“The United Nations Charter and the ideals it represents are in jeopardy. We have a duty to act. And yet we are gridlocked in colossal global dysfunction.” These words by UN Secretary General António Guterres illustrate the widespread perception that international institutions are in crisis at a time when global challenges like the climate emergency or rising inequality loom ever larger. Against this backdrop, the EU and its member states have set themselves the task to defend and transform the multilateral system. But to what extent is the narrative of multilateral decline supported by the research on global governance and international organisations?
In this literature review*, we synthesise and analyse the relevant scholarship to investigate the question whether international institutions are sufficiently robust to cope with a contested world in transition. Specifically, we review debates in the literature on the rules-based global order in light of changes in domestic politics and global power shifts. Moreover, we address scholarly debates on international institutions’ robustness, which can be defined as their sustained effectiveness over time in the face of internal and external challenges, as well as how they respond to these challenges.
Are international institutions sufficiently robust to cope with a contested world in transition?
Based on the extant literature, we develop three core arguments:
- Scholars broadly agree that the liberal vision of global order that emerged in the post-World War II era – and various liberal norms in particular – is facing increasing pressure to adjust to a multipolar world. Yet they disagree about how the global order is transforming in response to this pressure and the extent to which it is in crisis.
- While scholars identify changes in domestic politics and global power shifts as the sources of many challenges to the rules-based global order, rising powers are far from a uniform force, nor is populism a uniform challenge around the world. As a result, whether (and how) international institutions are challenged is a highly issue- and country-specific question.
- Scholarship has shown that the international institutions underpinning the rules-based order can be surprisingly robust. Once again issue-specific patterns emerge, and some international institutions are more robust than others.
Taken together, we identify three main gaps in the literature on the robustness of the rules-based order:
- Despite a lively debate on the crisis of the liberal, rules-based global order, which often takes place at the macro-level of general ordering principles, interaction with scholarship on international institutions – such as international organisations – is limited and tends to focus on concepts such as effectiveness, democracy, or legitimacy.
- Compared to other relevant concepts of global governance, the concept of robustness and its application to international institutions remain clearly underdeveloped, and scholars ascribe different meanings to the term – despite a lively debate on the robustness of international norms.
- Current scholarship shows there is substantial variation in the robustness of the rules-based order throughout the global governance landscape. Thus, we identify a need for empirically informed studies that map and compare potentially divergent trends and levels of robustness across different issue areas and various international institutions in the context of a contested world in transition.
Citation Recommendation: Weinhardt, Clara and Hylke Dijkstra. 2024. “Fork or Bump in the Road? The Crisis of the Rules-Based Global Order and the Robustness of International Institutions.” ENSURED Research Report, no. 2 (April): 1–30. https://www.ensuredeurope.eu.
*This publication is part of a series of three literature reviews on global governance. Read the other two reviews to learn about effectiveness and democracy in global governance and the EU's support for international institutions.
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