This chapter explores the growing prevalence of non-staff personnel within the UN system and the legal challenges they face in accessing justice. As non-staff personnel increasingly take on roles traditionally held by staff, they remain largely excluded from the jurisdiction of IATs and often may only avail themselves of arbitration clauses that can be prohibitive in practice. The chapter examines potential legal implications of this situation, such as functional immunity before domestic courts, as well as proposed solutions, such as alternative dispute mechanisms and expedited arbitration. It reviews current UN pilot projects aimed at providing non-staff personnel with informal dispute resolution avenues and discusses potential reforms to bridge the access-to-justice gap.

This chapter summarizes the empirical findings by comparing the three international courts. It shows that the EACJ has been the most deferential of the three courts, followed by the CCJ, and the African Court has been the least deferential. At the same time, the EACJ has the narrowest strategic space, the African Court the broadest and the CCJ lies between. The comparative analysis corroborates the theoretical argument of the book as each court’s deference closely aligns with its degree of formal independence and the extent of political fragmentation among its member states. The chapter revisits the book’s core argument by discussing the scope of the argument and considering its generalizability. It concludes with a discussion of the book’s implications for interdisciplinary research on international courts and IR literature on IOs in contemporary world politics.

Jan KlabbersThis epilogue takes stock of the volume and sketches some of the ramifications: if the vacuum assumption (i.e. international organizations only interact with their member states) no longer holds, assuming it ever did, then what? The author proposes that international organizations are better seen as political and economic actors in their own right. They may be given a function upon establishment, but usually develop a certain autonomy. This renders them closer to administrative agencies and offers a more realistic foundation on which to build further legal thought – and thus might be able to take third parties into account.

Although international organizations have always made some revenue in selling publications and organizing events, their activity in selling goods and services has increased significantly during the past few decades. From charging fees for the use of online platforms to selling visa services to governments, and from providing passenger and cargo transport to collecting aviation route charges on behalf of members states, international organizations now sell a wide variety of goods and services to private actors, states and other organizations. In other words, international organizations increasingly act in the market in ways resembling private actors, in addition to adopting business-like practices and mindsets in other ways, oftentimes raising difficult legal questions about their constitutional competence, immunity and responsibility. This article maps the market activities of international organizations, analyses the reasons behind their increasing importance and asks how they fit within the law of international organizations. In so doing, the article also challenges traditional, member state-centric perspectives to international organizations.

This chapter sets the tone for the volume, by demonstrating that international organizations law has traditionally been constructed around the fundamental assumption that the only legally relevant dynamic is the relationship between the organization and its member states. The law, in other words, has grown up in a vacuum, illustrated by the absence of clauses granting international organizations legal personality under international law (until well into the second half of the twentieth century) and illustrated by the absence of explicit treaty-making competences. International organizations were never expected to interact with others than their own member states; as a result, today’s international organizations law has a hard time accommodating third parties.

Dimitri van den MeersscheThis chapter traces the many entanglements between international organizations and private actors in the space of global security governance. By analysing the controversies surrounding the mandate of Europol and the contribution of private actors in countering terrorism online, it describes three modalities of entanglement: (i) private actors as sites of data collection and providers of sources of information that are increasingly relied upon by international institutions, (ii) enrolment of private platforms in the implementation of governance projects by international organizations, and (iii) alignment of such governance projects to the logic of tech companies and platforms – what Johns has described as a ‘lean start up’ mentality. Having traced these multiple points of influence, interaction and interdependence, the chapter proposes an infrastructural approach to the study of such public–private cooperation. This implies a recognition of how law and materiality are entangled in the production of social order and attentiveness to the role of digital infrastructures and socio-technical protocols in redrawing the public–private divide and constituting, mediating and materializing the exercise of international institutional authority. These observations crystalize in an urgent call to direct our thinking on rights and regulation towards these infrastructural formations and the political affordances that they entail.

This chapter explores the role of law in organizational interaction. In contrast with recent work on international institutional law that seeks to overcome functionalism and make legal sense of interaction, this chapter argues that interaction among international organizations is a legally constituted phenomenon, in two specific senses. First, law constitutes the space of the interaction (that is, the ‘organizational ecosystem’). Second, law provides the background norms for organizational autonomy and the vocabulary for the decoupling of the organization’s practice and its formal goals. Such a decoupling through institutional law allows international organizations to flexibly interact with each other and adapt to external pressures. Thus, in its dual role, international law provides the building blocks of interaction, playing a crucial role before the need to ‘regulate’ interaction even appears.

Publicly funded international organizations have traditionally been cautious in engaging with the private sector. This contribution will study the different types of relationships of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance – as a quasi-international organization – with the private sector. As illustrated, they are multi-faceted and relatively advanced. It will assess how the different types of interactions with the private sector have evolved over time and operate in practice. The contribution will also touch on how intergovernmental organizations that are members of the Alliance engage with the private sector as part of Gavi-funded activities. Some of those are complementary while for others intergovernmental organizations and private sector entities can be considered as alternatives.

The relationship between states, cities and international organizations is a useful prism to assess broader trends of the development of the international system. Engaging with sub-national actors like cities and their networks adds a level of complexity to the question of how independent an organization is and how it relates to the preferences of its member states. This chapter provides historical context to this current debate. It looks at how a conceivable international role of cities became an issue in the interwar era. In particular, it looks at how the ‘Union Internationale des Villes’, founded in 1913, sought some form of formal recognition from the League of Nations, but also fostered more modest ties with the International Labour Organization (ILO). This historical episode might not equip us with straightforward ‘lessons’ for today. But it might help us to adopt a more nuanced and informed perspective on current debates about international institutional reform and the promise that cities and their associations and networks can play in this regard.

Orfeas Chasapis TassinisWhat law should apply to contracts concluded between international organizations and private parties? Probing the concept of a ‘right’ to party autonomy, this chapter employs a Holfeldian framework to unpack the perspectival dimension of this age-old problem. It argues that international organizations may be at liberty of choosing the law applicable to their contracts, but domestic legal orders are not necessarily under an obligation to recognize that choice as effective. Arguably, however, deference to party choice is due in the context of arbitration. Yet, the frequent absence of party choice puts pressure on arbitrators to make principled choices on applicable law. Given the lack of clarity on how these choices are supposed to be made, the ‘closest connection’ test is put forward as perhaps the best safeguard for objectivity and predictability.

This chapter introduces the problem of theorizing international organizations. It breaks down the problem to two parts: the structural relationship between international organizations and their members and conceptual relationship between these institutions and other entities in international law, including states and non-state actors. The first relationship concerns whether international organizations should be analyzed as legally distinct from their members. The second relationship relates to international organizations’ rights, obligations, and capacities in international law, assuming that they are legally distinguishable from their members. The chapter concludes by clarifying how advancing a doctrinal legal theory is understood by this book, as well as the methodology that will be employed in that regard.

Having discussed the main limitations of current approaches in theorizing international organizations, this chapter goes on to investigate their core assumptions about the state. These are the notions that the state can be analogized to the ‘natural’ person of domestic law and that it forms an opaque and closed-off unitary actor. This chapter goes on to explain how this image may inadvertently distort how international organizations are theorized – from how we are to understand the relationship with their members to more technical questions of customary international law. Concluding this chapter, I suggest that theorizing international organizations should proceed from an altogether different premise. This is the idea the state itself is an artificial entity rather than a somehow naturally irreducible one.

Chapter 3 examines the history of the clean energy regime complex, which sets the stage to delve into questions of its effectiveness in later chapters. This chapter traces the role played by states, multilateral and bilateral organizations, transnational initiatives, and norm diffusion in driving regime complex emergence over the three periods of analysis (Period 1: 1980–2001, Period 2: 2002–2008, Period 3: 2009–2023). The chapter demonstrates that diverging state interests alone do not explain the regime complex’s emergence, but that organizational expansion, transnational actor agency, normative change, and institutional interplay all contribute to its formation.

This chapter critically examines how international lawyers have conceptualized the structural relationship between organizations and their members. First, it argues that popular accounts behind the notion that international organizations enjoy a personality that is opposable to non-members rest on problematic, and ultimately unproven, assumption. Next, the chapter explores the idea of volonté distincte. This is the notion that international organizations must exhibit a will of their own before they can be thought of as distinct from their members. The chapter zeroes in on the discipline’s most commonly employed test in this respect, namely checking the capacity of an organization to adopt decisions without the consent of all of its members. It argues that, on closer inspection, this test turns out to be incoherent and cannot serve the purpose it was devised for.

This chapter argues that the prevalent way for theorizing international organizations cannot properly account for the conceptual relationship between these institutions and states. At closer inspection, the popular treaty/contract versus subject/constitution frameworks for looking at international organizations address only the structural relationship between these institutions and their members. Nevertheless, one cannot simply assume that international organizations count as states for legal purposes just because they enjoy a legal personality that is distinct from their members, or because they share some relevant similarity with them. Equally important problems arise with analysing international organizations as merely another name for their member states acting together, and thus reducing the former to the latter. This view tends to disregard the fact that international organizations are often membered by entities that are neither states nor international organizations. Followed consistently, it also undermines the supposed distinct legal existence of these institutions.

This chapter brings together the threads of Chapters 8 and 9 to advance an alternative theoretical foundation for international organizations. First, it explains why we should understand the state as an artificial rather than as a natural construct, even for the purposes of international law. It traces states’ emergence back to a national community’s capacity for self-description through socially grounded rules of transformative re-description. Doing so, this chapter unveils the inherent openness of international law to admitting any other institutions that can also be traced back to this capacity. Thus, it recasts the state as just one institution among a family of such entities. All these entities, including international organizations, are equally admissible by default in international law without the need for any legislative intervention to that effect.

This chapter exposes some concrete and contemporary manifestations of the epistemology of the secret of international law. It particularly sheds light on the way in which the postulation of a hidden, unknown, invisible content as well as the experience of the necessity to reveal such content play out in international legal thought and practice, for the sake of ordering what can be said, thought, perceived and actioned through international law. The chapter then illustrates how such two necessities come to enable a mass production of speech materials which, in turn, determines what can possibly be said, thought, perceived and actioned through international law.

Here, the significance of mandates is shown for the initiation, pursuit, and outcome of mediation, as demonstrated by the Nordic cases of mediation from the past seventy-five years. Mandates influence the selection of mediator, but we argue that mediators can influence the mandate and develop it, within the confines set by the warring parties and the mandator. Some mandates are vague, which can allow space for the mediator, and mandates may change over time. Either way, they are important for the pursuit and outcome of the mediation. Five general conclusions are proposed for research and practice, including the mismatch between mandates and support for mediation efforts. In particular, the chapter emphasizes the utility of the mediation staircase for assessing outcomes. It also encourages the study of non-Nordic cases of mediation.