This essay identifies and explores an underappreciated win-win policy option that has the potential to address both the needs of refugees for resettlement and the labor demand of destination countries. Building upon provisions of the Model International Mobility Convention—a model convention endorsed by dozens of leading migration and refugee experts—and a program pioneered by Talent Beyond Boundaries, we explore how to scale up valuable measures for identifying job opportunities that can resettle refugees from asylum countries to destination countries. The latter can benefit from the labor of refugees and thereby offer long-term refuge for populations in desperate need of resettlement.

The complex issues of the twenty-first century cannot be addressed by disparate actors in the global arena. This has become even more apparent in 2020, as we celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the UN and have witnessed the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has put the UN system to the test, demonstrating weaknesses in regard to peace and security, sustainable socioeconomic development, and human rights, the three core mission areas of the organization. The underlying tensions between the ideals of liberalism associated with the UN's human rights and socioeconomic-development agendas and the institution of sovereignty, under nationalist strongman leaders throughout the world, stood in the way of an effective response. This is especially true as powerful states are able to thwart collective action in favor of their own perceived national interests. While the UN and its affiliated agencies, such as the World Health Organization, are still able to foster cooperation, their success is limited by the organization's inability to establish some form of authority and command.

The rise of “the rest,” especially China, has triggered an inevitable transformation of the so-called liberal international order. Rising powers have started to both challenge and push for the reform of existing multilateral institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and to create new ones, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). The United States under the Trump administration, on the other hand, has retreated from the international institutions that the country once led or helped to create, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP); the Paris Agreement; the Iran nuclear deal; the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty; the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); and the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). The United States has also paralyzed the ability of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to settle trade disputes by blocking the appointment of judges to its appellate body. Moreover, in May 2020, President Trump announced his decision to quit the Open Skies Treaty, an arms control regime designed to promote transparency among its members regarding military activities. During the past decade or so, both Russia and the United States have been dismantling multilateral arms control treaties one by one while engaging in new nuclear buildups at home.

The liberal international order is being challenged today by populism and unilateralism. Though it has been resilient in the past, the current challenges from within the order are unprecedented. Without being too pessimistic, I expect the LIO will survive but retract to its original core states in North America, Europe, and Northeast Asia, shedding some of its universal pretensions. States that remain within the liberal order, in turn, will compete with an alternative Chinese-led international hierarchy built around all or part of the current Belt and Road Initiative countries. While international institutions can facilitate cooperation, they do not bridge this emerging divide sufficiently to forestall conflict and, in any event, will not be sufficiently robust to prevent a new cold war. As part of the roundtable “International Institutions and Peaceful Change,” this brief essay sketches this argument and concludes with some possible ways of moderating future conflicts.

As part of the roundtable “International Institutions and Peaceful Change,” this essay examines the role of institutional soft balancing in bringing forth peaceful change in international relations. Soft balancing is understood as attempts at restraining a threatening power through institutional delegitimization, as opposed to hard balancing, which relies on arms buildup and formal alignments. We argue that soft balancing through international institutions can be an effective means to peaceful change, spanning minimalist goals, which aim at incremental change without the use of military force and war, and maximalist goals, which seek more profound change and transformation in the form of continuous interstate cooperation aimed at a more peaceful and just world order. However, the success of soft-balancing strategies in fostering peaceful change varies widely, even in today's globalized and institutionalized international environment. We explore these variations and identify three conditions for success that can inform both academic analysis and political practice: inclusion, commitment, and status recognition. We draw lessons from two historical examples: the Concert of Europe in the early nineteenth century and the League of Nations in the early twentieth century, and discuss how current threats to the liberal international order challenge soft balancing for peaceful change.

As part of the roundtable “International Institutions and Peaceful Change,” this essay focuses on the “Kindleberger trap,” a term coined by Joseph Nye Jr. referring to the situation in which no country takes the lead to maintain international institutions in the international system. President Trump's destructive policies toward many international institutions seem to push the current international order to the brink of the Kindleberger trap. Ironically, China has pledged, at least rhetorically, to support and even save these existing international institutions. Based on an institutional-balancing perspective, we suggest that the worry about the Kindleberger trap is unwarranted because the international institutional order will not easily collapse after the decline of U.S. hegemony. Institutional competition among great powers and institutional changes within the institutional order have become two remedies to maintain international institutions and to avoid the Kindleberger trap during the international order transition. What states, including the United States and China, should do is to reembrace and reinvigorate the role of multilateralism in world politics so that the dynamics of institutional balancing and consequential institutional changes in the context of U.S.-China competition do not deprive international society of the public goods and normative values of international institutions. The future international order should not be led by a single country, but by dynamic and balanced international institutions.

One type of change that has lurked at the edges of scholarly discussions of international politics—often assumed, invoked, and alluded to, but rarely interrogated—is learning. Learning entails a very particular type of change. It is deliberate, internal, transformative, and peaceful (in the sense of being uncoerced). In this contribution to the roundtable “International Institutions and Peaceful Change,” I ask whether intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) can learn in a way that is comparable to the paradigmatic learning of individual human beings. In addressing this question, I take three steps. First, I explore references to corporate entities “learning” within the discipline of international relations (IR) and ask whether what is being proposed is, in fact, genuine learning by the organizations themselves. Second, I attempt to construct a robust account of institutional learning that departs from these conceptions and acknowledges instead the self-reflection and structural transformation that I argue learning at the corporate level requires. Third, for the purpose of illustration, I turn briefly to the UN following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the slaughter of more than eight thousand men and boys outside Srebrenica in 1995 to identify examples of each stage of institutional learning. Finally, I offer three provisional claims about my proposed conception of institutional learning that warrant attention in future work. Namely, I suggest that institutional learning: (1) cannot be equated with moral progress; (2) is possible despite formal organizations being incapable of emotional responses such as shame or regret; and, perhaps most controversially, (3) can occur at the level of the IGO without prior or parallel learning taking place at the level of the state or individual human actor.

As part of the roundtable “International Institutions and Peaceful Change,” this essay focuses on the role of institutions as agents of peaceful change from a perspective that emphasizes the importance of a wide spectrum of human emotions to better understand the less quantifiable but nevertheless important conditions for being able to sustain initiatives for peaceful change. It aims to throw light on the often overlooked psychological and emotional hurdles standing in the way of agents’ ability to undertake and sustain action designed to lead to peaceful change. To do so, the essay returns to the pioneering work of Ernst Haas and his important concept of “spillover.” The essay shows that the neofunctional understanding of spillover was a theoretically important innovation, but that it was missing three essential elements: an understanding of the need for positive emotions and ontological security; an understanding of the link between values and identity; and a realization of the importance of a shared vision for the “good life.” To illustrate the problems with Haas's version of spillover, but also to highlight the significant potential of the theory, the essay turns to the crisis of the liberal international order as an example of a forum where the agency to undertake peaceful change seems to be faltering. The essay concludes that the ability of the liberal order to effect peaceful change is currently hampered because the order is characterized by negative emotions, contested values, and a vision of the good life that is seen as mainly a benefit for the cosmopolitan elite.

One of the more striking, surprising, and optimism-inducing features of the contemporary international system has been the decline of interstate war. The key question for students of international relations and comparative politics is how this happy state of affairs came about. In short, was this a universal phenomenon or did some regions play a more important and pioneering role in bringing about peaceful change? As part of the roundtable “International Institutions and Peaceful Change,” this essay suggests that Western Europe generally and the European Union in particular played pivotal roles in transforming the international system and the behavior of policymakers. This helped to create the material and ideational conditions in which other parts of the world could replicate this experience, making war less likely and peaceful change more feasible. This argument is developed by comparing the experiences of the EU and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and their respective institutional offshoots. The essay uses this comparative historical analysis to assess both regions’ capacity to cope with new security challenges, particularly the declining confidence in institutionalized cooperation.

The year 2020 has been a very trying one for many people, and universities have not been exempted from the challenges it has posed. There are real concerns that the effects of COVID-19 could lead to a lost generation of academic researchers. At the same time, this has been an unusually fecund period for the field of ethics and international affairs. New ideas regarding the relationship between politics and ethics have come to light, with implications for how we think about what ethics actually comprises. This essay seeks to take stock of this moment by considering the contributions to the field made by four recently published books. It concludes that we are observing a trend toward a more expansive way of thinking about ethics, one that has significant implications for how we approach the task of international relations scholarship.