This chapter describes the IMF and the World Bank, the two big international financial institutions created after World War II to stabilize the global economy. The two have similar goals and mechanisms but work with different instruments and in different contexts. Both pool the resources of their members and use the money it raises to make loans to governments with specific needs. The IMF lends to countries experiencing critical balance-of-payments problems. It makes short-term loans of foreign currencies that the borrowing country must use to finance the stabilization of its own currency or monetary system. As a precondition to the loan, the Fund generally requires that the borrower change its policies in ways that the Fund believes will enable monetary stability in future. The World Bank makes longer-term loans to pay for specific projects related to development or poverty reduction. Most Bank loans are tied to a particular project undertaken by the borrowing government. The Bank and the Fund are twinned institutions in the sense that they share a common origin and many structural features, but their practices and purposes are very different. As a result, they contrast each other in ways that are useful for exploring the mix of law and politics in global affairs.

The ICJ is the primary court for legal disputes among governments. It hears cases in which one country claims that another country has violated its obligations under international law. This chapter introduces the ICJ by examining its legal foundation in the Statute of the ICJ, and shows its powers and limits in practice by looking at the cases of Belgium v. Congo (on genocide) and Australia v. Japan (on rights and obligations for whale hunting under the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling).

This chapter examines the law and politics of migration and refugees in global governance. Most governments are committed to an international refugee regime that requires them to welcome and support refugees, but also many governments wish to prevent refugees and other migrants from crossing borders into their countries. This contradiction provides fuel for legal and political disputes, with migrants bearing the human costs. The dynamics illustrate ways in which legal obligations and politics preferences weave around and through each other, sometimes in conflict, sometimes together, in surprising combinations.

The United Nations was designed to be the central world institution for peace and security, with the Security Council at its core. This chapter looks at the law and history of the UN’s role in international peace and security, along with the secondary role played by the General Assembly. The Security Council is at the intersection of law, politics, and enforcement in world politics. The chapter looks at the formal powers given to the Security Council in the UN Charter and then examines how the practical life of the Council since 1945 has been both more than and less than what the Charter says. Case studies of mass killings in Sudan, Rwanda, and Syria show the limits of Council power under the influence of the US, Russia, and other powerful governments.

What is an international organization? Intergovernmental agreements often create new institutions such as the United Nations which have independent status and some autonomy. This chapter considers how these organizations come into being and how they are studied by scholars of international politics and law. Depending on how one looks at things, an international organization can appear as an actor in world politics, a place where politics happens, or a resource used by others in political fights. These are the roles of actor, forum, and resource. I examine the main scholarly theories that are often applied to understand the function and effects of international organizations in international relations: realism, liberalism, constructivism, and marxism.

Contestations about the contents and validity of laws and legal principles are fundamental to the (international) legal profession. After all, when engaging with legal norms, disagreements about their meaning and validity a central part of the day-to-day work of legal professionals specialising in international law, including legal counsel representing governments, international judges, legal officers working for international organisations and non-governmental organisations, and legal academics. We propose a practice-oriented approach to empirically research such interpretive legal contestations by groups of legal professionals. Using an interdisciplinary perspective, we contribute to IR norms research by drawing on not only IR practice theory, but also Bourdieu-inspired research within the Sociology of International Law and ongoing discussions on legal realism in International Legal Theory, including what we have called European New Legal Realism. After outlining how to implement our approach using either a Bourdieusian perspective or the concept of communities of practice, we use normative contestations in and around climate change law to illustrate its added value. Such an approach not only promises to make interpretive legal contestations visible empirically, but also emphasises how interpretive legal contestations matter as they reflect underlying power dynamics and may result in normative legal change in practice.

The Charter of the United Nations presents governments with authoritative rules for international politics. The Charter also defines the power and the limits of the United Nations organization. This chapter describes the main rules, limits, and powers of the United Nations from a close reading of the text of the UN Charter. We see the authority of the United Nations in balance with the sovereignty of member states. Two case studies, on the Goldstone Report on Israel’s 2009 invasion of Gaza and on the UN’s legal immunity for the cholera epidemic in Haiti in 2010, show the ambiguity, dilemmas, and politics that arise when these rules are applied in practice.

Dominant approaches to norm development have shaped and limited the direction and impact of the norm research programme. While early work tended to characterise norm development in relatively teleological and progressive terms, more recent work has explored how a norm’s meaning changes through processes of interpretation, contestation, and violation. In spite of this important corrective and the rich debates that have emerged from it, understandings of norm development have continued to be hampered by a focus on behavioral measures and on changes in norm content. As a result, approaches to norm development remain incomplete, most notably in their neglect of norm strength. To address these shortcomings, this chapter critically reviews existing scholarship on norm change and development, highlighting the need to consider norm content and norm strength as distinct and constitutive elements in processes of norm development. The chapter proposes a typology that identifies four forms of norm change, along with an updated conceptual framework for understanding norm development. This conceptual framework overcomes existing conceptual gaps and inconsistencies in the study of norm processes. In so doing, it promises to advance existing theoretical debates, open new directions of inquiry, and contribute to the further accumulation of knowledge about international norms.