Enforcers beyond Borders: Transnational NGOs and the enforcement of international law

Scholars have studied international NGOs as advocates and service providers, but have neglected their importance in autonomously enforcing international law. We have two basic aims: first to establish the nature and significance of transnational NGO enforcement, and second to explore the factors behind its rise. NGO enforcement comprises a spectrum of practices, from indirect (e.g., monitoring and investigation), to direct enforcement (e.g., prosecution and interdiction). We explain NGO enforcement by an increased demand for the enforcement of international law, and factors that have lowered the cost of supply for non-state enforcement. Increased demand for enforcement reflects the growing gap between the increased legalization of international politics and states’ limited enforcement capacity. On the supply side, the diffusion of new technologies and greater access to new legal remedies facilitate increased non-state enforcement. We evidence these claims via case studies from the environmental and anti-corruption sectors.</jats:p

Why the World Needs an International Cyberwar Convention

States’ capacity for using information and communication technology (ICT) to inflict grave economic, political and material harm on enemies has been amply demonstrated. In recent years, many states have reported large-scale cyber-attacks against their military defense systems, water supply systems and other critical national infrastructure. Currently there is no agreed-upon set of international rules and norms governing conflict in cyberspace. Many states prefer to keep it that way. They insist that difficulties of verifiability and the challenges raised by rapid technological change preclude international agreement on a formal convention to govern cyber conflict and favor reliance on strategic deterrence to limit conflict. In this article, I review some of the main objections to an international convention regulating the use of cyber weapons. I argue that while there are significant obstacles to effective multilateral arms control in the cyber domain, experience from other areas of international arms control suggest none of these obstacles are insurmountable. I also argue that whereas most observers insist that cyberspace favors offensive strategies, closer examination of the political dynamics of the cyber domain in fact indicates the dominance of defensive strategies. This in turn improves the prospects for striking effective multilateral agreement(s) to reduce risks of international cyber conflict

The anachronism of bellicist state-building

Unlike state-building in medieval Europe, America, and Africa, where a combination of security threats and economic incentives led to a swift consolidation of central authority, post-war Europe has lacked an essential ingredient of successful state-building: an existential threat. The result, argue Keleman and McNamara, has been a ‘gradual, uneven, and dysfunctional’ integration process, stopping short of statehood. Ironically, their comparative historical explanation for the EU's shortcomings is strangely ‘ahistorical’, failing to consider the specific world-historical time at which the EU was born. The EU emerged at a time when (a) existing nation-states were relatively solidly formed, and (b) the territorial state is increasingly anachronistic as a means of amassing and projecting power. In a globalized world, providing for citizens’ security and welfare demands global alliance-building more than coercive taxation to build large standing armies. War-deprivation is therefore not what explains the EU’s limited statehood. As security threats loom on the EU’s borders, concentration of fiscal capacity and coercive power in Brussels remains unlikely. The good news is that–by historical standards–the EU appears to be managing external crises remarkably well with limited ‘core state powers’

Re-bordering Europe? Collective action barriers to ‘Fortress Europe’

This article discusses the collective action problems associated with different kinds of joint external bordering and highlights specific aspects of the European Union which I argue make it particularly ineffective at supplying (many) forms of external bordering. Applying this framework to the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy, European Immigration Policy, and European Neighbourhood Policy, I explain why each of these areas is subject to chronic under-provision. I conclude that a ‘Fortress Europe’ is unlikely to materialize, giving rise instead to national re-bordering as a reaction to growing pressures on the Union’s internal and external borders

Of the contemporary global order, crisis, and change

The contemporary global order is widely said to be in crisis. But despite a rapidly proliferating literature on the subject, there is little clarity or consensus about wherein the ‘crisis’ consist, or what precisely is under threat. We offer a restricted characterization of the post-war global order based on its fundamental substantive and procedural ordering principles: sovereign inter-state relations and a relatively open global economy, characterized by practices of inclusive, rule-bound multilateralism. We argue that only if one of more of these foundational principles are systematically violated, can we speak of a demise of the order. To this end, we consider the extent to which each of these basic principles is currently endangered. We conclude that what we are witnessing is not the collapse of the current world order, but rather its transformation and adaptation into a broader, more flexible and multifaceted system of global governance–a change within the order rather than of the order

The global governance complexity cube: Varieties of institutional complexity in global governance

Published online: 06 November 2021Recent decades have seen a proliferation in the number, depth and span of international institutions regulating different domains of global politics. Issues like global health, intellectual property rights, climate change and many others that were once governed by relatively distinct rulesets are today regulated by multiple institutions with intersecting mandates and memberships. As a result, the creation, evolution and effectiveness of international institutions are fundamentally shaped by how they relate to other institutions operating within their policy domains. Yet, global governance complexes—that is, clusters of overlapping institutions and actors that govern specific policy issues—differ widely. The number and types of rulesets and actors involved, the degree of overlap between them and the extent to which overlapping rules conflict vary markedly across governance complexes and over time. The same is true for institutional responses to regulatory conflict. The broad trend towards growing institutional complexity in global governance is thus subject to important variation

Issue-adoption and campaign structure in transnational advocacy campaigns: a longitudinal network analysis

Why do transnational actors choose to campaign on specific issues, and why do they launch campaigns when they do? In this article, we theorize the membership, focus, timing and strategies used in transnational advocacy campaigns as a function of long-standing professional networks between NGOs and individual professional campaigners. Unlike previous scholarship that highlights the role of powerful ‘gatekeeper’ organizations whose central position within transnational issue-networks allows them to promote or block specific issues, we draw on recent work in organizational sociology to bring into focus a wider transnational community of individuals and organizations whose competition for professional growth and ‘issue-control’ is crucial in defining the transnational advocacy agenda. In doing so, we qualify existing notions of agenda-setting and gatekeeping in International Relations (IR) scholarship. To illustrate our theory we use a longitudinal network analysis approach, alongside extensive interviews and analysis of primary non-governmental organization (NGO) sources. Our empirical focus is on transnational disarmament advocacy. However, our theoretical analysis has implications for transnational advocacy more broadly. </jats:p