ABSTRACT
The study of international organizations has always been considered as the ugly duckling of the discipline of international relations.1 For a long time, it was an area dominated by lawyers and historians. Scholars of international relations preferred to treat organizations as a residual subject, only marginally important to the explanation of what was happening on the world stage. When international interdependence intensified in the 1970s, scholars introduced a new analytical concept called international regime, that was explicitly aimed at circumventing the presumably elusive notion of international organization. Nevertheless, they rarely investigated the extent to which international organizations have acquired autonomous influence over the formulation of international policies. This chapter accounts for this situation and offers a way out. It is argued, first, that international regime theory has furthered the dominance of the neo-realist view that international organizations are marginal actors in world politics; second, that recent changes in the international environment demand a reassessment of the weight of international organizations; third, that public choice provides a perspective that can account for international organizations’ autonomy, while retaining some of neo-realism’s premises, but relaxing others.
