International Organizations

This article introduces creative learning theory, arguing that international organization officials develop new policy ideas to address complex problems and mediate competing demands.

This article delivers the first systematic, comparative look at how elites and citizens view the legitimacy of international organizations (IOs). Legitimacy beliefs were measured for six key IOs across five countries: Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, Russia, and the United States. The study compares public opinion and multiple elite groups to assess where and how perceptions diverge.

This article asks whether the presence of a country's nationals in major IMF shareholder states affects the terms that the International Monetary Fund offers that country. The authors propose that large diasporas in powerful creditor countries create migration pressures that lead those shareholders to push the IMF toward loan packages that reduce short-term adjustment costs for borrowers. The paper analyzes IMF programs from 1978 to 2014 to evaluate whether borrowers with larger diasporas in major shareholder states receive different disbursement sizes or conditionality.

This article tests whether the International Criminal Court (ICC) and related prosecutorial actions prevent conflict-related sexual violence by government forces in intrastate armed conflicts. Using the Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (SVAC) dataset to analyze cases from 1989–2018, the authors compare outcomes across settings with ICC jurisdiction, ICC interventions, and cross-case ICC actions to assess whether prosecutions operate as a preventive strategy. The central contribution is an empirical test of claims that ICC activity reduces sexual violence, reporting qualified null and counterintuitive associations rather than clear deterrent effects.

Since 1970, scores of states have created truth commissions to document political violence, yet why some countries adopt them — and why some commissions gain strong investigative powers while others do not — remains unclear.

This study partners with an international sustainability-oriented NGO to test how direct, interactive conversations affect practitioner decision-making compared to standard dissemination.

This paper examines how HRO activities influence human rights conditions. It explores two models: boomerang (where third-party pressure indirectly drives improvements) and spiral (where such pressure can worsen conditions). Using a causal mediation model, it investigates whether the effects of HRO campaigns stem from direct targeting or through induced costs by powerful actors like other states or international organizations via sanctions or military interventions. The findings reveal that while HROs have an overall positive effect on human rights, third-party pressure partially offsets this improvement.

Scope and Puzzle: Recent decades have seen a wide spread of liberal norms in global governance—sustainable development, gender equality, and human security. Scholarship explains trajectories of particular norms but offers less on why international organizations (IOs) as institutions commit to these liberal norms at different depths.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is heavily politicized, and that politicization has tangible effects on how states manage risk. Political influence within the IMF generates asymmetric moral hazard: politically influential states face reduced expected costs from risky lending and policy choices, which in turn shapes international reserve accumulation and the incidence of financial crises.

Diffusion across states is well studied, but diffusion among international organizations (IOs) is less understood. A novel three-part approach reframes IO diffusion by centering how connections among IOs create pathways for policy and institutional spread, by clarifying different kinds of convergence effects, and by combining dyadic and spatial analytic tools to capture networked influence.

The article examines how IO membership influences corruption dynamics among nations. It proposes a nuanced argument: the impact of cooperation depends on fellow members' integrity.

Does legitimacy drive international institutional change? This article examines three causal mechanisms by which variation in legitimacy induces regional parliamentarization. Using survival analysis on a novel dataset of thirty-six regional organizations from 1950-2010, the authors find empowerment of supranational secretariats, proximity to the European Union, and neighborhood parliamentarization increase adoption rates. These results reveal that legitimacy judgments stem from cognitive referents—a previously overlooked source of institutional change.