ABSTRACT
The analysis of international organization (IO), and especially the United Nations (UN), is integral to the field of international relations (IR), although far too many colleagues view it as an after-thought, if a thought at all. Drilling deeper into this history complicates conventional wisdom, and it gets in the way of the parsimony of which IR specialists are so fond. In order to gain a better perspective on how this particular angle of IO analysis would improve the contribution of IR to solving global problems, it is worth pondering what the world would have been like without the UN. This chapter analyze international organizations could help move in that direction and to return to the metaphor put more liquid in the IR glass by being more historically informed, analyzing more thoroughly the contribution of big ideas, and helping specifically to address concrete problems.
