International Organization最新文献

States are reshaping the global digital economy to assert control over the artificial intelligence (AI) value chain. Operating outside multilateral institutions, they pursue measures such as export controls on advanced semiconductors, infrastructure partnerships, and bans on foreign digital platforms. This digital disintegration reflects an elite-centered response to the infrastructural power that private firms wield over critical AI inputs. A handful of companies operate beyond the reach of domestic regulation and multilateral oversight, controlling access to technologies that create vulnerabilities existing institutions struggle to contain. As a result, states have asserted strategic digital sovereignty: the exercise of authority over core digital infrastructure, often through selective alliances with firms and other governments. The outcome is an emergent form of AI governance in techno-blocs: coalitions that coordinate control over key inputs while excluding others. These arrangements challenge the liberal international order by replacing multilateral cooperation with strategic—and often illiberal—alignment within competing blocs.

In the 1990s and 2000s, scholars emphasized the transformative power of international human rights and the durability of liberal global governance. Today, that optimism has faded. Human rights norms face sharper constraints, weakened institutions, and their authority challenged. We argue that rising authoritarian power—driven by more countries autocratizing, major powers gaining strength, and coordination in an emboldened bloc—poses a major challenge to the global human rights system, and that the United States’ retreat from human rights leadership is accelerating this threat. Authoritarian regimes are no longer merely resisting pressure; they are reshaping the system itself. Four strategies are driving this transformation: repression of domestic and transnational activism; refuting information and discrediting of critics; re-engineering procedures and coalitions within international organizations; and replacement of existing norms with alternative narratives that redefine human rights in illiberal terms. US disengagement amplifies each strategy by removing funding, normative leadership, and institutional backing that once raised the cost of violations and constrained authoritarian advance. Together, these developments mark a turning point. Where autocracies once played defense, liberal democracies and human rights actors are now on the defensive. If powerful authoritarian states consolidate these gains, they may emerge as models for others, attract new followers, and gravely damage liberal human rights as a global project. Yet the future is not preordained. Resilience may require liberal democracies confronting illiberal backsliding at home, and for European and other consolidated democracies to assume greater external leadership to strengthen the foundations of international human rights.

The liberal international trading system has underpinned decades of unprecedented globalization. Yet the imposition of across-the-board and country- and sector-specific tariffs by the second Trump administration in early 2025 has reignited debates over the system’s survival. We challenge the notion that the regime is on the brink of collapse. Drawing on historical patterns of United States trade policy, we argue that US engagement with global commerce has mostly been eclectic, characterized by the coexistence of protectionist and liberal impulses. We show that the system has demonstrated resilience and an ability to adapt to challenges resulting from this eclecticism. While current US trade actions are unprecedented since World War II, we present three reasons to expect a return to the traditional US approach to trade policy. We therefore argue that, despite the protectionist turn and the disruptions created by current US trade policy, predictions about the death of the system underestimate its adaptive flexibility and are thus premature.

Information is a key variable in International Relations, underpinning theories of foreign policy, inter-state cooperation, and civil and international conflict. Yet IR scholars have only begun to grapple with the consequences of recent shifts in the global information environment. We argue that information disorder—a media environment with low barriers to content creation, rapid spread of false or misleading material, and algorithmic amplification of sensational and fragmented narratives—will reshape the practice and study of International Relations. We identify three major implications of information disorder on international politics. First, information disorder distorts how citizens access and evaluate political information, creating effects that are particularly destabilizing for democracies. Second, it damages international cooperation by eroding shared focal points and increasing incentives for noncompliance. Finally, information disorder shifts patterns of conflict by intensifying societal cleavages, enabling foreign influence, and eroding democratic advantages in crisis bargaining. We conclude by outlining an agenda for future research.

A defining feature of the post-1945 international system is the American network of allies and partners that has underpinned its global power. Recent developments within the United States and in the international system have severely strained that alliance network. If it collapses, what is at stake? Existing scholarship in International Relations highlights losses in aggregated military capabilities, reduced diplomatic support, and lost trade. In this essay we review these benefits and another that has been overlooked: ally-enabled access. Access refers to permission from allies and partners to engage in military and intelligence missions within their borders on their territory, through their airspace, or in their territorial waters. Access via America’s allies and security partners has enabled Washington to use foreign sovereign spaces for military logistics, military operations, and foreign surveillance to overcome the tyranny of distance. Examples include permission from allies and partners in the Middle East to allow the US Air Force to fly from their bases to strike targets in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, and US intelligence installations built and operated by permission from Pakistani, Turkish, and Japanese territory during the Cold War. We describe the broad functions of alliances and show how access has been key to projection of American military and intelligence power at a global scale. Perhaps limiting or ending America’s global hegemonic role is desirable; perhaps it is dangerous. We argue that accounting for the contributions of access made by allies and security partners is critical if scholars, policymakers, and publics are to properly assess what is at stake in an American turn away from alliances.

In the contemporary era, territorial conquest has been seen as illegitimate and has taken place in only limited ways. According to an influential narrative in scholarship and public debate, this “territorial integrity norm” is a product of the post-World War II international order and contrasts with the nineteenth century, when conquest was normalized and “might made right.” This essay argues, however, that nineteenth-century European international law imposed meaningful limitations on conquest, including “territorial inviolability.” These limitations were more effective in the colonized world than in Europe, primarily because national irredentism was not thought relevant outside Europe. Europeans’ denial of non-European sovereignty contrasted with their respect for European-established colonial boundaries, and they did not fight over colonial territory between 1815 and 1914. I demonstrate the strength of this “etiquette of thieves” by examining two events where territorial conflict between colonial powers was narrowly avoided: the Panjdeh (1885) and Fashoda (1898) incidents. Viewing territorial integrity as qualitatively changing, rather than absent at one time and present later, has important implications for discussions of how recent conquests, such as those of Russia in Ukraine, will affect the principle of territorial integrity. In particular, territorial integrity may be more likely to be altered in how it is applied than eroded altogether. A specific form of territorial integrity is an integral part of the post-World War II international order, but constraints on conquest as such need not be limited to that specific version of territorial integrity.

The second Trump administration has disrupted global climate politics, turning the United States away from the clean energy and environmental policies of the Biden administration. Consequently, analytical attention is turning, inside and outside of the United States, to a family of concepts referred to as “Climate Realism” (CR), which favors long-run investments in technology and adaptation over near-term climate mitigation efforts. We critically engage with CR and argue that political science identifies four key features of climate politics that shed light on CR’s strengths and weaknesses, and which will persist even in the second Trump era. Despite CR’s flaws, we contend that its emergence in reaction to the second Trump administration highlights some important dimensions of climate politics that deserve greater attention going forward. We highlight three topics for research: the political and practical strategies of the anti-green coalition; the heterogeneity in viable national economic strategies; and the implications for IR of a turn away from meaningful climate mitigation in powerful nations.

Political myths, the sacred narratives that legitimize power, are at the core of all political communities and organizations. In the post–World War II era, clear myths emerged around the ordering of the world, placing democracy, order, and peace at the idealized heart of global governance. Today, the international order is markedly changed. Previously dominant myths are routinely questioned and the international order that was built on these myths is beginning to fragment. Myths traditionally change with institutions. At this unique inflection point in the 2020s, however, this is no longer the case—myths crumble while the institutions they once supported persist, creating a vacuum in which novel myths must emerge in what we refer to as the new age of myth. We argue that the global order is in a transitional moment in terms of its governing mythologies. The myths that are born out of this age will underline the institutions, ideas, and ideologies that will shape the trajectory of the international order in the coming decades. In this essay we therefore argue that the study of political myths should be central to future approaches to international relations. Such an emphasis not only provides insight into the pathways of international cooperation and politics that may emerge from the contemporary shattering of the global political order, but also highlights how these sacred narratives will shape its future trajectory.

Scholarship on cross-border migration and welfare state politics has focused on native-born individuals’ attitudes. How does migration affect the redistribution preferences of migrants—key constituents in host and home countries? We argue that migration causes migrants to adopt more fiscally conservative attitudes, driven not only by economic gains but also by psychological shifts toward self-reliance and beliefs in the prospect of upward mobility. We present results from a randomized controlled trial that facilitated labor migration from India to the Middle East. The intervention prompted high rates of cross-border migration and significantly reduced support for taxation and redistribution among migrants. By contrast, left-behind family members did not become more fiscally conservative despite also experiencing economic gains. While the migrants became economically confident and self-reliant, their family members grew increasingly dependent on remittances. Our results demonstrate that globalization’s impacts on welfare-state preferences depend on the pathways by which it generates economic opportunity.