The paper argues that a new species of political institution has quickly spread across the globe to deal with regional governance. This new institutional form has similarities with the "state," "international institution," and "IGO" but also significant differences. The paper identifies the...

In this article I discuss output legitimacy as a category of normative analysis of international organizations (IOs). I first take issue with the widespread view that output legitimacy is just a synonym for organizational effectiveness or efficiency, and unrelated to democracy. Against this...

Despite the fragility of authoritative governing institutions at the international level, the politi-cal capacity to deal with global risks is developing. The sense of legitimacy that will ultimately derive from a deeply transnational sense of shared fate continues to lag, but even in that...

This WZB Discussion Paper documents in detail the representative claims analysis conducted within the WZB bridging project 'The Political Sociology of Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism'. It serves as methodological background for interpreting the dataset and findings based upon it. The paper...

In this WZB Discussion Paper we develop an analytical framework for the research project 'Contested World Orders', a collaborative effort between researchers based at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF), and the Berlin Social...

The past decade has seen a sustained move by students of international institutions and organizations to viewing their subject matter as independent variables affecting state interests and policy. Conceptually, this has put a premium on identifying the mechanisms connecting institutions to...

Much research on effects of international human rights institutions (IHRIs) is fixated on whether IHRIs have - "on balance" or "systematically" - generated domestic effect. This essay highlights the path-dependent and conditional nature of domestic effects of IHRIs that the current scholarship...

The thesis that European integration has become politicised has prompted a major debate in comparative political science and research on the EU. This debate nevertheless remains inconclusive with regard to links between the objects and thematic focal points of EU controversies (justification...

Much of what can be subsumed under the label of political cosmopolitanism argues that some internationalization of political authority is desirable because of the superior capability of international institutions in solving transnational problems. Surprisingly, however, few scholars have asked...

Internationale Organisationen greifen insbesondere seit dem Ende des Ost-West-Konflikts verstärkt in innergesellschaftliche Prozesse ein und treten immer öfter in direkte Herrschaftsbeziehungen mit Individuen. Die Einsätze zum Aufbau politischer Strukturen in Nachkriegsgesellschaften sind...