What role do international organizations play in international law? Similar to states, they have international legal personality, responsibilities, and immunities.  This chapter focuses on the preeminent global intergovernmental organization, the United Nations, and details the functions and limits of its principal organs.  Special attention is given to the General Assembly, Security Council, and International Court of Justice. The European Union is the leading example of a regional, supranational organization, and its authority and institutions are discussed in detail as well. The chapter concludes with brief considerations of other major international organizations, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Organization of American States, the African Union, and the World Health Organization.

Pan-Americanism’s promotion of liberal internationalism and pan-Africanism’s appeals to transnational solidarity among African people(s) provided useful frames for critics of non-interference to make it the subject of debate. I argue that the content and political salience of pan-Americanism & pan-Africanism empowered – or even inspired – critics of non-interference in these regions. In this chapter I offer a long-term account of the (uneven) erosion of non-interference at the regional level in the global South, an account centering on the contestedness of this norm within the OAS and OAU compared to ASEAN during the Cold War period. This contestation (at the level of discourse) contributed over time to norm erosion (at the level of law and practice). Pan-Asianism did not serve the same function. Since non-interference was less contested in Southeast Asia (and not on these grounds), it was therefore more robust or resilient over time. Because of the history of norm contestation and erosion, the three regional groupings arrived at the 1980s with different normative priors. This meant that Latin America and Africa were more amenable to the intrusive regionalism trend than was Southeast Asia.

Because of variation in the discursive foundations of regionalism and in the degree and nature of norm contestation and erosion, Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia arrived at the end of the Cold War with different normative priors. These normative priors interacted with other key variables during the second wave of regionalism, one of which is regime type. Democratization in Latin America during the 1980s was extensive, and, by the end of this decade, the region boasted a high “density” of democracy. The achievement of this critical mass of democracies contributed to the renewal of the development of intrusive regionalism (especially aimed at democracy promotion) in the region. Neither Africa nor Southeast Asia has achieved this density. Although average democracy scores in these other regions have been on the rise in the last twenty years, they remain in the “anocracy” range. Even though high democratic density was not achieved in these two regions, though, individual states democratized, and emerging democracies with regional leadership aspirations, like South Africa and Indonesia, have been at the forefront of regional reform campaigns.

This conclusion both briefly revisits the causal arguments that make up the book’s general(izable) framework and highlights the role of idiosyncrasy, contingency, and agency in the divergent normative trajectories of regional societies of Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. It then considers the applicability of the book’s theory to a new case – the “Arab” region (defined by membership in the League of Arab States).The last section of the chapter discusses the status of sovereignty in the South today; challenges for intrusive regionalism moving forward; and the normative implications of non-interference and its institutionalized violations.

This chapter examines Third World regional organizations’ discursive foundations, focusing on macronationalism as a movement and discourse, and tracing the development of the OAS, the OAU, and ASEAN. Decolonization produced sovereignty-sensitive states. It also, in some cases, produced regional international societies founded on macronational ideologies, like pan-Americanism and pan-Africanism. And because macronationalism appeals to values and solidarities that transcend the nation state, it holds the potential to challenge strict sovereignty norms. In Latin America and Africa, the establishment of regional organizations in some ways culminated pan-American and pan-African movements, but the formation of ASEAN did not culminate pan-Asianism – the latter had long lost favor in the wider region due to its cooptation by imperial Japan. ASEAN’s discursive foundations served more to reinforce strict sovereignty norms – in the long run – than to create openings for contestation of them. Non-interference did not have to compete with transnational pan-Asian discourses or liberal ideas about human rights and democracy that were more prominent in the African and Latin American cases.