International organizations (IOs) monitor compliance with international norms but public criticism of member states remains discretionary. We argue that such criticism depends not only on mandates or political incentives, but on whether IOs can access information they deem credible. This credibility is socially produced. Through repeated interaction, IO staff develop trust in specific local non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which become reliable conduits of mandate-aligned and verifiable information. These trust-based ties reduce uncertainty and reputational risk, enabling public criticism. We test this argument using original data on press releases and NGO participation in public hearings at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights from 1996 to 2020. Combining statistical analysis, an instrumental variable strategy, text analysis, and interview evidence, we show that the Commission is more likely to issue and to sharpen critical press releases when it has established ties with local NGOs focused on the relevant country and issue.

The institutional arrangements of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), notably those organized around conferences of the parties, have given rise to increasingly powerful and autonomous actors in global environmental governance. The expanding authority of these actors has outpaced the development of robust accountability mechanisms, allowing decisions that exceed mandates or undermine other regimes, often without oversight or redress. This accountability gap poses a structural risk to the legitimacy and effectiveness of global environmental efforts. We examine two potential pathways for closing this gap: (i) the Articles on the Responsibility of International Organizations, which offer a legal framework for institutional responsibility, and (ii) public accountability mechanisms that promote transparency, contestation, and learning. Each approach has limitations when applied in isolation, but their principles, if adapted to and developed for the specific institutional contexts of MEAs, could jointly inform a more coherent and layered framework of accountability. We propose institutional and policy reforms that link the legal recognition of institutional responsibilities under MEAs with embedded oversight and review mechanisms, laying the groundwork for more credible, responsive, and just global environmental governance.

This article offers a state-of-the-art review of a new and growing research program in International Relations (IR) that analyzes the far right’s inter- and transnational politics. Responding to the rise of far-right leaders, parties, and movements worldwide, this nascent literature sheds light on the inter- and transnational drivers, patterns, connections, and effects of far-right politics. To further consolidate and develop this emerging research program, as this article argues, it is imperative to integrate this literature into a wider framework that delineates different analytical approaches and research agendas. For this purpose, the article identifies and examines five research strands: (1) foreign and security policy, (2) international thought, (3) the global causes of the rise of the far right, (4) trans- and international collaboration, and (5) international norms, institutions, and orders. It appraises their different analytical perspectives and insights, connects each research strand with various IR paradigms, subdisciplines, and literatures, and identifies unexplored lines of inquiry. Thereby, the article aims to broaden and diversify the theoretical, empirical, and methodological scope of this research program and to further facilitate synergies between IR and far-right studies. It then discusses a series of limitations and challenges facing this research program and proposes a level-of-analysis approach to advance it.

Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) play a crucial role in promoting compliance with international norms through fact-finding and on-site monitoring missions. Many of these missions take place in authoritarian regimes, which often employ various tactics to control and suppress critics both domestically and internationally. Yet, in some cases, authoritarian states permit IGO missions to operate with little or no interference and may even establish collaborative relationships in politically sensitive issue areas. This study examines this puzzle by asking why and when IGO on-site monitoring missions can persist and foster collaboration in authoritarian contexts, a dynamic I label a pragmatic partnership. Theoretically, I argue that two key conditions must be met for such partnerships to emerge: international pressure and the development of interpersonal trust. However, I also contend that these partnerships can generate contestation, risk legitimizing autocratic practices, and marginalize pro-democratic forces. Empirically, I illustrate my argument through an in-depth analysis of the International Labour Organization (ILO)’s monitoring mission on child labour and forced labour in Uzbekistan. Methodologically, I employ process tracing covering the period 2005–2022 and draw on multiple sources of evidence. While such partnerships can contribute to incremental compliance with international norms, I also show that they generate contestation, risk legitimizing autocratic practices, and may marginalize pro-democratic forces.

Within political institutions insulated from money in politics and domestic electoral considerations, to what extent are non-state actors able to influence regulations? Many international organizations (IOs) are composed only of state members, but their regulations have far-reaching consequences for non-state actors. This paper sheds new light on the influence of non-state actors, particularly firms, on regulations, with a focus on the case of OECD tax evasion regulations. I argue that firms and industry associations work to build positive reputations with bureaucrats through broad-based and high-quality written public comments to further their policy preferences. I present evidence that bureaucrats make decisions in line with these expectations through quantitative analysis of a new dataset of 3,349 OECD public comments, natural language processing methods, and thirty-three in-depth interviews. The results indicate that stakeholder engagement may be a double-edged sword: while intended to democratize access to the policy-making process, even these fora are susceptible to strategic firm behavior. However, while well-resourced firms and associations are at an advantage in having their voice heard in the creation of regulations, smaller firms that invest substantially in the process can have an outsized influence. International taxation also represents a substantively important case of non-state actor influence given the successful co-ordination of 147 countries on new tax regulations.

The privatization of rights and obligations of states under the influence of international organizations (IOs) is a challenge for international law. The difficulty resides in the lack of a clear public status of those organizations. This article purports to identify an ‘international public law’ of both states and IOs. Only such a law could indeed institute international organizations as ‘public’ institutions of their member states’ peoples and thereby ‘reinstitute’ those peoples. The article’s first section presents an institutional-normative account of publicness. A second section presents how, even though an international law ‘of the public’ gradually developed after the nineteenth century, that public dimension was never very strong, not the least because of the role played by IOs. The third section explains indeed how, due to IOs’ construction as functional and apolitical organizations and the private law analogies that have dominated their organization, the international law of IOs quickly turned into a vector of public/private hybridization of both states and IOs. To address this challenge, the fourth section argues not only for a general and minimal common public status of IOs under international law, but also against quick analogies with states’ sovereign rights and obligations. To help consolidate the proposed distinct albeit continuous public status of IOs, the fifth section spells out what could be the common but differentiated public rights of states and IOs which may not be conferred to private persons, and their common but differentiated public obligations that could set limits on the private exercise of these rights.

This article examines the legal concept of ‘international organization’ by analysing its functions across public international law, institutional law and domestic law. It demonstrates how the concept structures legal reasoning by articulating a category of international legal subjects and serving as a shorthand for the rules governing the acquisition of status and the legal consequences flowing from that status for members of the category. In doing so, the article discusses which elements are essential, what is at stake in adopting definitions of international organizations and how institutional and domestic law may borrow from the concept as it exists in public international law.

Amidst a deepening sense of uncertainty and polycrisis, how do international organizations (IOs) relate to the future? This article explores the politics of speculative foresight as a pervasive but sparsely researched and undertheorized form of future-oriented expertise in international institutions that taps into eclectic knowledge genres – such as art and literature, management philosophy, geopolitics, and esotericism. First, I examine how foresight is created and validated as a bundle of epistemic practice in contemporary IOs. As a way of knowing, I find that foresight is authorized through claims to innovation, imagination, pluralism, and methodological correctness, challenging established understandings of IO expertise as based on bureaucratic rationality and scientific objectivity. Moreover, I argue that foresight differs from more well-researched future-oriented practices, like risk technologies, forecasting, and anticipatory modeling, by imagining the future as contingent, plural, and unknowable. In a second genealogical move, I illustrate how this specific rendering of the future was made possible historically through the establishment of futures studies as an activist, utopian, and aesthetic counter-project to ‘scientific’ Cold War futurology. The article mobilizes performative thinking in social theory and STS and builds on a transversal analysis of IO documents, digital platforms and archives, futurist writings, and historical literature.

The global expansion of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is an understudied area of research, particularly in the Middle East. The issue is often framed through a linear, state-centric lens that oversimplifies its complexities and subordinates the role of microprocesses and individual actors. This article contributes to global and refugee history through a microhistorical study of the establishment of UNHCR’s branch office for the Middle East in Beirut in 1962. It challenges the assumption that UNHCR’s globalization process unfolded in a systematic and well-reasoned manner and presents three interconnected arguments: first, the selection of Beirut was neither purely systematic nor entirely haphazard; second, UNHCR representatives enjoyed significant freedom in shaping the structure and functions of branch offices; and third, pragmatic diplomacy, rather than strict formalization through an agreement, ensured smooth relations between UNHCR and the Lebanese government.