For over a quarter of a century, international relations (IR) scholars have sought to theorize international organizations (IOs) and international institutions as actors in their own right. Early constructivist work drew upon insights from sociological institutionalism, world society theorists such as John Meyer, and transnationalism to show that IOs had (more) agency than earlier theorized, and played a semi-independent role in promoting norm diffusion or anchoring global governance. From a very different social-theoretic starting point, principal-agent theory also attempted to better understand the scope for IO action in global politics.
A limitation of this work was its inability to capture the inner-workings of IOs—what made them tick, as it were. Over the past 15 years, IR has theorized these internal dynamics through a turn to practice theory and social practices. A practice approach drills down on IOs, looking into the “engine room of world politics,” in Vincent Pouliot’s apt phrase (International Pecking Orders: The Politics and Practice of Multilateral Diplomacy, 2016). Practice approaches view the IO world in interpretive and relational terms, draw upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu for theoretical inspiration, and deploy an array of qualitative-immersive methods to access social practices. In recent years, this practice approach to the study of IOs has become dominant, at least in European IR (see, e.g., Alena Drieschova, Christian Bueger, and Ted Hopf, eds., Conceptualizing International Practices: Directions for the Practice Turn in International Relations, 2022).
The very good news for IR theory is that Kentikelenis and Seabrooke have written a tightly argued and carefully documented book that offers a “nuts-and-bolts view” (p. 9) on the inner workings of IOs that has nothing to do with practice theory. In contrast to practice theorists, the authors of Making Global Norms study IOs through a neo-positivist/critical-realist lens, based on a mostly nonrelational ontology. Theoretically, they draw heavily from—and update—early constructivist work on IOs; their methods are chiefly quantitative and non-immersive.
International organizations are complicated actors to conceptualize; their structure and workings vary tremendously over space and time. This diversity in the IO world is a central theme for Kentikelenis and Seabrooke. Diversity in contemporary IR scholarship is a key theme in this review, and why I applaud the authors for broadening the theoretical toolbox on IOs.
The core argument of Making Global Norms is that IOs are arenas where politics, power, and expertise interact to produce outcomes: global norms operationalized in policy. Put simply, international organizations are “scriptwriters” (pp. 4–5), where abstract principles (norms) are translated into concrete application (policy). The signal contribution of the book is to unpack how this happens—the actors involved and the politics and expertise that motivate, constrain, and constitute their every action. If that sounds like a complicated and nonparsimonious argument, this is precisely the point. Kentikelenis and Seabrooke thus join with others in calling on the discipline to rethink the importance placed on parsimony and generalization in our theory-building efforts (Peter Katzenstein, ed., Uncertainty and Its Discontents: Worldviews in World Politics, 2022; Erica Simmons and Nicholas Rush Smith, eds., Rethinking Generalization: Expanding the Possibilities for Social Inquiry, 2027).
The design of the book—abductive theory building (pp. 46–49)—is clearly laid out and justified; more importantly, it works. A reader finishes the volume thinking the authors have not only made a solid case for the argument, but also used the theory building to better define its scope and domain. In operational terms, this design translates into an introduction followed by separate chapters for theory and design/method; we then get two context-setting/data generation chapters. The core of the book is three “extended computational case studies” (p. 65) on the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The sole focus on the IMF is nicely justified; however, it is less clear what the phrase “extended computational” adds to the existing case study literature—little of which is cited.
Making Global Norms is an ambitious book, theoretically and empirically. The latter is rare in contemporary IR, which too often reduces empirics to plausibility probes, illustrative examples, or oversimplifies them to fit the constraints of causal-inference/experimental designs. Despite or, more likely, because of this ambition, there are gaps and limitations in the setup—on theory, design, and qualitative method.
First and on theory, as the authors develop it in chapter 2, the reader gets a sense of “been there, done that.” That is, the argumentation relies heavily on the pathbreaking work of Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore on expertise and bureaucracy in IOs (Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics, 2004). For sure, Kentikelenis and Seabrooke cite Barnett and Finnemore at multiple points; more importantly, they go beyond the latter by adding politics and network effects (epistemic communities) into the mix of IO agency. Given the overlap, a critic could argue that the core theoretical takeaway of Making Global Norms—IOs as scriptwriters—is Barnett and Finnemore of 2004, updated for an IO world both more political and interconnected.
Second, regarding design, the authors are clear on their abductive approach to theory building. Indeed, the pages devoted to design (pp. 46–49) are a primer in how carefully to justify and explain one’s design choices. Yet this same clarity made it clear how they were building on earlier abductive traditions, without acknowledging it. Here, I have in mind early sociological explorations of grounded theory (Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory, 1967) and their followers in contemporary political science (Kathy Charmaz, Constructing Grounded Theory, Third Edition, 2024). How does the authors’ abductive approach differ from this earlier work and improve upon it? Has disagreement over the appropriate level of pre-theorization—an issue that bedeviled grounded theorists—been overcome? Are research ethics properly addressed when working abductively? Ethical considerations were notable by their absence in grounded theory; yet, based on the neglect of ethics in Making Global Norms, the same happens with abductive designs.
Third, the volume’s use of qualitative methods is unclear and lacking in analytic transparency. This concerns the “relational element” of the argument, where Kentikelenis and Seabrooke explore the process—“deliberations” and “negotiations” (pp. 40–41)—through which IOs produce policy scripts. The qualitative techniques for capturing processes within IOs are well-known and include process tracing (employed by early constructivists) and practice tracing (used by practice theorists). Surprisingly, the authors use neither; instead, they favor “close-reading content analysis” as the “standard method” (pp. 55–56) for capturing interactions and processes. The discussion here lacks the analytic precision seen elsewhere in the book; it is also not referenced, which is odd for such a “standard method.”
This lack of conceptual clarity on the book’s process methods has knock-on effects in the case studies, especially chapters 6 and 7 and their relational, process sections (pp.157–162; pp.183–191). In these pages, the close-reading content analysis vanishes or is perhaps there but implicit. The only data cited are archival documents from the IMF: Executive Board Minutes. It is not clear to the reader how texts of this sort can provide evidence on process. Even if they did, how do the authors control for everything the minutes leave out—a well-known problem in both national and IO archives? These qualitative process sections thus lack analytic transparency. This is all the more surprising as the quantitative sections of each chapter excel in execution and transparency.
These criticisms aside, Kentikelenis and Seabrooke have written an excellent book. They have given IR a new theory for conceptualizing the agency of international organizations. Not everything is perfect here, but that is to be expected of any book, especially one that aims high in terms of both theory and empirics.
A final observation concerns the book’s shelf life. As I write these words (spring 2026), the entities at the core of Making Global Norms—international organizations—are being hollowed out, devalued, and defunded. While such trends predate the second Trump administration, they have accelerated considerably since January 2025. Indeed, the core scope condition of the authors’ argument—a world where IOs and their repository of scientific expertise play central roles in governance (p. 42)—may soon be history. The follow-up study to Kentikelenis and Seabrooke may well need to be written by historians.
