The post-1919 international order extended to China formal sovereign equality while offering few legal means to exercise it. The Sino-Belgian treaty dispute of 1926–29 reveals this: when China abrogated its 1865 treaty with Belgium and Brussels sued at the Permanent Court of International Justice, the institutions that promised peaceful revision could not deliver it without the consent of the powers whose privileges were at stake. The ‘unequal treaties’, a political category coined only in 1923, named the contradiction the order had built in. Four lawyer-diplomats—Wellington Koo, Wang Chung-hui, C.T. Wang, and Eugene Chen—were each caught between national autonomy and admission among the ‘civilised’ powers. The turn from legal argument to ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ was the structure’s doing, not a failure of nerve. Read beside Turkey, Persia, and the Latin American states, China’s case locates the obstacle: not semi-peripheral weakness as such, but the institutional position from which each engaged an order that subordinated its members through the very terms of their admission.

Nationals living abroad are increasingly recognised as important, yet often overlooked, actors in international diplomacy. Unlike previous research – which has focused mainly on states and diasporas as singular entities – this study highlights the pivotal contributions of individuals. It introduces a new theoretical framework that emphasises the multifaceted roles of professionals in international organisations as resources for strengthening their home state’s development, influence, and global visibility. The study examines the actors involved in diaspora diplomacy, how diplomatic work is conducted by, for, and through diasporas, and what motivates citizen diplomats. The analysis draws on a survey (N = 150), six focus groups (N = 18), and four interviews with highly skilled Latvian professionals in international organisations. Findings reveal the decentralised, networked nature of diaspora diplomacy, challenging the notion of the state or diaspora as a singular actor. Individual diaspora members play vital roles, advancing their home country’s goals and visibility through their professional activities. All core functions of public diplomacy – communication, representation, listening, advocacy, and nation branding – are actively performed at the individual level by citizen diplomats. However, the degree to which states benefit from this resource depends on having a coordinated strategy for diaspora engagement.

The rules-based international order faces an existential paradox. Eight decades after its founding, international law has never been more vital to human flourishing, yet it has also never been more imperilled. Developments in recent years such as the invasion of Ukraine and the erosion of the multilateral trading system represent more than institutional failures – they expose critical fault lines that, if left unaddressed, threaten to fracture the foundational architecture of international law. This article explores what these trends reveal about the future of the international rule of law and contends that the way forward requires a spirit of sober optimism – one that neither abandons hope nor ignores hard realities about the existing legal order. It suggests that this approach represents our best hope for securing humanity’s shared future.

Digitalisation in health introduces new actors, risks, and challenges into health governance. Global health institutions such as World Bank, World Health Organisation, and the now-disbanded US Agency for International Development play a central role in shaping how governments navigate this evolving technical terrain. This paper examines digital health discourses of these organisations in the early 2020s, asking why, how, and by whom digital health is promoted. Using Political Discourse Analysis, we study three flagship documents, selected from 72. Our analysis shows that these organisations engage in depoliticisation, portraying digital health as an inevitable wave that governments must adopt rapidly and extensively. This techno-optimist framing overlooks government capacity gaps concerning the complexity of strategic adoption and asymmetric power relations with technology providers, and the absence of political engagement with risks and challenges. These discourses foster a depoliticised vision of digital health, overlooking the political mechanisms for digitalisation to benefit the public.

Most quantitative analyses of policy convergence treat transnational communication in international organisations and domestic economic problems as additive factors. By contrast, this article argues that domestic economic problems motivate governments to search for successful policies, while international organisations offer channels for policy learning. Thus, both factors interact, magnifying each other's effects. The argument is corroborated by a quantitative analysis of the privatisation of telecommunications providers in the Western OECD world. A dyadic logit model shows that joint membership in international organisations increases the likelihood of policy convergence if governments face budget deficits. The argument of the article builds a bridge between theories of international organisations and domestic theories of policy making. Theories of the former gain an important scope condition specifying the conditions under which transnational communication works, while exploring the latter gains a theory specifying where new policy ideas come from.

This article addresses critical gaps in the literature on crisis-driven policy change in international organisations. While existing studies focus on elite decision-making and institutional resilience, the role of frontline crisis managers remains under-explored in International Relations. Using the European migration and refugee crisis as a case study and drawing on insights from organisation studies and the sociology of the professions, the article introduces a novel theoretical framework that foregrounds improvisation by first responders and the ex-post stabilisation of their spontaneous policy solutions at headquarters. In addition to reconstructing and illustrating the mechanisms that link frontline action to changed policies, the article identifies theoretical conditions shaping the likelihood and direction of informal policy change from the ground up. By highlighting bottom-up dynamics in crises, it not only advances theoretical debates on crisis politics, but also proposes a new research agenda for analysing the transformative role of field-level practices in global politics.

With this paper, I suggest focusing on diplo-scientific actors as a fruitful approach to study how certain actors have helped to shape international organisations through their diplomatic activities and scientific practices. Using the example of the Swedish medical physicist Rolf Sievert, I show how Sievert’s personality and preferences came to decisively shape the post-war trajectory of the International Commission on Radiation Protection (ICRP) and more broadly the international landscape of radiation protection. In the inter-war period, Sievert was engaged in the ICRP and its mother organisation, the International Radiological Congress (IRC), dealing with the interwoven questions of how to formulate international radiation standards and radiation protection initiatives. Following the Second World War, Sievert became concerned with the proliferation of nuclear technologies and the spread of radioactive fallout following nuclear test bombings. Because of this concern, Sievert set out to separate the ICRP from the IRC and form a new, independent group that could deal with the dangers of the new ‘Nuclear Age’. While Sievert was ultimately unsuccessful, his attempts would decisively change the purview and trajectory of the ICRP. This had large ramifications, as the ICRP continues to be the prime international organisation on radiological and medical radiation protection, formulating recommendations that are used by international, regional, national, and local groups, informing epistemic judgements on radiation research.

Under what conditions citizens accept public institutions as legitimate authorities is a key question in political science. Recent accounts suggest that populist citizens reject international organisations (IOs) as distant, elitist, and undemocratic. Conversely, technocratic citizens should favour IOs as they represent the pinnacle of depoliticised, expertise-driven decision-making. In this article, we provide the first joint analysis of technocratic and populist attitudes as drivers of attitudes towards IOs. We analyse a unique survey conducted in five European countries that covers four IOs and ask how individual populist and technocratic attitudes influence attitudes towards IOs. We find only conditional evidence for a structural association between technocratic and populist and IO attitudes, and credible evidence that country-specific experiences with populism in power moderate these associations. Our contribution has important implications for our understanding of citizen attitudes towards various forms of political representation and the legitimacy of IOs.

It is a truism that legitimacy is relational inasmuch as an international institution’s legitimacy hinges on how it is perceived by relevant audiences. What is less discussed is that legitimation practices may have another strong relational dimension as well, in which institutions portray themselves as being related to respected others. While the idea that international institutions associate themselves with others to borrow their legitimacy is not new, it has not as yet been thoroughly theorised. This article therefore brings together insights from research on the legitimation of international institutions and relational sociology, as well as from related fields, to theorise the notion of ‘relational legitimation’. It also presents a case study on the Special Procedures of the United Nations Human Rights Council. Based on qualitative content analysis of annual thematic reports, the paper suggests that relational legitimation is a common practice among the Special Procedures, and possibly also among other international institutions. It shows that relational legitimation relies on a number of different frames – alignment being the most important one – and that association is sought primarily with epistemic authorities, especially those from the West, and other ‘family members’.

International organisations (IOs) hold important governance functions and power. Yet, they are several steps detached from the constituencies that have entrusted them with functions and resources to carry them out, even as accountability expectations remain significant for their legitimacy. This article presents a broadly generalisable theoretical framework for understanding the variable accountability of IOs, seeking to advance the understanding of international accountability in three new ways. First, it elaborates on the concept of the scope of IO accountability, which can vary across organisations, over time, and across contexts. The idea of a scope of accountability moves beyond the dichotomy of accountable versus non-accountable power holders and advances an understanding of accountability as a multi-layered phenomenon, whereby both the expectations and practices of accountability can evolve over time and with respect to different audiences. Second, the article identifies three political factors – namely the formal and informal excercise of power, institutional structure, and public salience – that can shape, in important ways, the variable scope of IO accountability. Finally, it critically explores the tensions and contradictions between these political dynamics, and the implications for access to and the efficacy of accountability systems.