Research programme

International Organisation

This research cluster is a part of the Institute of Political Science’s research programme ‘Institutions, Decisions and Collective Behaviour’. Its members examine the sources, design, effects and contestation of norms, rules, institutionalised practices and formal organisations that operate across national borders.

Contact: Daniel Thomas

Climate change, weapons proliferation, terrorism, economic uncertainty, and the transnational movement of people, products and disease are feeding calls for stronger intergovernmental coordination and supranational governance. However, the institutions that supported global order in recent decades are now subject to unprecedented challenge by new technologies, reassertions of national sovereignty, territorial disputes, and redistributions of power. In addition, the spread and growing power of illiberal, nationalist and authoritarian regimes calls into question the liberal principles (human rights, free trade, etc.) that shaped the multilateral international order in the late twentieth century.

Members of this research cluster examine the sources, design, effects and contestation of norms, rules, institutionalised practices and formal organisations that operate across national borders. These include informal norms and formal rules like those detailed in international law, treaties and regimes, regional organisations like the European Union, and global organizations like the World Trade Organization and the United Nations. Their scholarship draws on diverse theoretical traditions (from rationalist to constructivist, liberal to realist) and a wide range of empirical methodologies (from statistics, comparative case studies and QCA to process-tracing, ethnography and genealogy). Members of this cluster are also active in the Leiden University Centre for International Relations (LUCIR).

Members

Other research clusters within the ‘Institutions, Decisions and Collective Behaviour’ programme: