Rules for the World - by Michael Barnett & Martha Finnemore

About the Book

Provides an innovative perspective on the behavior of international organizations and their effects on global politics.

Book Synopsis

Rules for the World provides an innovative perspective on the behavior of international organizations and their effects on global politics. Arguing against the conventional wisdom that these bodies are little more than instruments of states, Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore begin with the fundamental insight that international organizations are bureaucracies that have authority to make rules and so exercise power. At the same time, Barnett and Finnemore maintain, such bureaucracies can become obsessed with their own rules, producing unresponsive, inefficient, and self-defeating outcomes. Authority thus gives international organizations autonomy and allows them to evolve and expand in ways unintended by their creators.

Barnett and Finnemore reinterpret three areas of activity that have prompted extensive policy debate: the use of expertise by the IMF to expand its intrusion into national economies; the redefinition of the category "refugees" and decision to repatriate by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; and the UN Secretariat's failure to recommend an intervention during the first weeks of the Rwandan genocide. By providing theoretical foundations for treating these organizations as autonomous actors in their own right, Rules for the World contributes greatly to our understanding of global politics and global governance.

Review Quotes

International organizations are a growing presence in the global system but remain a neglected subject of study. This book by two prominent political scientists provides a groundbreaking look at their impact, making clear that international organizations may be created by powerful states but, once established, are neither straightforward tools of states nor unalloyed servants of a global common good.... Barnett and Finnemore conclude that the impact of these organizations lies less in the expert knowledge they wield than in the ways they define problems, set agendas, and deploy 'intellectual technologies.' The most intriguing insights of the book, however, emerge as the authors grapple with what the growing 'global bureaucratization' means for democratic accountability.

--G. John Ikenberry "Foreign Affairs"

The authors take a novel approach to studying international organizations and establish a framework wherein these actors have the potential to develop preferences and cultures that are counter to the wishes of their member states. The authors breathe new life into the study of IGOs by removing the rose-colored glasses of the extant literature, which cannot account for negative and independent behaviors of these organizations.

--C. S. Leskiw "Choice"

About the Author

Michael Barnett is Harold Stassen Chair at the Hubert H. Humphrey School and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of several books, including Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda, and coeditor with Shibley Telhami of Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East (both from Cornell). He is also coeditor of Power and Global Governance. Martha Finnemore is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. Her books The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force and National Interests in International Society are also available from Cornell.