The review of international organizations最新文献

Communication departments of international organizations (IOs) are important intermediaries of global governance who increasingly use social media to reach out to citizens directly. Social media pose new challenges for IO communication such as a highly competitive economy of attention and the fragmentation of the audiences driven by networked curation of content and selective exposure. In this context, communication departments have to make tough choices about what to communicate and how, aggravating inherent tensions between IO communication as comprehensive public information (aimed at institutional transparency)—and partisan political advocacy (aimed at normative change). If IO communication focuses on advocacy it might garner substantial resonance on social media. Such advocacy nevertheless fails to the extent that it fosters the polarized fragmentation of networked communication and undermines the credibility of IO communication as a source of trustworthy information across polarized “echo chambers.” The paper illustrates this argument through a content and social network analysis of Twitter communication on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM). Remarkably, instead of facilitating cross-cluster communication (“building bridges”) Twitter handles run by the United Nations Department of Global Communications (UNDGC) seem to have substantially fostered ideological fragmentation (“digging the trench”) by their way of partisan retweeting, mentioning, and (hash)tagging.

The European Union (EU) is a democratic organization but faces severe cases of democratic backsliding. The literature deems the EU a hospitable environment for and reluctant to reign in backsliding. This study focuses on the tactics that backsliding governments employ to preserve this hospitable environment and the conditions under which they succeed. I argue that backsliding governments seek to repurpose the practice of accommodation that permeates EU decision-making for the protection of their backsliding projects. Doing so promises backsliders an escape from their precarious bargaining position in a democratic organization but comes with constraints. Backsliders must limit opposition carefully to a subset of EU competences, backsliding-inhibiting competences, that threaten their backsliding projects the most. Moreover, they can only rely on accommodation in the Council if the democratic member states perceive opposition as justified and remain insulated from political accountability by Europe’s parliaments. I present evidence based on quantitative and qualitative analyses of bargaining positions, processes, and outcomes in EU decision-making. The results have implications for understanding the EU’s autocratic predicament, the opportunities of backsliding governments, and the role of autocracies in regional and international organizations.

Liberal democracy is facing renewed challenges from a growing group of states undergoing democratic backsliding. While entrenched autocrats have long resented and contested the established liberal order, we know far less about how newer backsliding states behave on the international stage. We argue these states, who joined prominent western liberal institutions prior to their backsliding, will use their established membership in these organizations both to protect themselves from future scrutiny regarding adherence to liberal democratic values and to oppose the prevailing western liberal norms that increasingly conflict with their evolving interests. Using voting data from the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) from 2006-2021, we show that backsliding states are more likely to vote against targeted resolutions that name and shame specific countries. We supplement this analysis with detailed data from the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) and combine regression analysis and a structural topic model (STM) to show that backsliding states are more critical in their UPR reports when evaluating advanced western democracies, and more likely to emphasize issues that align with their own interests while de-emphasizing ones that might threaten government power and control over citizens.

The growing literature explaining why repressive regimes ratify human rights treaties fails to explain why some regimes take the additional step to delegate authority to their people to file international legal complaints while others do not. I examine individual petition mechanisms in the United Nations which allow individuals to file complaints to an overseeing treaty body. I argue that repressive regimes face international incentives to signal their commitment to the European Union, a global power with a strong and continued interest in the global human rights regime. Repressive regimes, however, only ratify agreements when they perceive low domestic costs with little institutional constraints on the executive. In support of my theory, I find that repressive regimes are more likely to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights’ Optional Protocol allowing individual petitions when they are trade dependent on the EU while facing lesser institutional constraints, both legislative and judicial. The results are similar to explaining treaty ratification, but the interaction is substantively larger for OP ratification among repressive countries, highlighting the increased costs repressive leaders face to allowing individual petitions. Individual standing in the overseeing body of the ICCPR is one example of non-state actor access in international institutions, which is an important component of understanding institutional design and compliance.

States must navigate the structure of the international system in their relations with other states. One crucial component of this structure are rivalries as they indicate latent threat to states. Rivalries should thus influence how states behave within the given system, but also how they seek to shape and restructure it. Focusing on arms transfers, we clarify how the systemic structure implied by rivalries drives states’ efforts to engage in security cooperation with other states. Intuitively, a rivalry with another country should diminish an exporter’s propensity to transfer weapons there. But what is more, we argue that rivalries outside of this focal dyad matter as a potential importer’s enmity towards other countries will reveal information about its security interests to the exporter. Specifically, sharing rivalries with the same set of countries will signal to the exporter that there is a congruence in security interests and thus facilitate security cooperation. This security cooperation should take the form of arms transfers, at least if exporters value buck-passing and fear entrapment. We test our expectations using original data on Major Conventional Weapons transfers in the Interwar years, a period where this condition likely holds, and inferential network analysis models. Sharing rivals increases two countries’ probability to trade arms whereas a rivalry between countries exhibits no effect. This research contributes to our understanding of security cooperation, the arms trade, and networked international relations.

Why do democracies experience financial crises more often than non-democracies? Revisiting the 2008 Great Financial Crisis (GFC) as a significant and informative test case, I argue that considering the way domestic institutions inhere in system-level structures is important to explaining crisis susceptibility among democracies since the turn of the twenty-first century. I introduce the mechanism of co-regime financial connections in showing that regime type is an important systematic feature of global financial flows. Employing a latent space network regression model using IMF Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey (CPIS), I find that the network of cross-border portfolio asset investments is systematically patterned by co-democracy pairs. I then show that this regime-patterned interdependence affects increased financial crisis susceptibility among democracies. My findings build on literature highlighting the interdependence between domestic- and system-level factors and inform an empirical puzzle regarding the prevalence of financial crises among democracies.