The weaknesses of international organizations are well known and often in evidence. The pandemic has highlighted the World Health Organization’s troubles in extracting timely and accurate information from states and in providing consistent guidance. For several weeks, the UN Security Council failed to adopt a resolution urging a global ceasefire to aid in the coronavirus struggle. Meanwhile, other challenges to international governance continue. China persists in ignoring an international tribunal’s ruling invalidating most of its South China Sea maritime claims. The United States has levied unprecedented sanctions against the staff of the International Criminal Court. The World Trade Organization’s dispute resolution system is teetering near the edge of collapse. More than 75 years after the post–World War II frenzy of institution-building, there is still debate about whether international organizations matter—and concern about whether they can endure.

Given this backdrop, Christian Kreuder-Sonnen’s new book provides a surprising angle. He is interested not in the debilities and dysfunctionalities of these organizations but in how they accumulate power. Specifically, he explores when international organizations are able to deploy and retain emergency powers. Drawing on insights from the domestic context, he examines when crisis powers assumed by international organizations become normalized (the “ratchet” effect) and when those powers are “rolled back” by states and other actors worried about expanding international authority. As a framework for this analysis, he attempts to identify the coalitions supporting and opposed to new supranational powers and to weigh their respective institutional and rhetorical power. These coalitions, he makes clear, are not limited to national governments but may also include influential nongovernmental voices.

As case studies, the author selects recent acquisitions of emergency powers by the UN Security Council, the European Union, and the World Health Organization. The Security Council cases center on pathbreaking Council resolutions adopted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In the months after the attacks, the Council mandated that all UN members adopt certain antiterrorist measures into their domestic law, requirements that were widely recognized as a new “legislative” stage in its work. For most of its history, the Council had confined itself to addressing specific disputes. Now it was confronting a diffuse global phenomenon and requiring action by the international community as a whole. (As Kreuder-Sonnen acknowledges, the Security Council’s broad mandate and ample discretion under the UN Charter make it difficult to apply the concept of emergency powers to it.) Another Council resolution created a list of individuals suspected of supporting international terrorism and applied travel bans and asset freezes to them. Despite pushback, the first assertion of authority stuck, and the Council has now adopted similar legislative resolutions in other contexts. However, the second innovation faced scrutiny from international courts and activists concerned about the fairness of the process and the rights of listed individuals. Those complaints resonated, and the Council’s members agreed to substantially modify the process.

The European Union chapters center on new budget and financing powers assumed by the European Commission and the European Central Bank during the Eurozone crisis. In the face of financial turmoil, European institutions acquired the authority to extend emergency credits to member states and to serve as the lender of last resort. Here, the author argues that both institutions were able to cement these new powers, despite complaints from a few states and some judicial scrutiny. He argues that the perceived weight of the financial crisis allowed these institutions to push past objections and review by European judicial institutions. “A continuously high crisis level,” he concludes, “allow[ed] pro-ratchet actors to justify emergency powers as necessary and their normalization therefore as appropriate” (p. 150).

The book was published before the coronavirus pandemic erupted, but the WHO case studies make interesting reading in light of all that has transpired. Kreuder-Sonnen describes a WHO that moved aggressively during the 2002–3 SARS outbreak and even criticized the Chinese government directly for not providing adequate information on the outbreak. On its own, the organization declared a global health emergency, a significant assertion of autonomy from state control. “The WHO resorted to several unprecedented and exceptional measures that shook the very foundations of the organization’s constitutional authority structure” (p. 154). Several years later, the WHO employed some of the authority that it acquired during the SARS crisis to sound the alarm about the swine flu. Those warnings produced significant pushback, however, with some observers alleging that WHO health experts had conflicts of interest based on ties with the pharmaceutical industry. A chastened WHO adopted new transparency measures, which Kreuder-Sonnen categorizes as a partial rollback of the organization’s new powers. From today’s vantage point, it is hard not to see the organization’s tentative and largely deferential response in the early stages of the coronavirus crisis as a further manifestation of concern about avoiding overreach.

At times, the author’s attempt to formally model the response to emergency powers obscures as much as it clarifies. A less formalistic approach might have given him scope for additional insights. Kreuder-Sonnen also too easily assumes that rhetorical argumentation has been decisive in whether emergency powers are rolled back. The evidence that rhetoric was crucial is strongest in the case of the Security Council’s terrorism-listing process but is otherwise thin or absent. Interviews with key participants might have helped add depth and nuance to the author’s account of why some emergency powers stayed and others were successfully resisted.

These points aside, the book is an important contribution. The upshot of the author’s analysis is that international organizations will usually be able to normalize their uses of emergency power. And they usually do so outside the formal processes for amending the treaties and charters that underlie intergovernmental organizations. A deeper understanding of this process contributes to recent scholarship on the informal workings of international organizations (including by Randall Stone) and the ways in which existing organizations can spawn a network of subsidiary bodies (where Tana Johnson’s work is essential). Together, these and other strands of scholarship make clear how inadequate a simple principal-agent relationship is for understanding the complex relationship between states and the organizations they create.

The process of expanding international organization power that Kreuder-Sonnen describes is welcome in many respects. In the face of unanticipated developments, key international organizations are adapting, expanding their mandates, and experimenting with new governance tools. These innovations make it at least possible for organizations created in very different environments to respond to today’s needs. In another sense, however, the accretion of crisis power that the book documents accentuates an existing dilemma. Scholars including Lisa Dellmuth, Ian Hurd, and Jens Steffek have provided important insights on how to think about and measure the legitimacy of international organizations. Most observers concede that these organizations have particular challenges in generating and maintaining public support. The populist movements in several countries, including Brazil, Hungary, the United Kingdom, and the United States, make complaints about the influence of allegedly distant and unaccountable international authorities. If these organizations regularly circumvent formal deliberative processes to acquire new powers, that legitimacy gap may become even more acute.