Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics

International relations theory has long ago identified a subfield that deals specifically with the existence of international organizations - IOs in the jargon. This field has yielded relatively few insights, and is of little use to the practitioner. Scholars have proposed complex theoretical constructs - "international regimes" - to explain cooperation among states, but they have tended to treat international organizations as mere servants of states' interests, not as actors in their own right. They have very seldom opened the black box to describe what IOs are really like.Now Barnett and Finnemore want to revive the subject by going back to basic questions - what do international organizations do, how do they work - and by using the tools of another discipline, sociology, which has much to say about the behavior of organizations. They begin with an obvious starting point: international organizations are bureaucracies and, as such, they exhibit many of the pathologies that we associate with these large impersonal organizations - their lack of responsiveness, their taste for red tape, their tunnel vision, their mission creep. But bureaucracies also have qualities for which they do not always get credit but that make them an indispensable component of our modern world: their capacity to manage complex tasks in a rational way, their predictability and fairness in the application of general rules, their expertise in the use and production of knowledge, their legitimacy in the pursuit of the common interest.The two authors then lead the reader through a crash course in organizational behavior, starting with scholarly debates about IOs' autonomy, power, dysfunction and change, then moving to the characteristics of modern bureaucracies (hierarchy, continuity, impersonality, expertise) and to the effects of bureaucratic rules (rules as operating procedures, rules as lenses through which problems are defined and classified, rules as creating a world amenable to the intervention of experts, rules as the basis of an organizational culture). Rules of experts "construct" the social world, they help create the world as it is: this is the basic tenet of the "constructivist" school of thought from which this book derives.The authors distinguish between four types of authority that international bureaucracies can wield in their relations with states and other actors: delegated authority, when international organizations act on behalf of states; moral authority, when they represent the interests and values of the international community; expert authority, when knowledge yields power; and rational-legal authority, which is the hallmark of bureaucratic power. These four types of authority - delegated, moral, expert, and rational-legal - have the twin effects of putting IOs "in authority" and of making them "an authority": IOs are often the actors empowered to decide if there is a problem on a particular issue, what kind a problem it is, and whose responsibility it is to solve it.After having developed this theoretical framework, Barnett and Finnemore then move on to present three case studies of international organizations, focusing on their autonomy from states, the way they exercise power, their change processes, and how they sometimes produce inefficient and self-defeating outcomes. They first examine the IMF and the way its economic expertise made ever-increasing intervention in domestic economies seem logical and even necessary to states that had explicitly barred such action in the organization's Articles of Agreements. They then describe how the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) used its authority to expand the concept of refugee and later developed a repatriation culture that led to violations of refugee rights. Finally, they look at the UN Secretariat, the bureaucratization of peacekeeping, and the development of a peacekeeping culture that led the institution to turn a blind eye when crimes against humanity were committed in Rwanda.The book is not exempt from verbose jargon that sometimes makes it a hard read, and from approximations that lead the authors to couch some controversial statements without substantiating them (on the "failure" of IMF programs, for instance). They mostly keep a bird eye's view on the bureaucracies that they study, and fail to describe their inner workings in a meaningful way. They spend too much time discussing chicken-and-egg problems, such as the autonomy of international organizations vis-à-vis the states, and too little on important issues such as leadership or accountability. Their last proposition, that the promotion of democracies and liberalism is more and more dependent on organizations that are neither liberal nor democratic, would in itself have deserved a single volume. Despite its shortcomings, this book is a valuable addition to the field, and one hopes that it may spur further empirical studies on the bureaucracies that increasingly provide rules for the world.

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The book Rules for the World by Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore seeks to understand more fully why international organizations have certain beliefs, and explores the relationship between states and international organizations through three case studies: the International Monetary Fund, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and the failure of UN peacekeeping to prevent the Rwandan genocide. Firstly, I appreciated the link that was made back to the theme of the James Ferguson book: “We are interested in how IO staff come to create and interpret the bureaucratic rules that shape both how they classify and see the world and how they act in it”. This helps situate Rules for the World in the previously existing literature and reaffirms that the pathologies affecting international organizations is a very important issue.I enjoyed Chapter 4 about the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. This chapter shed light on why humanitarian organizations are often unable to accomplish their goal of aiding refugees. The answer lies in the same issue that is discussed in the Ferguson book, which is the flawed bureaucratic rules that the organizations abide by: “This definition’s central feature is its narrowness, a reflection of states’ desire to limit their responsibilities. UNHCR was born as a backward-looking rather than a forward-looking organization, and so it was expected to help those who already were refugees and not future refugees.” (page 81) Similarly to the Ticktin article, this book could be used as a textbook for students studying humanitarianism because it teaches us core themes of international organizations drawn from case studies. One weakness of Rules for the World in my opinion is the structure of the chapters. Each chapter is dedicated to a case study and the authors present the evidence in chronological order. This is more typical of history books than political science books. The arguments would have been clearer to me if the authors had linked back to their research question of “why international organizations believe as they do” throughout the chapters, and if they had broken down the evidence into sections forming a framework for answering their research question.Overall though, this was a great read.

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