ABSTRACT
International organizations provide a framework for states and non-state actors to work out differences and to peacefully manage shifts in relationships that occur when the international political and economic landscape changes. International organizations are both an arena where the rules and regulations that govern international society are set and an instrument of international society for implementing them. In the strategic arena, international organizations contend with an increasingly crowded and complex international political process that is still jealously guarded by states. The unprecedented interaction among civil society, the private sector, and states and the subsequent international consensus that emerged on sustainable development in the 1990s put in motion a fundamental reconfiguration of the international political and economic landscape. The international economic system that was put in place in the waning months of World War II reflected a basic consensus among Western governments that the international economy should be a liberal system.
