Overview

This book explains the design and development of international organization in the postwar period. It theorizes that the basic set up of an IO responds to two forces: the functional impetus to tackle problems that spill beyond national borders and a desire for self-rule that can dampen cooperation where transnational community is thin. The book reveals both the causal power of functionalist pressures and the extent to which nationalism constrains the willingness of member states to engage in incomplete contracting. The implications of postfunctionalist theory for an IO's membership, policy portfolio, contractual specificity, and authoritative competences are tested using annual data for 76 IOs for 1950-2010.

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9780198845072

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Reviews

This path-breaking book theorizes more than ten years of research on international organizations (IOs) at the global and regional levels by the authors. At a time when IOs are under increasing political pressure, the authors offer a post-functionalist theory of IOs. While interdependence explains the demand for IOs, degrees of transnational communities account for the variation in IO political authority. Required reading for anybody concerned about global governance! * Thomas Risse, Professor of International Relations, Freie Universitat Berlin * This sophisticated volume puts the social back into the international social contract among states. There is not an account of international organizations available today that more skillfully and persuasively combines the best of liberal and constructivist theory. Read it, and you will gain new insights into the stresses and strengths of the liberal international order. * Beth Simmons, Andrea Mitchell University Professor In Law,Political Science And Business Ethics, Penn Law * Deep thinking and theorizing as well as profound and methodologically advanced empirical analysis - if you ask for the impossible and want to have both in one book, this one has it. A Theory of International Organization is at its core about the tension between scale and community. It develops a sophisticated and encompassing set of insights into the working of International Organizations in an interdependent world constituted of (mostly) national communities. This book is one of the most important contributions to a new wave of theorizing about world politics that overcomes old schisms. It is a must-read for all serious students of International Relations. * Michael ZUERN, Director At The Wzb Berlin Social Science Center,Professor Fu Berlin, Wzb Berlin Social Science Center * Why have states in the post-World War era conferred ever-growing authority on international organizations? In this amazingly ambitious book, Liesbet Hooghe, Tobias Lenz, and Gary Marks convincingly dissect the authority of IOs over time and across space. They trace its sources to the scale and community of governance, and explain why general-purpose and task-specific IOs are distinctively different creatures. At a time when IOs are increasingly challenged, this book offers a profound understanding of the drivers and conditions of international governance. * Professor Jonas Tallberg, Department Of Political Science, Stockholm University *

Author Information

Liesbet Hooghe is the W.R. Kenan Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill and Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. In 2017 she received the Daniel Elazar Distinguished Federalism Scholar Award of the APSA. Born and educated in Belgium with a PhD. from the KU Leuven, she was a Fulbright fellow at Cornell University and a postdoctoral fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. She joined the University of Toronto in 1994 and moved to UNC-Chapel Hill in 2000. Between 2004 and 2016, she also held the Chair in Multilevel Governance at the VU Amsterdam. Hooghe is the former chair of the European Politics Society section of the APSA and of the European Union Studies Association. Her chief focus is multilevel governance, European integration, political behavior, and international organization. Tobias Lenz is Assistant Professor of Global Governance and Comparative Regionalism at the University of Goettingen, and the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg. During the academic year 2015/16, he was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence. Previously, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in a research project on the authority of international organizations, directed by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, at the Free University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. Lenz holds a PhD in International Relations from Oxford University and has held visiting fellowships at the Free University of Berlin, UNC Chapel Hill, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research deals chiefly with global and regional organizations, institutional design and change, legitimacy and diffusion. Gary Marks is Burton Craige Professor of Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill, and a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. He was educated in England and received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He was a recipient of the Humboldt Forschungspreis (Humboldt Research Prize) in 2010 and of a $e2.5 million Advanced European Research Council grant (2010-2015). In 2017 he received the Daniel Elazar Distinguished Federalism Scholar Award of the APSA. He co-founded the UNC Center for European Studies and EU Center of Excellence in 1994 and 1998, respectively. Marks has had fellowships at the Free University of Berlin, the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg, Pompeu Fabra, the Institute for Advanced Studies Vienna, Sciences Po, Konstanz University, McMaster University, the University of Twente, and was National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. His research and teaching are chiefly in comparative politics, multilevel governance, and measurement.

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