The strangest thing about international organizations is that for all the appearance that they have of bringing about a dulling rationalization of life, they are enmeshed in global politics as deeply as any other actor, if not more deeply. The very existence of international organizations in a world order founded on the equal sovereignty of states defies fundamental logic and possibly confirms that they exist both as instruments of policy and as political agents. International organizations have a complex history of their own, and ascertaining their politics is, arguably, in the eyes of the beholder.

This chapter addresses the role of international organizations in securing financial stability. Regulating financial stability is a chief concern of capitalist economies. Like in other fields of economic law, the challenge is to strike a balance between protecting a jurisdiction against overspill risks emanating from other jurisdictions, and containing risks across jurisdictions by shifting regulation to the international level. This results in two modes of regulation, which I call sovereignty and cooperation.

The breakdown of what Donald Wollheim once called the ‘consensus future’ of science fiction – a spacefaring human civilisation migrating to the moon, Mars, the outer solar system, and beyond – has coincided with increasingly dire warnings about the true consequences of technological modernity on the planet. Where the future once seemed to be a site of unlimited possibility, it now appears to be a site of ever-worsening catastrophe and collapse. This chapter considers what might be called the ‘consensus apocalypse’, but also looks beyond it to consider techno-utopian and ecotopian visions of a non-disastrous future for humanity, with a thematic focus on figurations of sea-level rise due to ice-sheet collapse, especially in the work of Kim Stanley Robinson.

The contemporary ecological crisis is also a crisis of human perception, representation, and agency. We are required to make frenetic alterations of scale, adjusting our daily experiences, actions and lifestyles to ever-changing global and atmospheric patterns and impacts. Yet the polysemy of climate and its diffuse presence in our lives – as extreme weather event, day-to-day expectation, scientific data, or urgent socio-political issue – also makes it amenable to multi-media or transmedia dissemination. Analogously, digital media is itself characterised by movement across and between microscopic (tweets, data) and macroscopic levels – i.e. a digital sphere marked simultaneously by ‘infowhelm’ and the possibility of mass global, networked, and resistant communities. This exploratory survey ranges from the quotidian dimensions of digital and online media – how changes in climate are being recorded and registered in tweets, blogs, and citizen science – to deeper qualitative storytelling formats adapted from and sometimes in dialogue with old media. The latter include online self-published fiction, podcasting (e.g. the BBC audio drama Forest 404), and personal ‘climate stories’ and testimonies. Ultimately, this essay argues for the continued importance, and potential agency, of human-scale perspectives on micro- and macroscopic ecological complexities and for preserving distinct, often maligned human modes of narrative and storytelling.

Energy, in the broad sense of all sources and forms of energy, fossil, renewable, electricity and fuels, is a latecomer to the field of international organization. The twin principles of permanent sovereignty of producer states over their natural energy resources and the sovereignty of consumer states over their energy mix seemed to remove this matter from the realm of international law and to allocate it to domestic law. The organizational architecture reflects this. Different from other functional systems such as health or trade, there is no single, central international organization of universal membership for the energy sector.

Critical questions about the relation between literature and climate are relevant both before and after the rise of environmentalism and today’s climate politics. How does literature write the encounter between biological bodies and climate? What trends in literary form and content do critics track when they study climate change? What concepts have they then created or rethought? To answer these questions, we need to look outside the contemporary moment and compare historical periods. This chapter looks at four topics: the ‘superorganism’, the climate theory of race, the concepts of ‘hyperobject’ and ‘trans-corporeality’, and the idea that literature can ‘model’ anthropogenic climates. The Anthropocene has certainly created new configurations of climate and embodiment coupled to changes in literary form, including what sort of narrative worlds seem real to their readers. But none of this is unprecedented. Present configurations of embodiment, climate, and form are still constrained by those of the past. Critics are only beginning to understand what they are, and how they change in historical time.

A week into the anti-racism protests that followed the chilling murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter (BLM), Patrisse Cullors, appeared on ABC’s Nightline. The show recapped the extraordinary events of that day: US President Donald Trump had announced that he was ‘dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel, and law enforcement officers’ to quell the demonstrations. Federal police and military troops had used tear gas, rubber bullets and flash grenades on peaceful protestors gathered around the White House to clear the route to a cynical photo-op: the President posing before a church that he did not enter, holding aloft a Bible that he did not open.

A fil rouge runs from the system of conferences, the river commissions and the administrative unions of the nineteenth century through the UN, its ‘family’ and the Bretton Woods institutions established in the mid-twentieth century, up to the most recent forms of international and transnational cooperation. The issues for which these forms of cooperation have been established range from the containment of communicable diseases to the protection of intellectual property, from the preservation of historic sites to food safety and from banking supervision to internet regulation. This phenomenon, as a whole, was analyzed as ‘the legal organisation of the international society’,1 or even ‘of the world’2 at the end of the nineteenth century. Activities and patterns have further developed into what is now called global governance.3 The entities engaged are intergovernmental organizations, treaty bodies, supervisory and expert bodies, standing secretariats, civil society actors, transnational corporations and varieties of hybrid or ‘soft’ actors, all of which have some ‘legal life’ of their own.

Global health is a very institutionalized field of governance, with diverse international institutions contributing in various ways to promote and protect human health (or negatively affecting it, depending on whom you ask). Such institutions include global international organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the World Health Organization (WHO), regional organizations such as the European Union (EU), hybrid institutions comprising public agencies and corporate bodies such as the International Standardization Organization (ISO) and, more recently, public-private partnerships and networks showing a similar structure. This proliferation is not surprising conceptually if we consider that health is an intrinsic and essential dimension of human beings and communities, both from a biomedical point of view as well as from a public health and social perspectives. So many transnational factors, processes and policies have a direct or indirect impact on health that not only existing international organizations have integrated or upgraded health considerations in their agendas, but new ones have been established to address neglected aspects of global health governance.

The exclusion of an individual or entity from the membership of a club or body inevitably raises questions regarding the fairness of the criteria used to take the decision. It is no different when it comes to the exclusion of a state from the membership of an intergovernmental organization (IO) – either through denial of membership or suspension or expulsion from membership. The elementary reason is that membership brings with it certain benefits. These can include political recognition, the possibility of making claims on institutional resources, the opportunity to influence policies of other states in particular areas of international life and signalling and locking-in domestic policies.

Even the most casual observer of international organizations must at times be puzzled. It is puzzling to realize, for instance, that regardless of the public outcry over nasty acts done on the watch of some international organization or another, nothing ever seems to happen: accountability is much-discussed, but rarely materializes. It is somewhat mystifying that for all the discussion of the reform of international organizations and of their policies, and for all that these are often amended, nothing much ever seems to change. Likewise, few international organizations have lawmaking powers properly so-called, and yet international organizations seem to be highly influential. By the same token, international organizations often engage in co-operation with one another without anyone noticing it, and seemingly without having strong authorization to do so. And it must be puzzling to realize that the law tends to treat all international organizations in much the same way, regardless of whether they work for the global common good or are better seen as interest groups for a particular group of states; regardless of whether they serve a global cause or manage a particular industry; and regardless also of the sort of activities they engage in – whether they occupy themselves with questions of peace, security and disarmament or are, effectively, institutions of higher learning set up as international organizations.

Scholarship on international organizations law, like most approaches in international law and international relations (IR), is dominated by state-centric, functionalist and rational choice frameworks. According to these mainstream approaches, states are axiomatically the principal actors in international affairs, which pre-exist and create international organizations to serve their own interests and needs. To realists, international relations are structured by competition, the search for security and the struggle for power among rational, self-interested states. In this view, international organizations are epiphenomenal, reflecting extant power relations and having only a marginal impact on state behaviour.1 To IR scholars and international lawyers of a more liberal-institutionalist orientation, international organizations are designed and created by states to pursue shared goals, solve coordination problems and produce public goods.2

In most international organizations there is a certain level of trust that basic commitments are being met by the member states. Disarmament organizations,1 however, form a special case: they are often seen as subject to the motto ‘trust, but verify’ in ways that do not quite apply to others. This means that within disarmament organizations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), different legal issues arise when compared to other organizations, rendering them of great theoretical importance in addition to their undoubted social relevance.

The focus of this chapter is on organizational efforts to regulate, supervise, control and possibly eliminate weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

This chapter considers the shifting meanings and capacities of American and British seasonal literature and media in light of anthropogenic climate change. Via two case studies, it compares seasonal work before and after widespread concerns about altered seasonal patterns in the United States and Europe. Beginning with a discussion of the seasonal aspects of Rachel Carson’s writing – most notably her sea trilogy – and its literary contexts, this chapter examines seasonal prose produced prior to the climate crisis. It also reflects on contemporary scholars’ tendency to revisit Carson’s work when ruminating on climate change, suggesting a nostalgia for seasonal reassurance. The chapter then turns to the contemporary production of seasonal media, using the BBC series Springwatch as a second case study. Placing Springwatch within a British tradition of seasonal broadcasting, it analyses the intersection of environmental and cultural seasonality in this series. As a show produced during a period of heightened climate anxiety, Springwatch actively works to generate seasonal data for climate research in the United Kingdom. In this sense, seasonal media unfolding within – and responding to – perceptible season creep can route seasonal sentimentality into the observation of phenological change.