Chapter 11 examines how constitutional war powers functioned in the late Cold War and early post–Cold War period. It argues that disputes in the 1980s and 1990s unfolded without domestic mobilization pressures and instead reflected competing views about how the United States should wield force as a Cold War superpower and later as the sole superpower. Under President Reagan, the Executive advanced expansive interpretations of presidential authority in Lebanon and the Persian Gulf to support its rollback strategy, while Congress used process, including War Powers Resolution reporting and funding leverage, to shape and sometimes constrain operations. In Nicaragua, Congress went further by blocking covert action through the Boland Amendments, prompting administration allies to press a significant theory of inherent presidential power to wage covert warfare. After the Cold War, presidents carried these practices into a unipolar era. In the 1991 Gulf War and humanitarian interventions of the 1990s, presidents alternated between asserting broad authority and acknowledging limits, while UN mandates carried diplomatic but little constitutional weight. Taken together, the chapter depicts war powers evolving through sustained interbranch bargaining rather than decisive constitutional settlement.

Chapter 7 traces how interwar fears of entanglement and executive adventurism reshaped constitutional war powers – and how World War II then blurred the line between neutrality and war. It begins with Congress’s effort to constitutionalize restraint: proposals like the Ludlow Amendment and, more durably, the Neutrality Acts, which used trade, finance, and foreign commerce powers to reduce the risk of sliding into conflict. The chapter then examines the era of “almost-war” from 1939 to 1941, when Roosevelt and Congress invoked emergency authorities and defense measures while the nation remained formally at peace. In this era, war-powers authority expanded gradually rather than at a single moment, leaving unclear when and how constitutional checks were meant to engage. Once war came, total mobilization deepened World War I precedents, but the constitutional “switch” from peace to war mattered less after the New Deal expanded baseline federal power. The chapter also confronts the civil-liberties costs of judicial deference, most starkly Japanese–American internment, before turning to the postwar constitutional challenge of reconciling the UN’s collective-security commitments with a war-powers system designed for autonomy and non-entanglement.

Against “political” Roman Catholicism, the WCC’s legal lobbying ultimately proved less important than ecumenical dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church. Though the ecumenical network shared legal tactics with representatives of the small Protestant Churches in Spain, in the face of Franco’s “National-Catholicism,” legal activism was at best an uphill battle, subject to the vagaries of Franco’s desire for international respectability and the Western bloc’s willingness to criticize a staunch anti-communist ally. Discrimination against Protestants in Spain ultimately rested on the Catholic hierarchy’s rejection of religious liberty in predominantly Catholic states – a position sanctioned by the Vatican under Pope Pius XII. It was, consequently, the ecumenical movement’s contribution to the Catholic Church’s embrace of religious freedom and ecumenism, via the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), that made possible religious (and political) liberalization in Spain. Working through personal contacts with Catholic leaders, especially Bishop Johan Willebrands and Cardinal Augustin Bea, the WCC contributed to the extension of religious freedom to Spain and across the Catholic world.

This chapter analyzes the 1990–1991 Gulf War to illustrate two distinct rationales for insincere coercion: mobilizing support and moving the goalposts. Following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the United States initially employed coercive diplomacy, using United Nations Security Council resolutions, economic sanctions, and troop deployments in an effort to compel an Iraqi withdrawal. While this effort failed to gain immediate Iraqi concessions, it successfully mobilized a massive international coalition and secured domestic approval for military action. As the subsequent air campaign decimated Iraqi defenses, the true balance of power was revealed, significantly increasing the coalition’s expected outcome for a ground war. Consequently, the Bush administration’s minimum demands shifted. Fearing a Soviet-brokered peace deal that would leave Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard intact, the United States “moved the goalposts” by issuing an ultimatum demanding an immediate, humiliating withdrawal. Knowing Saddam would reject these terms, the United States intentionally chose coercion failure. This allowed the coalition to launch a brute force ground invasion, achieving its expanded foreign policy objective of liberating Kuwait while simultaneously seriously attriting Iraq’s offensive military capabilities.

This chapter looks at some of the experiments of international governance by the United Nations typically listed as cases of international administrations (West Irian, Namibia, Cambodia and Eastern Slavonia). These United Nations peace missions have been considered as international administrations by numerous scholars, in the same category with Kosovo and Timor-Leste and sometimes on par with these two experiments in terms of effective authority deployed by international officials. I will be arguing that contra this opinion generally based on the reading of the mandates, international officials have displayed only limited political authority over these territories. Through archival work conducted in the United Nations Archives, revealing in specific instances the hidden transcripts of the time, I will be analysing each of these cases in turn, and adding a few other cases as well including Cyprus, El Salvador, Mozambique, Western Sahara and Somalia.

Calls for international administrations are still present in contemporary international relations, from the war in the Middle East to the Ukraine. This chapter summarises the main argument developed in the book, notably the necessity to apprehend international administrations through the reality on the ground. This means to pay special attention to the confluence of claims of political authority deployed by international officials and concomitant claims of accountability such practices of authority elicit. Finally, I discuss the various possibilities to strengthen accountability mechanisms for the UN (and for other international organisation).

Some argue that international administrations are contemporary manifestations of a project which began with the League of Nations Mandate System and the United Nations Trusteeship System. This chapter makes the case that these experiments of colonial administration systems are hardly international administrations, with sovereignty practices resting firmly within the European capitals at the time. If some projects envisionned a bigger role for the international organisations at the time, they were in fine defeated by officials brushing aside the idea of having these organisations play a crucial role in colonial governance. This discussion nevertheless sheds a new light on the specificities of contemporary international administration as a project of global governance.

This chapter presents the central claim of the book, arguing that sovereignty practices emerge at the confluence of struggles – on the one hand, by actors asserting the political authority over a specific territory and, on the other hand, through resistance to this move by actors pursuing accountability and the responsibilisation of sovereign actors. I claim that practices of political authority – expressed through effective rule over territory – are central, constitutive acts of world politics, entailing specific obligations. Broadening the study of sovereignty practices beyond state relations, I argue that understanding how specific actors such as international organisations act as sovereign actors opens up new perspectives on international accountability and obligations in world politics.

The chapter wishes to make a socio-historical and comparative contribution to the controversy arousing around business participation and the democratization of global governance through a comparison between the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and the International Organization of Employers (IOE) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While these two organizations have claimed to represent business and private enterprises at the global level, and have benefited from the legitimization of intergovernmental organizations themselves (the ILO and the UN) for more than a century now, they have done so in a quite differentiated way, both in their external relationships with intergovernmental organizations as in the definition of their internal representativeness. This chapter first delves into the process of institutionalization of the representation of the ICC and IOE. It then reveals the logic of their internal organization, particularly in their relations with their members, employers’ associations and multinational corporations. It insists on their selection process and the way they have built a collective entity now referred to as ‘business’. By doing so, the chapter distinguishes the representation of the ICC and the IOE within international organizations from the representation of business within and by the ICC and the IOE, insisting on the need for a more differentiated and historically grounded perspective on business actors within global governance institutions.

This chapter begins by outlining the past trends and the present trajectory of employment-related dispute resolution at international organizations. Second, the historic evolution of the statutory basis of administrative tribunals at the United Nations is analysed, suggesting that Member State governance organs are prepared to revise procedures, but are reluctant to address the transparency of employment law at international organizations. Third, and in conclusion – extending this book’s emphasis on concisely and clearly introducing the law – the incorporation of general legal principles of international administrative law into the Statutes of international administrative tribunals is proposed.

This chapter examines the role of international law and institutions in El Salvador’s UN Truth Commission (1992-1993). This was the first Truth Commission to be established by the UN after the Cold War. It argues that the Truth Commission drew on the identity and status of the UN as an international institution to authorize its account about the unlawfulness of the violence of the civil war. In turn, the UN-Truth Commission’s account displaced ‘other’ accounts (of peasant and Indigenous communities) which were seen to rival international law’s understanding of the violence. In particular, by excluding an account of the socio-economic circumstances of the civil war, which remained a source of conflict in the country, the UN was able to claim that it had contributed to making El Salvador a ‘model’ post-conflict state. To show this, the chapter juxtaposes the Truth Commission’s account with a rival account embroidered in a tapestry, hand-made by a Salvadoran woman living in a refugee camp in the 1980s, which represents the Sumpul River Massacre. The chapter shows how the tapestry exposes the socio-economic roots of the civil war – a truth that the Truth Commission displaces and renders irrelevant for post-conflict state-society relations.