European Journal of International Relations

Whose preferences influence the design of international institutions? Scholarship on the legalization of international politics and creation of international legal institutions largely adopts a state-centric perspective. Existing accounts, however, fail to recognize how states often delegate authority over institutional design tasks to independent legal experts whose preferences may diverge from those of states. We develop a principal-agent (PA) framework for theorizing relations between states (collective principals) and legal actors (agents) in the design process, and for explaining how legal actors influence the design of international institutions...

The current binary understanding of membership in international organizations (IOs), especially regional organizations (ROs), creates blind spots and biases in our understanding of who matters in IOs, as well as why and how they matter. Existing scholarship primarily looks at full member-states or non-state actors to capture who influences such organizations. Associated states are often portrayed as passive receivers of IO rules instead of active contributors. We address this blind spot and resulting analytical bias by exploring what types of association relationships exist and how they impact IOs...

Technocratic intergovernmentalism has undermined the preconditions for its own success as a democratic project of transnational cooperation. It has triggered populist reactions within nation states and helped to discredit the intermediary institutions (parties and parliaments) that connect democratic will-formation and joint decision-making. This rise of populism and its alignment with nationalism, in consequence, hampers joint decision-making in the international realm. We argue that representative democracies can overcome the negative spiral between technocratic intergovernmentalism and nationalist populism by mutually granting their citizens the right to elect representatives not only in their domestic parliament, but also in the parliaments of 'consociated democracies'...

What accounts for overarching trajectories of civil wars? This article develops an account of civil war as a social process that connects dynamics of conflict from pre- to post-war periods through evolving interactions between nonstate, state, civilian, and external actors involved. It traces these dynamics to the mobilization and organization of nascent nonstate armed groups before the war, which can induce state repression and in some settings escalation of tensions through radicalization of actors, militarization of tactics, and polarization of societies, propelled by internal divisions and external support...

Violence after civil war is a challenge to sustainable peace. Many armed conflicts today are recurrences of previous wars and much of the literature on violence after war explains why armed groups return to the battlefield. But even if peace prevails, many other types of violence take place in postwar environments. This postwar violence is likewise subject to a growing multidisciplinary literature. Using citation network analysis, we show that research on war recurrence and postwar violence has developed in relative isolation from each other-although these phenomena are interrelated...

The transnationalization and digitization of economic activity has undermined the quality of official economic statistics, which still center on national territories and material production. Why do we not witness more vigorous efforts to bring statistical standards in line with present-day economic realities, or admissions that precision in economic data has become increasingly illusive? The paradoxical answer, we argue, lies in the norms underpinning global statistical practice. Users expect statistics to draw on unambiguous sources, to allow for comparison over time and across countries, and they prize coherence-both internally and with holistic macroeconomic models...

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...

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...

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...

The United Nations Security Council passed its first resolution on children in armed conflict in 1999, making it one of the oldest examples of Security Council engagement with a thematic mandate and leading to the creation of a dedicated working group in 2005. Existing theoretical accounts of the Security Council cannot account for the developing substance of the children and armed conflict agenda as they are macro-oriented and focus exclusively on states. I argue that Security Council decision-making on thematic mandates is a productive process whose outcomes are created by and through practices of actors across the three United Nations: member states (the first United Nations), United Nations officials (the second United Nations) and non-governmental organizations (the third United Nations)...

What drives processes of institution building within regional international organizations? We challenge those established theories of regionalism, and of institutionalized cooperation more broadly, that treat different organizations as independent phenomena whose evolution is conditioned primarily by internal causal factors. Developing the basic premise of 'diffusion theory' - meaning that decision-making is interdependent across organizations - we argue that institutional pioneers, and specifically the European Union, shape regional institution-building processes in a number of discernible ways...

Practice theory provides important insights into the workings of the Security Council. The contribution is currently limited, however, by the conjecture that practice theory operates on 'a different analytical plane' to norm/normative theory. Building on existing critiques, we argue that analysing practices separately from normative positions risks misappropriating competence and reifying practice that is not fit for purpose. This risk is realized in Adler-Nissen and Pouliot's practice-based account of the Libya crisis...

The practice of contemporary warfare seems to be plagued by scandal. It is often assumed that the act of bearing witness to these moments of ethical failure, in which the relationship between the martial and the ethical breaks down, plays an important role in holding powerful actors to account for their conduct. Considerable faith has been placed in the role of transparency and truth-telling as foundations for normative engagements with war. This article argues that we must be cautious about this investment...

Neoliberalism is widely regarded as the main culprit for the 2007/2008 global financial crisis. However, despite this abysmal failure, neoliberalism has not merely survived the crisis, but actually 'thrived'. How is it possible to account for the resilience of neoliberalism? Existing scholarship has answered this question either by focusing on the distinctive qualities of neoliberalism (such as adaptability, internal coherence and capacity to incorporate dissent) or on the biopolitical capacity of neoliberalism to produce resilient subjects...

Contemporary rising powers have often pursued a hesitant and ambiguous foreign-policy and have belied the expectations of potential followers and established powers who would want them to engage more actively in global and regional governance. The existing analytical toolbox of International Relations does not offer suitable concepts to make sense of the widespread phenomenon of states that pursue hesitant, inconsistent courses of action and do not bring to bear their power resources to coherently manage international crises that potentially affect them...

Despite long-standing allegations of UK involvement in prisoner abuse during counterterrorism operations as part of the US-led 'war on terror', a consistent narrative emanating from British government officials is that Britain neither uses, condones nor facilitates torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and punishment. We argue that such denials are untenable. We have established beyond reasonable doubt that Britain has been deeply involved in post-9/11 prisoner abuse, and we can now provide the most detailed account to date of the depth of this involvement...

A global extinction crisis may threaten the survival of most existing life forms. Influential discourses of 'existential risk' suggest that human extinction is a real possibility, while several decades of evidence from conservation biology suggests that the Earth may be entering a 'sixth mass extinction event'. These conditions threaten the possibilities of survival and security that are central to most branches of International Relations. However, this discipline lacks a framework for addressing (mass) extinction...

Cosmopolitans often argue that the international community has a humanitarian responsibility to intervene militarily in order to protect vulnerable individuals from violent threats and to pursue the establishment of a condition of cosmopolitan justice based on the notion of a 'global rule of law'. The purpose of this article is to argue that many of these cosmopolitan claims are incomplete and untenable on cosmopolitan grounds because they ignore the systemic and chronic structural factors that underwrite the root causes of these humanitarian threats...

The European Union is facing multiple challenges. Departing from mainstream theory, this article adopts a fresh approach to understanding integration. It does so by taking two theoretical steps. The first introduces the structure-agency debate in order to make explicit the relationship between macro-structures, the institutional arrangements at European Union level and agency. The second proposes that the state of integration should be understood as the outcome of contestation between competing hegemonic projects that derive from underlying social processes and that find their primary expression in domestic politics...

This article develops a poststructuralist critique of the historical sociology of International Relations project. While the historical sociology of International Relations project claims to offer a more nuanced understanding of the state and the international, this article argues that it lacks critical reflection on the notion of a common ground on which 'history' and 'sociology' can successfully be combined. In order to problematize this 'ground', the article turns to Jacques Derrida's critique of attempts to solve the history-structure dichotomy by finding a perfect combination of historicist and structuralist modes of explanation...