Individual Agency and Policy Change at the United Nations

Individual Agency and Policy Change at the United Nations
Author: Ingvild Bode
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2015-03-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317615131

This book highlights how temporary international civil servants play a crucial role in initiating processes of legal and institutional change in the United Nations system. These individuals are the “missing” creative elements needed to fully understand the emergence and initial spread of UN ideas such as human development, sovereignty as responsibility, and multifunctional peacekeeping. The book: Shows that that temporary UN officials are an actor category which is empirically crucial, yet usually neglected in analytical studies of the UN system. Focussing on these particular individual actors therefore allows for a better understanding of complex UN decision-making. Demonstrates how these civil servants matter, looking at what their agency is based on. Offering a new and distinctive model, Bode seeks to move towards a comprehensive conceptualisation of individual agency, which is currently conspicuous for its absence in many theoretical approaches that address policy change Uses three key case studies of international civil servants (Francis Deng, Mahbub ul Haq and Marrack Goulding) to explore the possibilities of this specific group of UN individuals to act as agents of change and thereby test the prevailing notion that international bureaucrats can only act as agents of the status quo. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of international organizations and the United Nations.

United Nations peace operations and International Relations theory

United Nations peace operations and International Relations theory
Author: Kseniya Oksamytna
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2020-08-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1526148862

United Nations peace operations have undergone multiple transformations over the more than seventy years of their existence. Multidimensional peace operations have organised elections, helped deliver humanitarian assistance, advised on army and police reform, and fought rebel groups. Such operations not only represent a core pillar of the multilateral peace and security architecture but also fundamentally reshape lives of millions of people around the world. This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of multiple theoretical perspectives on UN peace operations. It offers practical examples of how International Relations theories apply to specific policy issues and simultaneously demonstrates how major debates on UN peace operations - on civilian protection, local ownership, or gender mainstreaming - benefit from theoretical exploration. With insightful contributions from a range of international academics, UN peace operations and International Relations theory is an essential book for scholars, students, and experts working on peace and security and the broader issue of international cooperation.

The United Nations

The United Nations
Author: Kent J. Kille
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2020-09-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

This key resource for anyone interested in the United Nations, global issues, or world politics provides accessible and comprehensive coverage of the history, growth, and development of ideas and institutions governing the globe. The United Nations has been an essential actor in world politics for 75 years. Its entities have eliminated smallpox, protected the ozone layer, promoted arms control, and helped to save the lives of over 90 million children. Yet, it is frequently criticized as ineffective and antiquated. This book provides a balanced and systematic overview of the UN's contributions and challenges, highlighting areas where it plays an essential role in global governance as well as areas of redundancy and needed reform. This book provides readers with a clear, well-organized reference resource to the entire UN system-its principal organs, specialized agencies, programs and funds, and key issues of engagement. Through individual entries, it examines the history of UN engagement, ranging from peace and security to migration and climate change. It moves beyond a simple description of UN entities as it assesses the development of ideas (such as that of sustainable development), as well as responses to changes in world politics. Finally, it presents both the significant successes of UN work and continued challenges.

The Essential UN.

The Essential UN.
Author: United Nations
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Human rights
ISBN: 9789211013726

"Everything you always wanted to know about the United Nations in one book! This primer to the United Nations is designed for all global citizens. It covers the history of the UN, what it does and how it does it. As the world's only truly global organization, the United Nations is where countries meet to address universal issues that cannot be resolved by any one of them acting alone. From international peace and security to sustainable development, climate change, human rights, and humanitarian action, the United Nations acts on our behalf around the world." --

Civilian Protective Agency in Violent Settings

Civilian Protective Agency in Violent Settings
Author: Jana Krause
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2023-09-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0192866710

More than half the world's population live in violent settings, such as civil wars, communal conflicts, cities plagued by gang violence, and entire areas governed by criminal organizations. Living exposed to diverse forms of violence, individuals and communities have found innovative-and sometimes counterintuitive-ways to protect themselves and others. Civilian Protective Agency in Violent Settings establishes the study of civilian agency and its protective dimension across various violent settings as a systematic and unified field of research. It brings together researchers spanning several social science disciplines to study civilian protective agency in different violent settings, including civil war, genocide, communal violence, and organized crime, and in various geographical locations, from Syria to Mozambique, Sri Lanka to Mexico, Iraq to Colombia and Western Europe. The volume offers conceptual foundations, new theoretical insights, and detailed empirics that advance our understanding of civilian protective agency and promote future research on the topic that is comparable, tractable, and cumulative.

Advocacy and Change in International Organizations

Advocacy and Change in International Organizations
Author: Kseniya Oksamytna
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2023-11-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0192671987

How do international organizations change? Many organizations expand into new areas or abandon programmes of work. Advocacy and Change in International Organizations argues that they do so not only at the collective direction of member states. Advocacy is a crucial but overlooked source of change in international organizations. Different actors can advocate for change: national diplomats, international bureaucrats, external experts, or civil society activists. They can use one of three advocacy strategies: social pressure, persuasion, and 'authority talk'. The success of each strategy depends on the presence of favourable conditions related to characteristics of advocates, targets, issues, and context. Institutionalization of new issues in international organizations as a multi-stage process, often accompanied by contestation. This book demonstrates how the advocacy-focused framework explains the origins of three workstreams of contemporary UN peacekeeping operations: communication, protection, and reconstruction. The issue of strategic communications was promoted by UN officials through the strategy of persuasion. Protection of civilians emerged due to a partially successful social influence campaign by a coalition of elected Security Council members and a subsequent (and successful) persuasion efforts by Canada. Quick impact projects entered peacekeepers' practice as the result of 'authority talk' by an expert panel. The three issues illustrate the diversity of pathways to change in international organizations, representing the top-down, bottom-up, and outside-in pathways. Moreover, they have achieved different degrees of institutionalization in UN's policies, structures, and frameworks: protection of civilians is the most institutionalized, as evidenced by measures to hold peacekeepers accountable for non-implementation, while quick impact projects are the least institutionalized.

Routledge Handbook of International Organization

Routledge Handbook of International Organization
Author: Bob Reinalda
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 974
Release: 2024-12-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1040225535

This completely revised and rewritten handbook gives an overview of international organization (IO) as a dynamic field of research that adds to our understanding of global and regional relations and related domestic politics. Bringing together international scholars from a range of disciplines, it considers both IO as a process and multilateral organizations as institutions. This handbook is divided into five parts: I. Documentation, sources and perspectives II. International secretariats as bureaucracies III. Actors within and beyond international bureaucracies IV. Processes within and beyond international bureaucracies V. Challenges to international organizations Containing new chapters on topics such as the anthropological perspective, IO secretariats in several continents outside of Europe, feminization, the digital turn and challenges to IO legitimacy, the contributors reflect on the progression of IO studies from a burgeoning field to a well‐established subfield of international relations and the move away from scholarship based mainly in North‐Western Europe and the United States. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of IOs, global governance, diplomacy and foreign policy, as well as practitioners of multilateral cooperation.

Handbook on Governance in International Organizations

Handbook on Governance in International Organizations
Author: Alistair D. Edgar
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2023-11-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1800884931

Required for peace and security, economic governance, sustainable development and humanitarian support, International Organisations (IOs) are central to the structure of global governance. Introducing the importance of governance in IOs, this Handbook addresses the collective challenges and synthesises the expertise of global or regional representativeness for international cooperation.

Global Governance on the Ground

Global Governance on the Ground
Author: Nele Kortendiek
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2024-11-06
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0198889143

Global Governance on the Ground offers a new approach to how international organizations govern. Through an in-depth look at the case of migration and asylum, the book argues that international organizations (IOs) not only govern global challenges through rules, standards, expertise, and numbers but also through practice on the ground. Much scholarship has been devoted to the question of how IOs become autonomous agents and exercise authority to shape governance outcomes. Far less attention has been given to the way IOs use their field access to govern global issues on the ground-without first going through formal policy channels or renegotiating their authority. The book demonstrates that through field-based practice, IOs directly regulate global issues in the spaces where they become virulent, in different locations across the globe. The book draws on ethnographic fieldwork at the European external border, comprising interviews at the headquarters of seven organizations, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and three humanitarian NGOs. This, combined with an extensive document analysis, shows that field staff improvise to organize collective action on under-regulated issues and that headquarter staff consolidate and diffuse their operational knowledge. The book conceptualizes this governance mode that operates at a low institutional threshold but largely determines the de facto governance of contested or crisis-ridden global problems.

Norm Change in International Relations

Norm Change in International Relations
Author: John Karlsrud
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2015-12-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317374797

In recent decades there have been several constructivist scholars who have looked at how norms change in international relations. However few have taken a closer look at the particular strategies that are employed to further change, or looked at the common factors that have been in play in these processes. This book seeks to further the debates by looking at both agency and structure in tandem. It focuses on the practices of linked ecologies (formal or informal alliances), undertaken by individuals who are the constitutive parts of norm change processes and who have moved between international organizations, academic institutions, think tanks, NGOs and member states. The book sheds new light on how norm change comes about, focusing on the practices of individual actors as well as collective ones. The book draws attention to the role of practices in UN peacekeeping missions and how these may create a bottom–up influence on norm change in UN peacekeeping, and the complex interplay between government and UN officials, applied and academic researchers, and civil society activists forming linked ecologies in processes of norm change. With this contribution, the study further expands the understanding of which actors have agency and what sources of authority they draw on in norm change processes in international organizations. A significant contribution to the study of international organizations and UN peacekeeping, as well as to the broader questions of global norms in IR, this work will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations alike.