2

Theory, Methods, and International Organizations

International organizations shape the politics and controversies that arise among countries
in a number of ways. They are sometimes powerful forces in their own right, as when an
international court decides that a state is violating its legal obligations or when the UN
sends peacekeepers to intervene in a conflict. They can also be centers where diplomacy
and negotiation among states take place - this "forum" role accounts for part of the
importance of the World Trade Organization and of the UN General Assembly. In still
other situations, international organizations provide the tools or resources by which
countries try to advance their interests in world politics. These diverse functions mean
that the relations between states and international organizations can be studied from very
different perspectives, with different emphases that produce different insights.
International organizations are diverse and sophisticated entities, with legal,
political, and social dimensions that overlap and conflict in interesting ways. They vary
widely in their substantive areas of authority, their internal structures, and their political
salience. Their complexity allows for an equally complex field of study in which
contrasting perspectives offer distinct emphases and tools of analysis, and which therefore
come to very different interpretations of the same real-world patterns.
For all their differences, these organizations also all share some bask features.
This leads on from the basic paradox of consent and obligation that was noted in Chapter
1: all the organizations in this book were (I) founded by states with an explicit inter-state
treaty; (2) have states as their members; and (3) have independent corporate personalities.
Taken together these mean that they exist as autonomous legal actors distinct from their
members. Jan Blabbers uses these three features to organize his excellent book on the law
of international organizations.
These features mean that formal international organizations are stuck in an eternal
dilemma as their powers and existence are derivative of precisely those actors (i.e. states)
that they are supposed to regulate (or govern, or influence). The existence of international
organizations therefore raises deep conceptual questions about the nature of international
politics and the capacity for international rules to bind or even coexist with sovereign
states. Their powers are in principle devolved to them from nation-states but in practice
are much more complex than that and may be either more or less than they appear on
paper.
This chapter provides two ways for thinking about this complexity. First, it
presents the leading theoretical approaches from the field of International Relations and
considers what in-sight they provide into the world of international organizations. These
theories (realism, liberal-ism, constructivism, and Marxism) should not be taken to
provide competing accounts of the work of international organization. Rather, they are
better seen as alternative attitudes regarding how to think about world politics more
broadly. I draw out of these approaches implications for research on International
organizations. On this question, the chapter shows how the diversity and complexity of
IOs lead to a range of distinct methods and conceptual approaches to their study, and how
these approaches in turn produce competing interpretations of the organizations power,
behavior, and impact. The chapter introduces the jargon and debates of academic studies
of inter-national organizations that are motivated by realist, liberal, constructivist, and
Marxist premises and attitudes. In various manifestations, these represent the main
currents of contemporary scholarship on international organizations. They help you guide
your thinking about the role and power of international organizations.
The second half of the chapter gives three ways for answering the question 'what
is an international organization? This is a question about the ontology of IOs, that is: what
kind of a thing it is. The three answers I discuss are that lOs can be actors in their own
right, or tools in the hands of other actors, or places where states come to hold meetings
with other states. I call these three the actor, resource, and forum views of international
organizations. The three are not necessarily mutually exclusive but they are often seen as
alternatives in the interpretive lenses of scholars and also sometimes in the political
strategies of states. For instance, at the inception of the International Criminal Court the
US wanted it to be more of a resource to be used by the UN Security Council and less of
an actor with independent investigative and prosecutorial power, while the majority of
states insisted it be an actor with the capacity to launch cases on its own initiative. It is
inevitable that one take some position on this tripartite ontological starting point in order
to study International organizations, even if only provisionally. It nevertheless has
implications for research methods, concept formation, and even the empirical findings of
scholarship.

IOs and International Theory

In social science, a theory is a set of ideas that simplifies the complexity of the world and
gives suggestions for how to identify the key forces and actors within it Different theories
give different ideas about how the world can be understood and what to look for to make
sense of it. These are sometimes In competition with each other -for instance, when
Benedict Anderson presents nationalism as an "imagined community" in contrast to the
linguistic nationalism of Johan Herder - but more often they direct us to ask different
questions about an issue, and their distinct conclusions are a product of different
assumptions about what is worth asking. Competing theories therefore might not generate
competing answers. They may instead differ on what is an interesting question.
This section takes up some of the most familiar schools of thought from
International Relations theory and examines their contribution to the study of
international organizations. These are realism, liberalism, constructivism, and Marxism.
Each of these is contested and none of them is entirely self-contained - defining them and
drawing boundaries around them is some-what controversial and arbitrary. Nevertheless,
this chapter makes an effort to organize each approach into a coherent set of ideas so that
some key differences among them can be made clear.

Realism
The realist school of thought begins from a premise that states are motivated by a sense
of their own insecurity to continually look for ways to increase their power. This is a
claim that realism shares with most other approaches to international politics and so it
does not do much to help differentiate a realist approach to international organizations;
more is needed. The distinctive feature of realism comes when realists offer a definition
of what they mean by ''power" in this formulation. For realists, power is understood in
terms of material, military resources such as tanks and bombs, and in the contribution of
these to the power or security of a country.
At this point, a distinctive perspective to international relations emerges: it
suggests that international politics should be understood as the pursuit of military
dominance by states in an effort to reduce their intrinsic sense of insecurity in relation to
other countries. It is from this view of power that we can derive the central realist
prediction: 'that great powers will develop and mobilize military capabilities to constrain
the most powerful among them."
For the study of international organizations, this framing leads to two paths of
research, one empirical and one normative. The empirical strand asks whether and how
international organizations might influence the decisions of states as they pursue their
military objectives relative to one another. Because of their interest in the material
hierarchy of international politics, realists are particularly intrigued by the interests of the
Great Powers (as opposed to small states or other kinds of actors).! International
organizations are important in the realist perspective to the extent that they have
implications for Great Powers' pursuit of material, military advantage over rivals. There
is a great deal of debate over how much this exists, and it is basically an empirical
question: do strong states defer to international organizations? To answer this question
requires looking care-fully to see how world politics is affected by the existence of
international organizations.
The best realist scholarship aims to explore the nature and degree of this influence.
Lloyd Gruber, for instance, finds that the existence of the Canada-US Free Trade
Agreement gave the US more power in its negotiations with Mexico over NAFTA. Robert
Gilpin saw post-World War II international institutions as important investments in
systemic stability made possible by, and in the interest of, American military power. John
Mearsheimer, relying more on logical deduction than on empirical evidence, comes to the
general conclusion that "[international] institutions have a minimal influence on state
behavior, and thus hold little promise for promoting stability in the post-Cold War
world?'! This has produced a good deal of debate over the proper interpretation of the
relationship between military power and international organizations.
The normative strand of realism promotes the view that international
organizations should not be allowed to interfere with the military pursuit of great powers.
This is essentially a nationalist position and is represented in the US by the “new
sovereigntist” group of neoconservatives. In this view, promoted by John Bolton in the
policy world and Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner in the academic world (among others),
the entanglements of international organizations and international law should be resisted
by the US, and international law should be used instrumentally to advance American
interests, this is a normative position in the sense that it advocates how the US should
behave in the world. (There is an empirical version of this claim as well, which asks
whether countries really do behave instrumentally toward international organizations -
this scholarship is not very productive since it leads very quickly to a tautology: assuming
that states take decisions based on perceptions of their interests, then anything they do
toward international organizations must presumably be because they saw some interest in
doing it, and it is conceptually impossible that they would act other than in their interests.
The realist approach to international politics involves an ontological claim (that
states are the starting point), a theory of their motivations (power-seeking due to
insecurity) and a theory of what constitutes power (materiality). It is mainly the last of
these that separates realism from other approaches since state-centrism and a desire for
power can feature equally in the other perspectives as well.

Liberalism
The liberal approach to world politics begins with an emphasis on the choices that actors
make in the pursuit of their interests, in relation to the choices and interests of other actors.
This generally means the choices of states, but it can also refer to how domestic actors
such as firms, leaders, and political parties make choices that shape the "national interest"
at the international level. As with realism, this general focus is not enough to differentiate
this approach from others since any of the theories in this chapter could also be compatible
with this starting point.
The distinctiveness of the liberal approach is in how this idea is put into practice
in research: liberalism suggests that IOs can be seen as a series of agreements which states
enter into expecting to receive a gain. The focus of scholarship is therefore on what kinds
of international co-ordination might produce these mutual benefits for their members and
what unintended consequences might follow from the arrangements that they make.
These research questions lead many scholars in the liberal tradition to see OIs in
contractual terms: as bargains struck among self-interested states. From this beginning, it
is characteristic of the liberal approach to see inter-national organizations in terms of the
costs and benefits that they offer various actors. It takes as axiomatic that the participants
in the organization are there because they believe there is some advantage for them from
their participation, and the liberal tradition of research seeks to under-stand what those
gains are, when they do or do not exist, and what are the side effects or unintended
implications of these inter-state bargains. The purpose of international organizations, in
this view, is to reduce transaction costs and find more optimal outcomes among
interdependent but autonomous units.
The imagery of IOs as contracts has been popular among IR scholars in the liberal
tradition. The diplomacy over the Rome Statute of the Rome Statute of the International
Criminal Court in the 1990s (for instance) looks a lot like negotiating the terms of contract
among the states. The parties to the negotiation are expected to advance options that suit
the interests of their governments, and a deal can be struck if there is sufficient overlap
among these interests. Those who find the terms accept-able have the option of joining
the "contract' and taking on the legal obligations it contains. From the liberal perspective,
in this case the US and a few others did not like the terms of the final document and so
refused to endorse it at the close of the Rome Conference in 1998 (see Chapter 9).
A similar story can be told about the World Trade Organization (Chapter 5 of this
book). The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) of the WTO represents the
promise by the contracting parties to manage their trade policies within the limits set by
rules on most-favored nation, national treatment, and bound tariffs. The architecture of
the dispute-settlement mechanism of the WTO exists as recourse for contracting parties
who believe others have reneged on their promises. The UN Charter might also be seen
in the same way (though at the risk of mis-representing the breadth of the UN's authority):
the Charter sets up its members to commit to respect the borders of other members and to
re-solve their inter-state disputes peacefully.
Contractualism, when applied to international organizations, takes as its starting
point the states that make up the organization, and it studies their choices, options, and
behaviors. States are the active agents, and even though they may agree to certain limits
on their freedom as they consent to international rules, they remain legally and
conceptually free to renounce those limits and revoke their consent at any time. States
choose the terms on which they delegate powers to international organizations, and
remain in control of the delegation throughout. It tends to minimize the organizations
themselves, seeing them instead as by-products of the inter-state promises in the treaty.
By making states the center of attention, international organizations in the contractualist
view take on the status of dependents, descendants, or servants. To the extent that
International organizations have the capacity to act as independent actors in this approach,
it is generally seen as a problem. That is, it is an unfortunate consequence of the limits of
contract-writing, as the parties cannot foresee all future circumstances and cannot fully
control how their acts of delegation might be used by others. Following these themes, the
contractual approach has generated a substantial literature which seeks to understand how
the unavoidable incompleteness of all contracts might create room for IO autonomy, and
how states (i.e. "principals") monitor and enforce the performance of the organization
(i.e. their 'agent") relative to the terms of the contract.
The sparest version of contractualism treats international organizations as nothing
more than contracts made between states. In this view, the founding treaty is important
because it codifies promises made between states to which they are expected to adhere,
but the key commitments are among the signatory states and the organization itself is as
a consequence essentially epiphenomenal. It doesn't add anything beyond what states
bring to it. Jan Klabbers has described it as akin to imagining "a zero-sum game between
the organization and its members, where powers exercised by the members on Monday
may be transferred to the organization on Tuesday only to flow back to the members on
Wednesday." Despite being empirically unrealistic, it may nonetheless be useful
sometimes to adopt this extreme perspective on international organizations in order to see
more clearly its contrast with other approaches.
Work that begins from a liberal, contractual premise tends to produce research
that emphasizes the terms of the bargains made be-tween states. It de-emphasizes factors
that other approaches make more central, including the agency of the international
organization itself, the effects of differences in power among the parties, and the feedback
process by which the organization might reshape states, their beliefs about their interests,
and their understanding of the problems they confront in international politics. These
themes are more central in the other approaches. To the extent that these things are
dominant in the case one wants to study, the liberal approach reaches the limits of its
usefulness.
 Two subsets of liberalism are worth highlighting, dealing with domestic
institutions and international regimes respectively. On domestic institutions, Andrew
Morayscik has argued for disaggregating the state in international liberal theory. He
suggests focusing instead on how domestic actors come together to produce the policy
positions that the state pursues through international organizations. For trade negotiations,
this might mean examining what powerful industrial companies want, whether other
groups are contesting those demands, how politicians respond to them based on the
incentives they face in domestic political institutions, and more. Rather than take states
as unitary international actors making choices, this "interest-group liberalism" looks at
the interests, position, and relative power of substate actors that contribute to making the
collective 'national interest."
'Regime theory' is a subset of the liberal approach that goes in the opposite
direction - it is interested in the web of international rules and norms that govern an issue.
It arose among political scientists in the 1980s looking to identify the formal and Informal
rules of the international system and to assess their impact on the choices that states
make.li This approach is characterized by the tendency to first ask the question "what are
the rules?' and then consider how (or indeed whether) they affect the chokes of states. The
rules form the basis of the regime. This might be allied with a kind of legal formalism
(that is, the emphasis on the formal rules and laws that govern states), and yet it need not
carry the necessary assumption that states will actually follow the rules, or that states will
not be strategic manipulators of those rules.
The study of international organizations as regimes is often augmented by the
recognition that the relevant rules for any particular question do not end with formal
international organizations. Informal rules, soft law, and practices matter too. The
international regime on refugees, for instance, includes not only the powers of the
International Migration Organization but also of the 1951 Convention on the Status of
Refugees and other treaties and of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees,
as well as the practices of a range of non-state and quasi-state actors including the
International Committee of the Red Cross. On currency flows across borders, the formal
rules of the International Monetary Fund set some policy limits on states, but far more
important for the overall shape of these flows are the informal mechanisms negotiated
among powerful states in semi-regularized meetings of central banks and other officials,
as well as the cumulative, international effect of states domes-tic regulatory environments
for finance. The international legal rules on most issues relate to but transcend formal
international organizations, and so to grasp the obligations of states requires taking stock
of the broader "regime" on that theme - including but not limited to the formal treaties
and organizations. It can be useful as a method for understanding the organizations to see
them in relation to this environment, for both its complementarities and its contradictions.

Constructivism
The insight behind constructivism can be illustrated with a simple stylized historical
example. The United States acted with alarm when North Korea developed nuclear
weapons in the 1990s and 2000s but with support when the United Kingdom did the same
thing earlier in the twentieth century. How do we account for the difference? Both
developments put extremely powerful weapons in the hands of other governments, and
yet the US responded differently to the two situations. To answer that "the UK was an
ally while North Korea was nor only begs the question: what's the difference between
these two? Alexander Wendt, who developed this example, suggests that "ally" and
"enemy" are two ways of seeing other countries (or other people) and these ideas
influence how we behave toward them and in turn how they behave toward us$ These
Ideas are generated in the course of past interactions and are not reducible to brute
material variables, such as weaponry - they combine material and social content which
together give governments ideas about how they want to behave.
This little example illustrates the two key features of constructivism: actors
behave toward the world around them in ways that are shaped by the ideas that they hold
about the world, and that these ideas are generated by past interactions. It provides a
different way of understanding inter-national politics than realism or liberalism. Realism,
for instance, would expect the US to behave toward North Korean nuclear weapons in the
same way as It did to British nuclear weapons since, after all, a British bomb would do
the same (or more) damage than a North Korean bomb. There is no material difference
between the two. liberalism would encourage us to see what mutual advantage might be
realized by coordinating between the parties but has little to say about why one
relationship looks conflictual while the other looks friendly.
Constructivism is founded on the fact that much of international politics is shaped
by the ideas that people and states have about them-selves and the world around them
(ideas such as "ally" and "enemy"), and that these Ideas can change over time)! This is
'what makes the world hang together," at the intersection between actors, ideas, and the
material world.!! It highlights the power of their ideas and the power that comes from
using these ideas in particular ways.
International organizations are the products of these processes, and also contribute
to them, and constructivist scholarship looks at both aspects. For instance, Charlotte
Epstein's book on the decline of whale hunting examines how the International Whaling
Commission (I WC) was established in 1946 at a time when whale hunting was widely
seen as a respectable activity with important industrial and economic functions)! She
charts how that idea changed over time in many countries, though in not all, such that by
the 1990s the rival camps of pro- and anti-whaling members had basically divided the
organization in two. The disputes that arise at the today can only be understood in light
of the broad but not universal spread of anti-whaling discourse.
In addition to an emphasis on the power of ideas and discourse, constructivism
focuses on the constitutive effects of interaction between actors and structures. In other
words, it looks at how the process of interacting in the world shapes the interests and
ideas of the actors, with-out taking autonomous state interests for granted. These might
include the ways that the interests of states are shaped by social interaction or by ideas
and forces in the external environment, or ways that states use international rules and
norms to Justify their policies, or the various ways that the actions of states contribute to
remaking their international environment. All of these are mutually constitutive, so that
they continually remake both the rules and the states that use or interact with them.
Consider the "social" foundation of the UN Security Council: as noted above, the
formal parameters of the Council's authority are clearly spelled out in the Charter in
Articles 25, 39, 41, and 42, among other places. But the practical content of this power Is
quite uncertain because the phrase "threat to international peace and security" is both
crucial and under-specified. The Charter empowers the Council itself to give meaning to
that phrase, and thus one can say that the Council's powers are a function of the Council's
practice in interpreting its own powers, rather than simply a function of the Council's
formal authority. To know what constitutes a "threat to international peace and security'
requires that we study the history of Security Council decisions, including both those
moments where the Council decided that a situation qualified as such a threat and those
where it decided against it. States present their arguments to and in the Council over
whether an issue constitutes a threat to international peace and security, and through both
its political processes and its voting rule the Council comes to a determination which
stands as the dispositive statement of the matter. There is necessarily room here for
competing interpretations that never get reconciled, and ultimately for dissensus, all of
which leads to the fact that any account of the Council's powers is contingent and
contested. As we shall see in Chapter 4, identifying the scope of the Council's authority
therefore requires understanding the history of how that authority has been deployed,
defined, and argued over in practice, and how it is continually changing as states and
others continue to argue over it.
The constructivist approach to international organizations is called for whenever
the research question requires that we pay attention to the ways that the relationship
between states and international organizations is shaped by the processes of interaction
between the two. States and international organizations shape each other in the process
of world politics, in contrast with realism and liberalism which primarily see international
organizations as instruments of states. As states react to the decisions of international
organizations, they can reinforce the organization? authority and power. For instance,
when WTO members argue their cases at the Dispute Settlement Panels, they legitimize
that process and strengthen the WTO. Similarly, one consequence of the US strategic
manipulation of the Security Council ahead of the Iraq invasion may be an even stronger
sense in international politics that Council approval is indeed required to make a military
operation legal. This reinforcing of the Council was presumably not the intention of the
Americans at the time, but by showing how important that support was to their cause,
they may inadvertently have enhanced the legal and political status of the organization.
The interplay between practice and legitimation can also be seen at the
International Court of Justice. As we will see in Chapter 8, states often prefer to boycott
cases at the ICJ when they believe that the Court has wrongly claimed jurisdiction. They
refuse to participate, even though their commitment to the ICJ Statute requires it, and
even though their refusal likely Increases the chances of an adverse ruling. In doing so
they appear to understand that participating validates the institution and its processes.
(Keeping their options open, they often find ways to make the Court aware of the
substance of their case less directly, perhaps by making secret memos public or by
sending the Court unsolicited materials. The Court has become adept at considering some
of this evidence despite the boycott, and thereby making its hearings more complete.)
The philosophical setting for constructivism comes from the work of social
theorists who are interested in how people operate in their rules-saturated environments))
People interact with rules in everything they do, from the constructs of language, to the
etiquette norms of their interpersonal interactions, to their legal status as "persons" in the
eyes of the state. Action can only make sense in relation to these social structures. Rules
are not only external and regulative com-mands. They also constitute the actors as
apparently independent agents in the first place, and they constitute the setting for
interaction among those units. This is true for international organization as it Is for
domestic social institutions.
The constructivist insight is that the inter-action of states and international
organizations changes both sets of players in the game: the rules change as states invoke
and interpret them in particular cases, and states are changed as their decisions and indeed
their sovereignty are redefined by international rules. Today's international law on the
preemptive use of force, for instance, is the aggregation of past cases, interpretations, and
fights over preemption; it remains binding on states, even though there is no consensus
on what the rules forbid or allow and no agreement on how to apply them to particular
crises.
Constructivism does not deny that states seek to pursue their interests and that
they desire power. Its distinctive contribution is in showing how they come to see certain
things as being in their interest, or as being useful tools of power, and how these ideas
change in the course in events. It is therefore as much about power and interests as any
of the other theories of IO.

Marxism
The Marxist approach to international organizations begins from the premise that
international politics and international economics are one sin-gular system, and that this
system is inherently unequal. This follows logically from the Marxist analysis of political
economy more generally, which argues that there is no analytic separation between
politics and economics.0 Rather than being two separate realms, the economic and the
political for Marxists constitute a mostly coherent single social (global) order. This order
involves the unequal distribution of power among actors in society, in which rich states
and firms share a privileged position against everyone else.
The implication of this approach for IO scholarship is well illustrated by BS.
Chimni's account of the role of international institution s.as Chimni examines the practical
influence of many international organizations and finds that they generally reinforce the
unequal power between rich states and poor states. Rather than lead to greater equality
the main global organizations such as the UN, the WTO, and the IMF, contribute to
maintaining the existing divisions between rich and poor. The mechanisms by which this
happens, Chimni says, include the unequal voting rules and membership of the UN
Security Council, the WTO's efforts to reduce tariffs on Third World ex-ports such as
textiles but their inaction on reducing rich-country subsidies on agriculture, and the IMPS
capacity to force countries to adopt market-based policies that harm the poor in exchange
for loans that are used to repay international banks.
Any of the four approaches discussed here could make similar points about the
unequal distribution of power in international organizations. What is distinctive about
Marxism in IO scholarship is the way that the political and economic domains are linked.
For Chimni, there is little rea-son to differentiate between the political interests expressed
by the rich states in meetings of the Security Council and the economic analyses produced
by the IMF - both serve the same set of interests, namely to maintain a stable political
system that enables the accumulation of wealth in ever fewer private hands.
For Chimni and other Marxists, the expression of political and economic interests
in the shape of dominant international organizations constitutes a kind of "nascent global
state." The administrative network formed by strong states, transnational firms, and a
globalized elite class is woven together into a system of governance that disempowers the
vast majority of the world's citizens. This is what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri called
"Empire" and Immanuel Wallerstein called "the World System.

The Value of IR Theory

These approaches can take the same set of circumstances and come to very different
conclusions about their politics and their meaning. For instance, when the US invaded
Iraq in 2003, it used military force to settle a dispute without the authorization of the UN
Security Council. This is a violation of the commitments made by the US under the UN
Charter, which include the promise to "settle their international disputes by peaceful
means" (Art. 2(3)) and to "refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of
force" (Art. 2(4)). What does this mean for the relationship between states and their
international obligations? One could interpret the US behavior in many ways: perhaps it
is evidence that powerful states can choose to ignore the rules to which they have
consented and may do so to accomplish a strongly held goal; perhaps it illustrates that the
rules are independent of state behavior in the sense that they persist even when they are
violated; or perhaps it is one more instance of the long-running interaction between states
and rules as the former interpret, argue over, and manipulate the latter, and the latter
condition, shape, and constitute the former. The relationship that one sees between states
and international organizations, and how one conceives of power in world politics, is
different in these views.
It should be clear by now that these approaches are not really comparable one to
each other. It is not possible to test one against the others with the intention of ruling out
any of them. These are not theories that produce discrete hypotheses in the sense
demanded by Karl Popper and the positivist tradition in the philosophy of science One
cannot falsify any of these approaches, and they do not lend themselves to predictions
about specific future events. They are not independent of how one sees the world, and
therefore it is not easy to use them to make causal claims about dependent and
independent variables.
Each theory provides a distinctive intellectual framework that makes sense of a
complex set of events, forces, and Ideas in characteristic ways. They should be thought
of as alternative "sense-making" devices, as described by Karl Weick) Reasoned
argument is unlikely to cause one theory to prevail over another. But a well-educated
person should be able to see the logic in each of them and understand their intellectual
foundations.
It should also be clear from these descriptions that I seek to dispel some common
myths about International Relations theory as it applies to international organizations.
 There are some common caricatures of IR theory that circulate in discussions of
international organizations, and these should be resisted. Among the myths, for Instance,
it is often said that realism is about the pursuit of power by states, that liberals are
optimistic about cooperation between states that constructivists see norms as
consequential in explaining international cooperation, and that Marxism lost its in-fluence
after the end of the Cold War.
As explained above, each of these are either highly misleading or basically wrong.
All four approaches above are about political power and the pursuit of state interests -
realism does not monopolize the study of power, just as liberalism does not monopolize
the study of self-interested bargains. Marxists and constructivists are just as interested in
power politics and national interests as liberals and realists. What the four disagree on is
how power should be conceived. They present alternative views of power itself, which
lead to different ideas of what constitutes an interesting or important research question
and therefore different programs of research. It is wrong to equate realism with “power
politics” if this means that the other approaches are not about power.
Equally, it is wrong to assume that realists are “pessimists” about international
cooperation while liberals and/or constructivist are “optimists”. These approaches do not
in themselves tell us whether international organizations will be plentiful or few, or
successful or not Instead, they tell us under what circumstances we might expect
international organizations to develop, and what kinds of features we can expect of them.
And they indicate ways of thinking about the powers and limits of international
Organization.
Finally, it is too simplistic to associate constructivism with international “norms"
as distinct from cost-benefit calculations. Constructivists are as concerned with
instrumental, self-regarding behavior as are any other scholars. What is different about
constructivism is the view that one should pay attention to how the actor thinks about his
or her self-interest, and how those perceptions of interests are shaped by the external
environment and by the process of interacting with that environment.

Three Views on Ontology: Actor, Forum, Resource

The international organizations in this book exhibit a range of characteristics and can be
under-stood in a variety of ways. For different situations, or for different purposes, each
might look like an actor, or a forum, or a resource, or some combination of these at once.
That is, each is a corporate entity capable of taking action in its own right; each is also a
location where other actors (mostly states but potentially also other kinds of actors) come
to discuss, debate, and decide; and each is a "kind of resource, or a set of resources, that
states and others can use to advance their own political agendas. Much of the political
and academic dis-agreement about global governance and international organization is a
product of different views on which of these characteristics provides the best way of
thinking about world politics. This section examines each of these three in turn before
suggesting that they can all be useful, though at different moments and for different kinds
of questions.

IOs as Actors
International organizations are actors in world politics. They are constituted by
international law as independent entities, separate from the states that make them up as
their founders and their members. The practical expression of this independence varies
greatly across organizations, but in a formal sense they are corporate "persons' much like
firms are 'persons´ in domestic commercial law. This means they have legal standing,
with certain rights and obligations, and can sue and be sued. This was established
concretely in the ICJ opinion on Reparations for injuries, but that case merely affirmed
what had existed in custom and in practice for a long time prior: inter-state organizations
are legally independent from their founders. Some of this independence is written into the
treaties that establish them, and some of it arises by implication. Contemporary treaties
on international organization usually include a clause similar to Article 4(1) of the
International Criminal Courts Statute, which says "The Court shall have international
legal personality." This establishes that the Court is an independent body, separate from
both the states that make it up and the individuals who staff it But even without such a
declaration, part of the point of creating an international organization is to have a body
that is distinct from any of the states within it, and so agency on the part of the IO is an
essential component of its function, purpose, and indeed existence.
Being recognized as an actor requires some kind of social recognition plus some
kind of capacity for action. For international organizations, this means they are
understood by the international community as actors, and that in that community their
decisions must have some impact. International lawyers tend to see this 'personality" of
IOs as a product of the legal construction of the organization by its treaty, while political
scientists and sociologists are likely to see it as a product of a social process of
institutionalization. The dilemma of international organization as a practice in world
politics is of course that IOs as actors are composed of states, that is of units which are
themselves independent actors, and so formal international organizations are al-ways
collective rather than unitary actors. When they operate as "agents" they are unitary actors
in the same way that national governments, also composed of many individuals and
factions, are recognized as unitary actors: that is, widely but uneasily. Alexander Wendt
has suggested that one test of "personhood" should be whether the actor can do things
that its constituent parts on their own are unable to dog Using that criterion, the
substantive chapters of this book help to document the evidence that these international
organizations do indeed have the capacity for independent action, though it varies across
organizations and it sometimes does not match precisely the powers described in the
founding charters.
The impact of IOs-as-actors is evident in the real world whenever an international
organization influences the shape or practice of world politics for other actors. For
instance, in 2009 the International Criminal Court indicted the president of Sudan for
crimes in Darfur and issued a warrant for his arrest. This has a major impact on
international politics, despite the fact that the president has stayed in power since then
and has not been arrested. Following the indictment, the president's travel had to be
carefully calibrated to avoid jurisdictions that might arrest him; the legitimacy of the court
itself went both up and down, depending on the audience; governments were provoked to
take a stand for or against the indictment and changed their policies in various ways as a
result. The president's personal situation changed dramatically and immediately as a result
of the warrant, as he found his liberty suddenly at risk in ways it was not before. AU of
these changes are evidence of the capacity of the ICC to behave as an actor in its own
right in world politics. That its impact is not entirely in the direction desired by the ICC
is not a suggestion of the lack of power for the organization; it does, however, indicate
that its power is complicated (In ways which are the subject of Chapter 9). Similarly, the
UN General Assembly resolution that equated Zionism and racism (GA 3379) had an
impact in world politics: it generated controversy, defense, and renunciation. These
reactions were a result of the fact that states seem to believe that statements of the
Assembly are influential moves by a relevant international actor, whether they agree with
them or not.

IOs as Fora
International organizations are also places in space and time, in the sense of being
physical buildings, conferences, and schedules of meetings. Part of their value is that they
act as meeting places where states discuss interests and problems of mutual concern. The
players in these discussions are usually the member states them-selves, and the OI may
have no role other than as a focal point or a physical location with a support staff. Non-
state actors sometimes have a role in these negotiations but often find it difficult to get
access.li This is an important contribution to international law and politics but it is very
different than the role of "actor" described above.
In their role as fora, international organizations represent an extension of the
nineteenth-century European practice of holding ad hoc themed "conferences" among
governments, such as those that produced the first Geneva Conventions. This practice
became more standardized in the twentieth century, often in the United Nations, with
major UN-sponsored conferences on environment and development (Rio 1993), human
rights (Vienna 1994), and the status of women (Mexico City 1975, Beijing 1995) among
others. The value of the UN in these cases is that it can provide experienced logistical
support for large meetings, even though it itself may not be present as a formal participant
These meetings represent the “forum” function of IOs in it clearest manifestation.
In addition, most international organizations include a plenary body in which all members
are represented, and whose purpose is general deliberation about the work or themes of
the organization. The ICC has its Assembly of States Parties, the WTO has its General
Council, the ILO has the International Labor Conference. The procedures for discussion
in these bodies are relatively inclusive and open so that all members have an opportunity
to participate. As a consequence, they tend to have either few executive powers or high
standards of consensus for decisions, or both. The UN General Assembly fits the former
category: it can make recommendations but has few powers to take legally binding
decisions. The WTO fits the latter: its members can sit as the "Dispute Settlement Body"
with the authority to overturn decisions of the dispute settlement panels but requires a
unanimity decision to do so.
The deliberative functions of these assemblies can have a powerful legitimating
effect on the organization and its decisions. They are also useful for facilitating side
negotiations among members. For instance, the original motivation behind the UN
General Assembly was to have a place where states that were not Great Powers could
have some voice but its annual meetings in New York have come to include both the
formal speeches by governments and the large and un-knowable number of informal
meetings on the sides that are made possible by virtue of so many diplomats and leaders
being in one city at the same time. The transaction costs for diplomacy are thereby
reduced, and a benefit is achieved even if the formal speeches generate nothing but hot
air.

IOs as Resources
Finally, international organizations are political resources that states use as they
pursue their goals, both domestic and international States use the statements, decisions,
and other outputs of international organizations as materials to support their own
positions, and many international disputes include competing interpretations of these
materials. States fight over what international organizations should say and what they
should do, and then fight over what these acts and statements mean for world politics. For
instance, does Security Council Resolution 242 really require that Israel withdraw
immediately from the Palestinian territory it seized in the 1967 war as the plain text would
indicate, or only that it should negotiate a withdrawal in due time? Competing
interpretations allow the parties to maintain that the Council supports their policies, and
that the other side is violating its obligations. They use the resolution as a political tool to
further their goals. Much of what comes out of international organizations is useful to
states in this way, and one might even say that anything that is not useful in some way is
not likely to have any impact at all.
States spend significant energy pursuing, deploying, and resisting these resources
in and around international organizations, a practice which both illustrates and reinforces
the power of the organizations in their social and political contexts. The usefulness of
these resources is evidence that the audience is paying attention to the outputs of
international organizations and helps to establish the point that they are not just "cheap
talk' In addition, where the organization can control who uses its symbols and outputs, it
can extract concessions from states in exchange for the right to use them. The Security
Council controls "UN peacekeeping" as if it were a trade-marked brand, and when it has
allowed countries' military operations to be called "peacekeeping" missions it has
demanded that they adhere to standards set by the Council. International organizations
make themselves stronger when they can act as gatekeepers to their valuable symbols.
More generally, however, international organizations have little control over how
their names, decisions, and outputs are used by states, and these resources travel
effortlessly between legal and non-legal applications. For instance, governments
sometimes blame the International Monetary Fund for forcing them to make unpopular
policy changes, even though the Fund does not believe that it has the authority to 'force"
borrowers to do anything. In making this claim, the governments are using the symbol of
the IMF for domestic political purposes in ways that may well irritate the IMF. The value
of the symbol for these purposes is only loosely related to the actual powers or demands
of the IMF, in the sense that the government may well find political advantage in using
the Fund as a scapegoat even if the government would have made the same changes absent
the Fund. Similarly, states often seek to have the International Court of Justice hear their
disputes even if they doubt that the other party will respect the outcome. The non-
compliance of the other state may well be a useful political too. In these cases, the
existence of the international organization gives states tools and options which they would
not have otherwise, and their effects must therefore be counted as we assess the impact
that international organizations have in world politics.
Seeing international organizations as tools rather than as solutions in themselves
helps to emphasize the limits to their power and effectiveness. International organizations
can be Influential when circumstances are favorable, but they can also be thoroughly
marginalized when powerful actors seek to keep them out, or when no one sees an
advantage in bringing them into action. For instance, the UN Secretary-General had
prepared in the early 1980s a diplomatic solution to the contested governance of
Cambodia, but he and the entire UN were largely kept out of the process by a few states
in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) group who refused to negotiate
with the Vietnamese government that controlled Cambodia” Only after the geopolitics of
ASEAN changed in the late 1980s did his plan come to be implemented as the Paris Peace
Agreement of 1991. The apparent 'failure of the UN to deal effectively with the Cambodia
problem was actually a result of the fact that some powerful states insisted that the UN
not be used as a tool for solving the problem. The "tool" view is an antidote to the common
but misleading assumption that there Is always in principle an international-organization
answer to every diplomatic problem or humanitarian crisis. From Darfur to the Haiti
earthquake to the Syrian war, the potential contribution of international organizations to
solving international problems is in part defined and delimited by the utility that states
see in invoking them to those ends.
The three aspects of actor, forum, and tool coexist in tension in international
organizations. Each on its own provides an incomplete view. They must be considered
together, even though they cannot be entirely combined. To see IOs from only one of
these three perspectives leads to an unnecessarily partial view of their nature and power
and makes it too easy to criticize or dismiss them. To see them exclusively for their
"forum" properties leads to the mistake made by John Bolton, who maintained that the
UN "does not exist". What does exist, he implied, is a collection of independent states
who sometimes choose to meet in the rooms of the UN building, and perhaps to add a UN
label to their collective endeavors (i.e. a forum exclusively). This is a radically
reductionist view of international politics and law; it claims that everything that is done
through or by the United Nations can be reduced analytically to the behavior of individual
states without losing any meaning. It denies the possibility of corporate personhood for
international organizations and thus the possibility that they might have positions or take
actions independent of their members. This is a hard position to sustain since it requires
that we deny that there Is any practical difference between states acting alone and states
acting through the United Nations. The real world of international relations is full of
examples that states react quite differently to what other states do as opposed to what IOs
do. Consider, for instance, the Amerkan effort to gain Security Council approval for its
invasion of Iraq in 2003, while John Bolton was in the US Department of State: the
premise of that effort was that the Council could provide collective legitimation for the
invasion and this would change how other states reacted to the invasion. The US strategy
of seeking Security Council support presumed that the audience of states would see an
invasion as more legitimate than they would without Council approval, or than they would
if the US gained the state-by-state support of governments individually through bilateral
efforts. If there is a difference in how the action is perceived depending on whether it is
supported by a collection of individual states and supported by those states through the
Council, then the reductionist view must be wrong. That difference represents the in-
dependent contribution of the Security Council to world politics, beyond its role as a
tartan or meeting place.
It is equally hard to sustain an entirely actor-centric view of most international
organizations. The independence of even the strongest of inter-national organizations is
always conditional on an alignment of social forces that is outside of its control. For
instance, the Security Council has the authority to intervene in world politics in any way
it sees fit in response to anything it identifies as a threat to international peace and security
(Arts. 39, 41, 42), and it operates entirely on its own without oversight by any other
institution. And yet, its ability to take action on international security depends on the
voluntary contributions of military resources by individual member states. As a result, its
actor-like qualities in the international system are legally enshrined by the Charter but in
practice are drastically undercut by member states. Both the independence of IOs and
their limits are central to some versions of the 'delegation" approach to international
organizations, a subset of liberal IR theory that focuses on the delegation by which states
endow them with authority12 Once empowered by this delegated authority, the
organization may have consider-able autonomy to deploy its powers as it wishes, and it
may be a challenge for member states to control it. To overstate the independence of inter-
national organizations is as much a mistake as to understate it, and anywhere along this
spectrum all claims about the autonomy of international organizations must be grounded
in an empirical study of the particular organization in question. There are no general
answers to questions about the distribution of power and authority between states and
international organizations.
These three images of international organizations coexist in varying proportions
and manifestations in each international organization. The UN General Assembly is, for
example, much more of a forum than either the ICJ or the ICC, and many of the more
technical organizations such as the Universal Postal Union are much less useful as
resources than are those with a higher political profile such as the UN Security Council.
Despite these variations, all three aspects are embedded in all IOs, as they are in all
complex organizations in society.
Al three views must therefore be considered, and the challenge for the scholar of
international organizations is to figure out how to combine them and where to put the
emphasis to best suit the research problem at hand. When Michael Barnett sought to
understand how the UN came to abandon Rwanda at the time of the genocide in 1994, he
looked at the positions that the strongest states on the Security Council brought to the
debate (a "forum' view of the UN), as well as at the position of the Secretary-General and
his staff (thus recognizing that the UN was also an actor in the process), and at how the
collective decisions of the Council would be perceived and manipulated by other states
and by the genocidaires themselves (i.e.. How the UN would be used as a tool by other
players) This combination resulted in a nuanced history of the decisions of the UN on the
matter, and one which belies simplifying attempts to assign to any one player the well-
deserved blame for the UN behavior.

Conclusion
 The fundamental tension in international law, which is central to the field of
international organization as well, is between state sovereignty and the commitment
involved in international treaties. States are the masters and the servants of international
organizations, and this tension must be reconciled somehow. The academic study of
international organizations has developed various strands for thinking about this
complexity in different ways. The approaches in this chapter, realism, liberalism,
constructivism, and Marxism, adopt different starting points for thinking about
international organizations.
This chapter suggested a second three-way typology for analyzing international
organizations: that of actor, forum, and resource. These are different lenses for studying
or metaphors for imagining, international organizations, based on different interpretations
of their role and function in world politics. At times, international organizations behave
like independent actors in International relations, issuing decisions, taking actions, and
being talked about as if they were players in their own right. At other times, they provide
a forum in which states (or others) carry out their negotiations and their diplomacy. A
forum is a place rather than an actor, and there are times when even the most powerful
international organizations slip off their corporate per-sonhood and become just a setting
for inter-state bargaining. Finally, international organizations are also sometimes
resources or tools with which states try to accomplish their goals. This is on display on
those occasions where states use the organization as a source of status or legitimacy.
States strive to associate themselves with organizations that they think will give them
status in the international community, and they work to have their causes legitimated by
association with those organizations.
The themes of this chapter emphasize the importance of both the legal and the political
aspects of international organizations. Indeed, neither can be understood without the
other. In doing so, it sets the stage for the case studies of particular international
organizations which follow, and primes the argument that the real-world powers and
practices of international organizations are equally and at once in the domains of
international law and of international politics.