topic in International Relations (IR), Global Governance and related disciplines.