International Organizations in Global Politics

The Politics , Power , and Pathologies of International Organizations

Do international organizations really do what their creators intend them to do? In the past century the number of international organizations (1Os) has increased exponentially, and we have a variety of vigorous theories to explain why they have been created. Most of these theories explain IO creation as a response to problems of incomplete information, transaction costs, and other barriers to P...

Politics in Organizations

Security Beyond the State: Global Security Assemblages in International Politics

To date, most discussion of security privatization in international politics has been focused on the role of private military companies and mercenaries. This article seeks to shift the focus away from the battlefields and toward the less spectacular privatization and globalization of commercial private security. Drawing on Saskia Sassen’s notion of state ‘‘disassembly,’’ we situate the growth o...

Global health diplomacy: a ‘Deus ex Machina’ for international development and relations; Comment on “A Ghost in the Machine? Politics in Global Health Policy”

Brugha and Bruen (2014) raise a number of compelling issues related to the interaction between politics and policy in the global health context. The first question that their views invite is whether this is, at heart, best characterized as a benign or malign influence. Many commentators have suggested that this overlap should be discouraged (see, for example, Marseille et al 2002; Thomas & Webe...

The Politics of Researching Global Health Politics; Comment on “Knowledge, Moral Claims and the Exercise of Power in Global Health”

In this comment, I build on Shiffman’s call for the global health community to more deeply investigate structural and productive power. I highlight two challenges we must grapple with as social scientists carrying out the types of investigation that Shiffman proposes: the politics of  challenging the powerful; and the need to investigate types of expertise that have traditionally been thought o...