By some accounts, traditional international organizations are going out of style. Indeed, there were indications that this was already the case when the first issue of the International Organizations Law Review went to press in 2004. Henry Schermers observed that “a certain aversion developed against the creation of new international organizations.”¹ U.S. President George W. Bush had just demonstrated his preference for assembling “coalitions of the willing” in Iraq. On the political left, Anne-Marie Slaughter praised the advantages of global governance through transnational networks in her widely acclaimed book, A New World Order, which was also published in 2004. She later joined President Barack Obama’s State Department in a high-level position. European countries likewise emphasized informal cooperation strategies around this time. Instead of creating new international organizations, states explored alternative structures that would be more nimble and less rigid, including public-private partnerships. And, indeed, nonstandard institutions have proliferated. The recent rise of nationalism and populism has generated numerous front-page stories about actual or threatened exits from international organizations. These developments raise a question: are international organizations as a category becoming obsolete? More pointedly, do international organizations continue to merit a dedicated legal journal? In light of these trends, an affirmative answer cannot be assumed.

Having recently undertaken an effort to both document and theorise the continued appeal of the purportedly stodgy model of formal, treaty-based international organization with broad and diverse membership—what we call a paradigmatic international organization—we remain confident about the durability of this model of cooperation and its importance for policymakers and legal scholars alike.²

It’s notable that, over the past two decades, some of the nonstandard institutions that were established as deliberate rejections of the paradigmatic io model have moved incrementally toward that model. One example is the Global Fund to Fight aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, which was established in 2002 as a foundation under Swiss law seeking to embrace a private sector mentality in its operations and its governance. The Global Fund has obtained treaty-based privileges and immunities, it has secured the jurisdiction of the ilo Administrative Tribunal to resolve disputes with its employees, and it has acquired permanent observer status in the UN General Assembly. Another example is the Financial Action Task Force (fatf), which started out as a temporary, informal effort launched by the G7. Today fatf’s mandate is permanent, its work is supported by a secretariat with 65 staff members and it boasts broader participation than the UN General Assembly. In some quarters there is support for transforming fatf into a full-fledged international organization.

These aren’t isolated examples; incremental shifts towards the legal structures and membership patterns associated with paradigmatic international organizations are quite common. We undertook a comprehensive review of changes over time in the membership and structure of the networks described in Slaughter’s book, which were established in a broad range of issue areas including finance, the environment, and police cooperation. Nearly every network saw its membership grow—and in a majority of cases, either a new secretariat was established or an existing secretariat was expanded. Moreover, today the individuals who staff those secretariats typically enjoy privileges and immunities associated with international organizations.

In today’s crowded world of heterogeneous international institutions, there are advantages to conforming to the paradigmatic io model. In fact, some of these advantages emerge precisely because the global governance space has become so crowded with diverse institutions. International institutions aren’t isolated creatures. To advance their missions, they must interact with various actors beyond those that participate in the institution day-to-day. These other actors include non-member states and other international institutions. In those interactions, paradigmatic international organizations have some subtle but important advantages. International organizations have recognised rights and capacities in international law—and frequently national law as well. Entities that are readily recognized as international organizations have, for example, recognized capacity to make treaties and often have access to privileges and immunities under national legislation. Nonstandard institutions must engage in lengthy and contentious discussions to establish that they ought to be treated like “ordinary” international organizations. They may be able to jury-rig alternatives or develop custom solutions, but these substitutes may not be entirely reliable. For example, Lisa Tabassi, the former general counsel of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (osce), which doesn’t fully conform to the traditional io model, has described how the osce must sometimes rely on mou s for its field operations, which provide less security to the organization than treaties would; in addition, osce officials sometimes lack formal protection when traveling on official business.³

By contrast, international organizations that conform to a familiar model face fewer barriers precisely because outside actors, including non-members, potential members, and existing organizations, can readily understand and classify the type of entity with which they are dealing. For example, Natalie Lichtenstein, the chief counsel for the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank’s (aiib’s) establishment, has explained that modeling the aiib on existing regional development banks helped to reassure and attract new member states. Once the aiib was up and running, it gained access to forums for cooperating with other international financial institutions, such as the regular meetings of the Heads of Multilateral Development Banks; such collaboration can in turn enhance the efficacy of the participating organizations, both individually and collectively. In short, standard-issue organizations are “plug and play.” Moreover, surveys and public opinion polls from around the world continue to show that the imprimatur of a familiar international organization can shift public opinion.⁴

Organizations that meet our definition of paradigmatic international organizations are not only recognisable to lawyers as international organizations, but they also have membership that aligns with their purported goals. Broad membership that aligns with how an organization presents itself allows the organization to speak and act with greater credibility. The inverse is also true; organizations may lose efficacy or credibility when certain states or groups of states are missing among their members. Think here of the threat that African states would exit the International Criminal Court en masse, or the decision by the few states that actively engage in whaling to withdraw (or threaten to withdraw) from the International Whaling Commission. The International Organization for Migration (iom) supplies another example here. For many years, outsiders viewed iom with a mix of skepticism and disdain, and even some insiders were self-conscious of the organization’s lesser status—even though iom has been endowed with all the bells and whistles needed to satisfy international lawyers since 1989. There are many factors at play, but one is membership: until recently, Russia and China’s non-member status reinforced the perception that iom was an America-led organization and not truly “international,” notwithstanding its name. Our article describes how William Lacey Swing, one of iom’s former directors-general, tirelessly courted those two states and felt great pride when they became member states. The full extent to which this membership expansion—which roughly coincided with iom’s formally becoming a related organization of the United Nations—shifts perceptions of iom. In the hyper-status-conscious world of international diplomacy, these markers of being a “real” or paradigmatic international organization matter.

Scholars have long noted that the boundaries of the definition of international organization are fuzzy. As the Global Fund example above illustrates, nonstandard entities can sometimes manage to accomplish some of the same things that international organizations can do. Our work, which focuses on information costs and highlights the relational dimensions of international institutions, has identified some key features that make paradigmatic international organizations distinctive—and worthy of continued attention of scholars and policymakers alike.

Our research focused on the informal end of the spectrum—on how small and nimble coalitions of the willing, networks, and private-public partnerships, sought both broader membership and deeper institutional structure. But our thinking extends all the way across the institutional spectrum to the most integrated of international organizations: the European Union. Over the years, the EU has created special structures to deal with crises, only to replace them with more formal and broader institutions later. For example, in 2010, to address the sovereign debt crisis, the European Financial Stability Facility was set up as a private company under national law. Its successor, the European Stability Mechanism, operates as a backstop for Eurozone states facing liquidity challenges, and is structured as a paradigmatic international organization established by treaty. Indeed, the process of European integration is often described as one in which both broadening and deepening occur together over time—it is not one or the other. The EU response to the Covid and Ukraine crises is no different; in the last few years the EU budget has doubled (through Next Generation EU), and enlargement to more than 30 states is at the top of the agenda.

International organizations are usually established by treaty. Compared to instruments for setting up nonstandard institutions, treaties are harder to negotiate, harder to join (e.g., because the approval of national legislative bodies is a prerequisite to ratification), and harder to amend. And international organizations require regular financing. But we find that the alternative—taking short-cuts and setting up nonstandard institutions—has much larger costs in the medium term. Our work seeks to correct for the myopia of international legal scholars, international relations scholars, and governments alike. International organizations are far from obsolete.