“Global Institutions without a Global State,” in the Oxford Handbook on Historical Institutionalism – with Martha Finnemore – eds. Orfeo Fioretos, Tulia Falletti and Adam Sheingate

Historical institutionalism has not yet grappled with the deeper intellectual challenges of “going global.” Understanding international, particularly global, institutions, requires attention to and theorizing of a global social context, one that does not rely on a national government in the background, ready to enforce laws and rules. It also requires theories about the global organizations themselves. In this chapter, the authors argue that a historical institutionalism that engages with the many varieties of sociological institutionalism would be a richer tradition that could more systematically examine the role of norms and ideas, thereby expanding its analytic range to institutional contexts beyond the state.

Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore, “Global Institutions without a Global State,” Oxford Handbook on Historical Institutionalism, eds. Orfeo Fioretos, Tulia Falletti and Adam Sheingate (Oxford University Press: 2016). Also published in Orfeo Fioretos, International Politics and Institutions in Time (Oxford University Press: 2017).

Access the full text here.

Other Writing:

Essay

The Wrong Way to Punish Iran with Abraham Newman

During the war on terror, the United States quietly turned the world financial system into a hidden empire. The American government used the power of the dollar and its influence over obscure organizations such as the Swift financial messaging service to monitor what its adversaries and terrorists were doing and, in some cases, to cut ...
Read Article
EssayPublic Writing

The Weaponized World Economy: Cover story for Foreign Affairs

When Washington announced a “framework deal” with China in June, it marked a silent shifting of gears in the global political economy. This was not the beginning of U.S. President Donald Trump’s imagined epoch of “liberation” under unilateral American greatness or a return to the Biden administration’s dream of managed great-power rivalry. Instead, it was ...
Read Article