Effectiveness Of International Institutions Research Articles

International institutions in the mechanism for the protection of human rights and freedoms in the national security context

The objective of the article was to determine how effective international institutions are in the mechanism for the protection of human rights and freedoms in the context of national security. The methods of statistical analysis, correlation analysis, generalization and analogy, hypothetical-deductive model were used to achieve the proposed objective. In addition, international institutions were identified that are directly concerned with the protection of rights and freedoms in the event of their violations at the regional level. The correlation was established between the level of human rights protection and the level of national security, the number of international human rights treaties ratified, the number of cases brought before international regional human rights courts. It concludes that international institutions are effective in the mechanism for the protection of human rights and freedoms in regions with a weak national system for the protection of human rights and freedoms. Identifying factors affecting the level of protection of human rights and freedoms in the context of national security in countries with a weak national protection system may be the prospect of further investigation.

Beyond Gridlock: How Global Governance Continues to Shape our World

Abstract In 2013, Thomas Hale, the late David Held and Kevin Young published Gridlock. Their book made sense of a widely shared perception. The edifice of global governance, this perception suggested, had begun to crumble under a range of pressures. The empirical evidence that lay beneath this perception was puzzling not only in a normative, but also in an analytical sense. It did not seem to match the demand for international institutions, which was the most central factor scholars pointed to when they had to explain the emergence, changes and effects of international institutions. The subtitle of Hale, Held and Young’s neatly summarised what was at stake. What had to be explained was ‘why global cooperation is failing when we need it most’. The three titles reviewed in this essay challenge this view. They suggest that many international organisations continue to do their everyday work (Dolowitz et al.), that many informal global governance institutions have been added (Roger), and that various forms of ‘ebb and flow’ have been a constant in global governance since 1850 (Grigorescu).

Environmental issue linkage as an electoral advantage: the case of NAFTA

Why would some legislators alter their votes on trade agreements in return for environmental side agreements that may be hard to enforce? While numerous studies have examined the effects of side agreements, few have evaluated their impact on legislators’ positions on a trade agreement over time. This paper examines the effects of the environmental side deal attached to NAFTA, with novel time-series survey data that captures the evolution of House members’ positions on NAFTA during discussion and finalization of the environmental side of the free trade agreement. I find that pro-environmental legislators in safe districts tended to withdraw their support for NAFTA once the side deal was agreed upon, whereas those in competitive districts stood their ground and increased their support in the final stage of voting. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I find little evidence that the side deal assuaged legislators in import-competing districts. This article shows how the effectiveness of international institutions is moderated in important ways by electoral considerations.

What kills international organisations? When and why international organisations terminate

This article addresses the puzzle of why, and under what conditions, international organisations cease to exist. International Relations literature offers rich explanations for the creation, design and effectiveness of international institutions and their organisational embodiments, international organizations (IOs), but surprisingly little effort has gone into studying the dynamics of IO termination. Yet if we want to understand the conditions under which international organisations endure, we must also explain why they frequently fail to do so. The article formulates and tests a theory of ‘IO death’ using a combination of population-wide statistical analysis and detailed historical case studies. My analysis is based on an original dataset covering the period 1815–2016. I find that exogenous shocks are a leading proximate cause of IO terminations since 1815 and that organisations that are newly created, have small memberships, and/or lack centralised structures are most likely to succumb. My analysis leads me to suggest a number of extensions and refinements to existing institutionalist theories.

Ліберальний міжнародний порядок: «реалії» втілення тa концептуальне бачення.

Formation of the international order in order to prevent the threat of war start at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, the liberal principles as a program have been proclaimed in the well-known «Fourteen Points» by US President W. Wilson. However, they have not become a liberal benchmark for most authoritarian politicians, especially during the interwar era. Only after the end of the Second World War they were important elements of a liberal model that envisioned openness of markets, the effectiveness of international institutions and the resolution of conflicts, based on international law.However, this approach was a definite cover for the two-pole world and lasted until the early 1990s, when the United States made the leap for global hegemony. Today, international liberal practices have failed and in a multipolarity situation – with China’s rise and with the further sovereignty of Russia, as well as American allies – Britain and some Central European states, only new geopolitical arrangements of the leading powers will be able to protect the world from the threat of wars and conflicts.In the middle term, a long-lasting negotiation process is possible, the consequence of which will probably be the achievement of a new liberal-conservative global consensus.

From Public International to International Public Law: Translating World Public Opinion into International Public Authority

This article argues that increasing demands in world public opinion for legitimate and effective international institutions require a paradigm shift in public international law. There is a part of public international law that should be better understood as international public law because it enables and disciplines the pursuit of public interests by international institutions. We consider such activities as exercises of international public authority. The article elaborates our approach by way of a thorough discussion of other approaches to governance phenomena in international legal scholarship. It then carves out the notion of international public authority. This notion includes various types of soft and informal governance instruments with innovative compliance mechanisms as well as the activities of informal and hybrid institutions or network-like structures.

What the Framework Convention on Climate Change Teaches Us About Cooperation on Climate Change

Arild Underdal has been at the center of an important community of scholars studying global environmental governance. Since the 1990s that community, along with many other scholars globally, has offered important insights into the design and management of international institutions that can lead to more effective management of environmental problems. At the same time, diplomats have made multiple attempts to create institutions to manage the dangers of climate change. This essay looks at what has been learned by both communities—scholars and practitioners—as their efforts co-evolved. It appears that despite a wealth of possible insights into making cooperation effective very few of the lessons offered by scholars had much impact during the first two decades of climate change diplomacy. Indeed, basic concepts from cooperation theory and evidence from case studies—many developed in Arild’s orbit—can explain why those two decades achieved very little real cooperation. The new Paris agreement may be changing all that and much better reflects insights from scholars about how to build effective international institutions. Success in the Paris process is far from assured and scholars can contribute a lot more with a more strategic view of when and how they have an impact.

Book Review: Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation is Failing When We Need It Most. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.

In Gridlock, Thomas Hale, David Held and Kevin Young argue that the previous successes of international cooperation, by facilitating peace and fostering economic linkages, have deepened interdependence to the point where international cooperation is now more difficult. That suggests that global governance successfully dealt with problems it was initially designed to address, but failed to address problems which have emerged from their very existence. Put differently, interdependence not only creates a demand for international institutions, but effective international institutions also create a structure that, in turn, generates an even stronger interdependence.DOI: 10.20424/2237-7743/bjir.v4n3p694-699

International Relations Theories and International Law

This brief essay describes the main approaches to explaining international relations and how they might be useful in understanding international law.As used in academic discourse in the United States, international relations (IR) theory is a sub-field of political science that applies the methods of modern social science to develop and test hypotheses identifying the causes of “outcomes” that occur in world — as opposed to domestic — politics. The most important outcome is war (or peace); other outcomes of interest are alliances, treaties, varying levels of international trade, and the creation or effectiveness of international institutions like the United Nations (UN) and the International Criminal Court (ICC). A useful abstraction is to characterize all international outcomes along one spectrum of cooperation and conflict, with perpetual world peace on one end and no-holds-barred world war on the other. The term “international relations” is commonly used in non-academic settings to refer to the international outcomes that the eponymous discipline seeks primarily to explain and secondarily to predict.

Cutting the Gordian knot of economic reform: when and how international institutions help

Why do leaders of countries opt to sign on to international institutions that constrain their freedom to enact domestic policy? In this book, Leonardo Baccini and Johannes Urpelainen address this enduring question of international relations by looking at liberal economic reforms. During the past two decades, governments across the developing world have implemented many liberal economic reforms that reduce direct state intervention in different industries, for example with regard to intellectual property rights and privatization. While failure to implement them can have disastrous economic and political consequences, liberal economic reforms have also provoked intense political controversy domestically. Baccini and Urpelainen argue that international institutions help to cut this Gordian knot by allowing leaders to credibly commit to liberal policies while also creating domestic political support for reform. The book takes a comparative look at developing countries that have engaged in treaties with the United States and European Union to develop a full theory of when and how leaders enter into international institutions to effect economic reform. Cutting the Gordian Knot of Economic Reform is the first work to provide a theory on the design of international institutions, the circumstances that cause leaders to form international institutions, and the effects of international institutions on economic reform. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/politicalscience/9780199388998/toc.html

Clash of the treaties: Responding to institutional interplay in European Community–Chile swordfish negotiations

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.

States Held Hostage: Political Hold-Up Problems and the Effects of International Institutions

This paper argues that the benefits of international institutions accrue disproportionately to pairs of states that find cooperation most difficult. It determines which states achieve the greatest gains from these institutions by identifying a central reason that states fail to cooperate in international relations: they fear being “held up” by other states for political concessions. Political hold-up problems occur when one state fails to undertake an otherwise productive investment due to the increased ability it would give another state to extract political concessions. Focusing on the World Trade Organization (WTO), I demonstrate that political hold-up problems are pervasive in international relations due to links between economic and political policies, but that international institutions can solve hold-up problems by helping to enforce agreements. I first formalize this argument and then empirically test the implications derived from the model, finding that the WTO increases trade most for politically dissimilar states by reducing states' abilities to hold up their trading partners for foreign policy concessions. I provide evidence of the causal mechanism by showing that WTO membership increases trade in contract-intensive goods and boosts fixed capital investment. I conclude that by solving political hold-up problems, international institutions can normalize relations between politically asymmetric states that differ in terms of capabilities, regime types, and alliances.

Implemented Institutional Design and Conflict

This convincing examination of the effect of regional economic organizations (REOs) on conflict mitigation emphasizes an idea often overlooked: The heterogeneity of international organizations is important for understanding their effect. In Regional Economic Institutions and Conflict Mitigation, Yoram Haftel builds off two prominent debates: the effect of international institutions (e.g., Mearsheimer 1994/1995; Keohane and Martin 1995; Martin and Simmons 1998) and, more importantly, whether these bodies mitigate conflict (e.g., Russett, Oneal, and Davis 1998; Bearce and Omori 2005). Haftel advances the understanding of the dynamic relationship between international organizations and conflict by delving into the micro-foundations associated with the conflict-mitigating effect of REOs. His argument is grounded in the premise that the characteristics of REOs vary and, as a result, their effects on mitigating conflict will differ. By disaggregating the components of the institutions to understand their individual and combined effects, this excellent book persuasively adds nuance to these debates by moving beyond the question of whether or not institutions matter in mitigating conflict to assess the conditions under which they do.

The Informative Power of Treaty Commitment: Using the Spatial Model to Address Selection Effects

The effects of international institutions on state behavior make up a key research agenda in international‐relations scholarship. Because states self‐select into treaties, we cannot infer that these commitments have causal effects unless we address this selection effect. I explain the significant limitations of the methods used thus far to overcome this problem and argue that a more effective approach must take into account states’ treaty preferences. I describe a novel combination of ideal‐point estimation and propensity‐score matching that can estimate the probabilities of treaty commitment and use them to test hypotheses. I use this procedure to test the effects of three key international human‐rights treaties. My results provide significant new findings regarding the effects of these important agreements. I show that the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women has significantly improved respect for women's rights, but that the Convention against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights have not had significant effects on human rights.

The Informative Power of Treaty Commitment: Using the Spatial Model to Address Selection Effects

The effects of international institutions on state behavior make up a key research agenda in international relations scholarship. Because states self-select into treaties, we cannot infer that these commitments have causal effects unless we address this selection effect. I explain the significant limitations of the methods used thus far to overcome this problem and argue that a more effective approach must take into account states' treaty preferences. I describe a novel combination of ideal point estimation and propensity score matching that can estimate the probabilities of treaty commitment and use them to test hypotheses. I use this procedure to the test the effects of three key international human rights treaties. My results provide significant new findings regarding the effects of these important agreements.

Space Governance and International Cooperation

Obama Administration officials have indicated that international cooperation will play a greater role in their national space policy than it did during the Bush Administration. But they have not provided a clear and consistent logic specifying why the United States wants more space cooperation, what types of cooperation it will pursue, and how it will convince other countries to agree on, and comply with, accords that produce the desired policy results. Instead, their policy about space cooperation mixes elements from three different and somewhat contradictory strategic logics: a “Global Commons” logic, a “Strategic Stability” logic, and a “Space Governance for Global Security” logic. While each logic has attractive features, the Global Commons logic is unlikely to achieve significant results in a short period of time, while the Strategic Stability logic is more likely to promote competition, rather than cooperation. Following the Space Governance for Global Security logic could yield much larger dividends by using positive and negative forms of space cooperation to gain widespread support for the equitable rules and effective international institutions needed to address the central challenges identified by the 2010 National Security Strategy.

Welfare Improvement through International Cooperation as Justification for International Institutions in Global Governance

In this paper we study the welfare improvement effects of international institutions which represent a system of rules used to execute international cooperation. We show that international institutions can improve welfare in the case of providing international public goods and regulating cross-border externality (CBE). This paper consists of two parts. In the first part we study the welfare-improving effects of international cooperation to provide international public goods. Two criteria are used to classify international public goods and analyse the welfare improvement effects of international cooperation: (a) inclusiveness/exclusiveness and (b) crowding/no crowding. In the second part we study the welfare improvement effect of international cooperation to regulate CBE. Two criteria are used to classify cross-border externalities for a detail analysis: (a) impacts of CBE and (b) two groups of countries, i.e. initial (player) country and other (players) countries.

The Design and Performance of Regional Institutions

collaborative attempt by a group of well-known scholars to use their in-depth knowledge of particular cases to evaluate, challenge, and expand upon a conceptual framework known as the rational design of international (RDII) research program (Koremenos, Lipson, and Snidai 2001). The Achaiya and Johnston volume takes as its jumping off point the observation that there is significant variation both in the design and performance of regional economic and security institutions across the globe. The collaborators seek to describe and explain variation in design, and then to evaluate the effects of design choices on institutional efficacy. Achaiya and Johnston explain in their introductory chapter to the volume that while they build heavily on the RDII research program, they find three limitations in existing work: (1) a lack of focus on the effect of variance in institutional design on the effectiveness of cooperation; (2) a lack of focus on ideational variables; and (3) a lack of study of non-Western regional institutions (p. 13). By expanding the focus of RDII in these three ways, they hope to advance understanding of the design and effects of international institutions. The organization of the case studies is primarily by region, with chapter on institutions in southeast Asia, in Latin America, in Africa, and in the Arab world, plus two focusing on primarily European institutions - on NATO and on the EU. This is a very different organizational focus than was used in the Koremenos et al. (2001) volume, where contributors analyzed the design of institutions in particular issue areas. Achaiya and Johnston report that while they provided chapter writers with a list of potentially important independent variables, they explicitly decided against testing deductive hypotheses. The editors conclude that one of the strengths of the project [is] its inductive richness' ' (16). This inductive focus is apparent in the resulting case studies, which provide historical descriptions of the emergence, development, and general success of a wide range of regional organizations and cooperation. The conclusion reached by Achaiya and Johnston from their contributors' case studies is that identity and domestic political (in) security are much more important in explaining variance in both the design of institutions and the effect of institutional design on cooperation than are the types of cooperation problems confronted. Since the explicit focus is on regionally delimited institutions (not on the many institutions that cross regional boundaries), and the case studies mix together institutions aimed at different problems in drawing conclusions about a region's institutions, it is perhaps not surprising that a primary finding of the study is that regional identity shapes these institutions and that the effect of the type of cooperation problem is less apparent.

Aspects of Economic Growth and Globalisation

The process of globalisation started in the 19th century. We have observed a significant change in the global economy since the Industrial Revolution. The Emergence of international institutions such as the UN, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO have contributed to the process of globalistion in the 20th century. At the same time, it is important to consider the role of more effective international institutions in the 21st century. The process of regionalism has contributed to the process of globalisation, as we observe the way countries in Europe are working together with the EU or nations are trying to have more free trade and financial integration under APEC. At the same time, it is important to see effective national institutions in place which are committed ensuring that national policies will be well implemented with the view to ensuring that national and regional governments and institutions are also playing their role in the process of globalisation. Furthermore, individuals as national, as well as, world citizens should play their role in contributing to the effective process of globalisation in such a way that all people and nations could benefit from an increasingly integrated global economy.

The Significance of a World Government in the Process of Globalisation in the 21st Century

This paper discusses the process of globalization and analyses those pressing global issues that have been unresolved due to the lack of an integrated global system and effective international institutions. It highlights a number of global issues that require global ethics and global action. The paper discusses how a globally integrated system, with a world government, a world parliament and a world central bank as its components, is no longer an idealistic concept. The paper highlights the dynamic gains of the transformation of nations and the future of this planet, once an integrated global system is in place. It analyses the challenges overcome during the integration of the US in the 19th century and the process of the formation of the EU in the 20th century. It argues that the creation of a globally integrated system, based on new and effective international institutions would be easier to implement than the formation of the US in the 19th Century or the EU in the 20th century, as we now have technology that did not exist in the 19th century and the process of globalization has already removed many previous financial, technological, cultural, language and other barriers to integration.