This chapter discusses the role of political parties and interest groups in affecting the direction of foreign policy, with a focus on the erosion of bipartisanship and the influence of ethnic groups.

This chapter advocates viewing the structures of international political systems through the lens of multiple dimensions of social differentiation; the structured processes by which social actors and positions are produced, populated, related, reproduced, and transformed. Social differentiation involves, at minimum, establishing who has what authority over whom with respect to which activities; that is, differentiating actors, activities, and authorities (which usually are complexly interrelated). And in addition to institutional and normative dimensions, which are notoriously excluded from the Waltzian account of structure, social differentiation has important material or geo-technical dimensions that are also ignored in the Waltzian account (which is not, as is often claimed, materialist). More generally, I argue that rather than seek to identify a small number of structural models composed of a few elements, we should aim for a checklist of dimensions of differentiation that illuminate some recurrently important features of the structures of some social and political systems of interest.

This chapter comprehensively discusses theoretical approaches to international law and global governance, and provides a historical overview of the development of international law

This chapter concluds the book and sketches some of the limits of what may be expected from international law

this chapter discusses the outline of the legal regulation of the global economy, focusing on how the system is divided into separate domains (trade, finance, investment, etc) and provides basic overviews of each of these

In a world of pre-given substances (or static relations) change needs to be explained. In a processual world, though, change, not stasis, is the norm. Persistence therefore demands explanation. Living and social systems are far-from-thermodynamic-equilibrium systems that, by taking in and creatively utilizing matter or energy, temporarily stave off the inexorable physical progression of entropy (movement towards greater disorder; decay). Social continuities no less than social transformations are socially produced. (A state, for example, can be kept in the far-from-thermodynamic-equilibrium state of statehood only through extensive and complex processes of (re)production.) And both continuities and transformations arise from similar processes that operate continuously. The chapter illustrates what I call continuous (trans)formation with the case of the development of modern militaries and introduces both John Padgett and Walter Powell’s framing of transposition and re-functionality and William Sewell’s framing of eventful history.

This chapter assesses the role of the Department of Defense, intelligence community, and Department of Homeland Security in foreign policy as well as the coordination mechanisms across bureaucracies.

This chapter develops models of what I call spatio-political structure, rooted in the differentiation of centers and peripheries. Distinguishing between a) the number of top-level political centers, b) the homogeneity or heterogeneity of centers, peripheries, and their relations, and c) the relative autonomy of centers and peripheries, I identify three principal types of political systems (both of which have “international” and “national” forms): systems of single-level governance (e.g., states systems); systems of single-center governance (e.g., empires); systems of multilevel multiactor governance (e.g., medieval Europe). In IR’s standard (Waltzian) structural framing, pre-defined units (individuals and states), on (three) pre-defined levels, combine into pre-defined types of (national and international) political systems. I instead treat as empirical questions the types of polities that exist within a space, their distribution and relations, and the resulting kinds of systems. The chapter concludes with a novel, heterarchic depiction of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Eurocentric international system.

Inter-organizational relations research revisited

Committed to the idea of re-pluralizing the discussion and exploration of inter-organizational relations (IOR) within international relations (IR), this volume began from the assumption that a broader understanding was required of what exactly is to be examined and of how this research could take place. To achieve such a broadening, three levels offer room for innovation. These relate to subject matter or research object (organization type and policy field/societal sphere), theory and methodology.

First, at the level of the research object, innovation seems to be easiest to achieve. The narrow focus of the study of IOR on intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) can be countered by broadening the research agenda to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and multinational enterprises (MNEs). This is done in Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8, while Chapter 2 addresses the relations of a hybrid form of governance. Besides IOR in the dominant policy fields of security (Chapters 3, 4 and 6) and economy (Chapter 7), topics linked to the rule of law (Chapters 2 and 3) and sports (Chapter 8) are also covered. The same holds for a topic from security studies that is not directly associated with it (Chapter 5). However, more could have been achieved here with regard to pressing issues such as health or climate/environmental policy (but see, for instance, Eckl and Hanrieder, 2023; Holzscheiter, 2015; or Smith et al, 2021).

Second, on theoretical innovation, this volume contains only one contribution based on a rationalist approach. Rationalist accounts have come to dominate the discussion of IOR in IR so far. This discursive power is not only reflected in numbers of publications; it is also wielded through the capacity to create and disseminate key terms, such as ‘interorganizationalism’ (Koops, 2008; also Biermann, 2009), or to define the field (Koops and Biermann, 2017). Regardless of the reasons for their dominance, this volume enlarges the space for alternatives to rationalist accounts. In addition to sociological neo-institutionalism (Chapters 3 and 5) and classical pragmatism (Chapter 8), which have already been proposed in the introduction, options include post-structuralist discourse theory (Chapter 3) and relational sociology (Chapter 7), along with combinations of rationalist regime complexity with constructivist considerations from (critical) norms research (Chapter 4) and public administration with organization studies (Chapter 6).

Introduction

International non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become an integral part of global governance and global world order(s). They have played an important role in the development of norms and are by now crucial players in setting agendas and standards as well as with respect to monitoring of policy issues ranging from climate change to trade and human rights (Peters et al, 2009). They have instigated and shaped international institutions such as the International Criminal Court (Pearson, 2006; Haddad, 2013), and the provision of humanitarian or development aid is meanwhile inconceivable without NGOs. In order for such activities to be successful, NGOs often engage in inter-organizational cooperation, defined as the interaction between two or more organizations with respect to information sharing, the coordination of policies, joint decision-making and other activities (Biermann and Koops, 2017). While NGO scholars have begun to inventory and characterize the types of relationship that NGOs enter into, and have studied inter-organizational cooperation regarding its form and function (Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Henry et al, 2004; Yanacopulos, 2005; Carpenter, 2007a, 2011; Ohanyan, 2012; Elbers and Schulpen, 2013; Stroup and Wong, 2013), the inner workings of such cooperation remain largely unexplored.

Therefore, we still have only scant knowledge, particularly of the processes involved and as to who instigates cooperation among NGOs and moves the involved organizations from non-cooperation to informal or formal cooperation as, for example, in the case of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC). Starting out as a ‘loosely organized coalition of NGOs, it […] transformed into a permanent institution at the court with two headquarters, regional offices, and a secretariat with a permanent staff’ (Haddad, 2013: 189; see also Pearson, 2006). While constitutive of the existing world order with respect to human rights, we know little about how the Court's transformation came about, who were the driving forces behind it, and what prompted NGOs to move from informal to formal cooperation. The same applies to the Climate Action Network (CAN), a large coalition of NGOs that has existed since 1989, and of which Duwe (2001: 182) argues that individual agents ‘act as entry points for the cooperation’ among the partaking NGOs.

Inter-organizational relations as an emerging subfield

As an academic discipline, international relations (IR) is state-centric by definition. It is about relations between nations organized in or as states. Consequently, it has always been good advice for those interested in studying IR to focus on states and their relations. In the early 1990s, however, a common understanding gained acceptance in IR that the political world is no longer just a world of states but of societies – a gesellschaftswelt (Rosenau, 1992). For more than 30 years, the study of non-state entities has become quite prominent in IR, be it of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), multinational enterprises (MNEs) or other organized forms of representation. The focus of this research is often on relations between states and non-state entities and their impact on each other. It has been only in the past 15 years that IR scholars have started to analyse relations among non-state entities. With a strong focus on IGOs, this subfield was labelled inter-organizational relations. While inter-organizational relations (IOR) may not have joined the discipline's mainstream yet, there is a visible and growing group of scholars researching this topic and translating its importance into multiple research questions.

As a consequence, the subfield of IOR has developed and matured since its creation. This came at a price, though. In the early days, scholars experimented with various theoretical and methodological approaches to study specific cases of IOR. In the recent past, this experimental period was replaced by a tendency to conformity and canonization. This tendency is not only expressed in a concentration on certain theories, methods, organization types and policy fields, but also in a binary understanding of the nature of relations. In theoretical terms, those interested in enquiring into IOR prefer rationalist approaches such as resource dependence and regime complexity (both to be discussed later). Methodological issues are hardly reflected upon explicitly, so most studies can be described, at best, as based on content analysis. There is also an inclination towards studying relations among IGOs or between IGOs and NGOs, mostly those dealing with security or economic policies. Moreover, inter-organizational relations are usually conceptualized in a binary way as being either cooperative or conflictive/competitive.