Week 3: Can International Organizations "Break Your Balls?": A Constructivist View

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This week we looked at Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore’s “Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics”. The key message coming from this book is that international organizations (IOs) are not the handmaidens of states (as often portrayed in Realist literature). Instead, IOs have agency – they can do things and effect change.  They have compulsory power (they control material and normative resources that can influence others), institutional power (they can guide behavior in indirect ways ie: agenda setting) and productive power (they can define the problems which need to be solved, and propose solutions.)

This is not just a happy story, however. Barnett and Finnemore argue that IOs are bureaucracies, and subject to bureaucratic politics. For better or worse, they tend to expand into new areas. And because they have traditionally been created by liberal states, they tend to be liberal in nature. Barnett and Finnemore also believe that these features of IOs will not be going away anytime soon, and they may be more and more involved in our every day lives.  But IOs have also made mistakes, and are not necessarily democratic, nor democratically accountable. This may pose problems in the future.

I thought the class might be interested in these last points – that IOs are liberal in character and are becoming more and more involved in our daily lives. But the students weren’t biting. Instead, we seemed caught on the issue as to whether IOs actually matter, and whether they can make a difference. This is good, but it seems like we might be caught up in a very narrow view of what “making a difference” actually is and means. Is it more important that states sign a treaty? Or if they change their behavior because of IO pressure/action or norms generated by IOs? Can IOs, in fact, "break your balls"?

You can read the International Organizations version of the article here. 

Week 3 Power Point: http://ge.tt/2mvfdZW/v/0?c