Crisis of Multilateralism? Challenges and Resilience

“This book is a goldmine for scholars and practitioners eager to understand and contribute to global cooperation. An audacious and looking-forward exercise that boosts determination and creativity.” —Valérie Rosoux, Professor – Director of Research, FNRS and University of Louvain, Belgium “Although multilateral institutions seem to be in crisis, the editors of this important volume argue that they are ‘more resilient, more reactive, and more effective than usually thought.’ A must-read for anyone interested in contemporary international relations.” —Lise Howard, Professor of Government and Foreign Service, Georgetown University, USA “This important boocoverk shows that crisis is constitutive of multilateralism. As its rich case studies illustrate, disagreement, struggle and conflict form its normal conditions.” —Vincent Pouliot, James McGill Professor, McGill University, Canada This book explores the challenges that multilateralism faces and questions the idea of a ‘crisis’ of multilateral cooperation and international organizations. It examines recent pressures on and power shifts in multilateralism such as the war in Syria, the Covid-19 pandemic, challenges for NATO, the erosion of multilateral norms, the Trump-Biden transition, the rise of China, the post-Brexit European Union, and the mobilization of countries from the South. The book also illustrates the resilience of multilateralism and some lessons learned from the WTO, UN Women, IO Secretariats or global environmental governance. It argues that ‘crisis’ should not be considered a pathology but the ‘matrix’ of multilateralism. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of IR, global governance, and international organizations. Chapter 3 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com. Auriane Guilbaud is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University Paris 8 and member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Franck Petiteville is Professor of International Relations at the Grenoble Institute of Political Studies. Frédéric Ramel is Professor and former Chair of the Political Science Department at Sciences Po Paris.