Ranjit Lall. 2023. Making International Institutions Work: The Politics of Performance. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Excerpt

Everyone, these days, seems to be an expert in assessing the performance of international institutions (IIs). For example, many British citizens decried the failures of the European Union in voting for Brexit. On the opposite end of the performance spectrum, the U.S. Biden administration has extolled some of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) successes in the Russia-Ukraine war. Somewhere in between, the private sector has questioned whether the Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is performing as intended to ensure the stabilization of oil markets in a post pandemic, energy-shifting marketplace. What explains this seeming paradox – that we have a wide spectrum of performance across IIs? Why do some IIs fail while others succeed? This important, first-order question lies at the center of Ranjit Lall’s Making International Institutions Work: The Politics of Performance. …