Enhancing international cooperation: between History and necessity.

Farer, Tom ; Sisk, Timothy D.

Thoughts from the New Coeditors: Where and Why Are We Going?

The transfer of editorial stewardship for a journal provides the occasion to rethink the journal's purposes and its place in the dense forest of texts claiming attention. If our view of these matters differed radically from those of our distinguished predecessors, it is very unlikely that we would have been called, much less chosen, to assume the journal's direction. Still, there are likely to be nuanced differences among editors. At a minimum, each set inevitably has its own way of expressing its view of the journal's purposes and place. This article describes where we seek to take the journal in the coming years, and why.

Global Governance: Institutions, Identities, and Interests

What do we mean by the phrase "Global Governance"? To us it refers to the norms and institutions (of varying degrees of formality) and processes by means of which social goods--including wealth, power, knowledge, health, and authority--are constantly being generated and allocated by public, private, and nongovernmental actors through their cooperative and competitive actions. It is therefore obvious, we trust, that formal intergovernmental institutions constitute only a fraction of global governance in our mental universe. Our focus will be on the norms, institutions, and practices, but also on the actors--their motives, strategies, and tactics--and on the allocational consequences of their activities seen from a human security perspective.

Among scholars, practitioners, and political leaders with any sort of cosmopolitan perspective it is conventional to speak of a gap between the institutions of global governance and the transnational challenges of the twenty-first century. Though this is one way of framing the challenge, (1) a useful alternative is to see gaps as one of the bad outcomes currently produced by global governance as we have defined it. Whether seen as causal or consequential, there is certainly a gap today between the dramatic new challenges flaring up in the early years of the century and the international system of institutions, norms, processes, and actors that has haltingly evolved to meet them. Even a mild optimist looking far down the avenue of the twenty-first century can envision a world fraught with widening and deepening poverty, episodic pandemics, frequent eruptions of furious internal conflicts, proliferation of small arms and weapons of mass destruction, the spread of organized criminal and terrorist enterprises, and devastating environmental, economic, and social effects of climate change.

Although the global future is not necessarily a neo-Malthusian catastrophe, we fear it will be unless global governance evolves in ways that enable key actors collectively to address these unparalleled international challenges. If norms, institutions, processes, and actors' perceptions of identity and interest were beyond the reach of collective human will, then no doubt then no doubt there would be clear and present dangers to the very survival of the human project in a recognizable and morally tolerable form.

Those who state the governance problem solely in terms of "gaps" usually have fairly formal institutions in mind and presume that those formal institutions are presently and prospectively inadequate. We are sympathetic to that form of discourse, but we also think that the implied emphasis on formal institutions leads over-quickly to a search for institutional fixes and insufficient consideration of why we have the extant set of inadequate institutions. Like cops, we doubt coincidence.

Institutional arrangements embody perceptions of identity and interest; hence, any strategy for the revision of those institutions must begin by clarifying and assessing those identities and interests. They are certain to be the property not of some abstraction called national governments but of real actors in the public and often the private and, increasingly, the nongovernmental sectors. So we want to encourage prospective authors eager to reveal the inadequacies of efforts to confront one or another of the great transnational challenges to see the challenge first in terms of who benefits or thinks they benefit from the status quo and how, in light of the way they came to be, those benefits or perceptions could be altered sufficiently to create momentum for benign change.

We are really just clarifying here one implication of our conception of the global governance problem not so much as one of gaps in the system of governance but rather as one of bad outcomes resulting from the interplay of norms, processes, institutions, and actors with various identities and interests perhaps well (but perhaps badly) understood by the actors themselves. Better outcomes in a given case might best be achieved through the invention or renovation of formal multilateral institutions; but before so deciding, more informal adjustments in the status quo--achieved, for example, through implicitly reciprocated change in the behavior of states or the ad hoc marshaling of incentives and disincentives by like-minded states or private codes of conduct, or boycotts organized by nongovernmental organizations (the possibilities are very various)--should be canvased.

There is a danger, we realize, in describing our vision of global governance and our analytical approach in such broad and abstract terms. The danger is that prospective authors may feel that may feel that they cannot discuss very specific and immediate challenges to human security without locating them within vast systems of power and authority and formal institutions and norms and all possibly relevant informal ones. Of course, we appreciate that we are editing a journal, not a series of books. We appreciate as well the limited time readers, both scholars and practitioners, have at their disposal. Journal authors can only look at small parts of the enormous whole that are the moving pieces of global governance. What we can do, however, is to encourage authors to connect their work in a corner of the global canvas to the canvas as a whole; that is, to see and help readers to see its wider implications. We ourselves can help connect the little parts to the whole through the choice and arrangement of contributions and through our introductions and comments on them.

The Halting Evolution of International Responses

We start from the premise that there is insufficient cooperation among the world's leading states and transnational organizations for efficient preemptive action to address future challenges and to realize the opportunities inherent in sustained collaboration as opposed to the unilateral seizure of short-term tactical gains. Today, across a wide range of issue areas--from wars to weapons, from environment to economics, from destitution to disease--we witness responses to great challenges that are in varying and sometimes gross degrees unequal to the task. The consequences of such relative failure are seen in traditional and new threats to the security of even the most powerful states, and in the sordid fact that more than one-sixth of the world's population experiences a daily threat to its survival.

In our view, the inadequacy of international responses to contemporary international challenges exists because of the fundamentally evolutionary nature of international organization and interactions. The issue-area, incremental approach that has characterized change in the structure and function of international governance regimes has proven insufficient to address adequately the complex and perilously interconnected challenges of our time. One example: nuclear weapons. There are already enough to incinerate the planet. Their continuing spread has brought them into countries with unstable or pathological regimes and/or countries with precarious control systems. The risk of unauthorized launch or transfer to terrorist organizations grows. The weapons have begun to enter into clandestine streams of commerce. In the face of these metastasizing dangers, there is widespread recognition among elites in leading states that the nuclear nonproliferation regime, never really sufficient to its tasks, is shattered. And there grows a corresponding (if grudging) appreciation of the logic of the zero-option for nuclear weapons. As yet, however, we see no concerted effort to resolve the security dilemmas implicit in any effort to achieve that option.

The current century's challenges and opportunities are now addressed by a system of states and improvised transnational institutions that have roots in the nineteenth-century rise of the modern putatively sovereign state. Too often, increments in global governance are the afterthought of disaster, often of devastating wars. For instance, the battle of Solferino in the Second Italian War of Independence in 1859 led over time to the formalization of the International Committee of the Red Cross through the work of Henri Dunant, and today that nongovernmental (but government-connected) organization anchors as best it can the whole edifice of normative restraint on the violence of conventional interstate wars. As presently constituted it is not adequate to the challenges of today's asymmetric and civil wars haunted by such problems as demobilizing fratricidal paramilitaries or transforming or integrating them into professional security forces.

From the ashes of World War I came the League of Nations, which as an artifact of the promise of peace through institutional design survives today in the grand design of the Palais des Nations in Geneva. The League suffered at one level from fundamental flaws in its decision rules and at a deeper level from shifts in the balance of power, interest, and will among the leading states. Its main national props, the UK and France, battered by the pyrrhic victory of World War I, shrank from defending the League's nonaggression Grundnorm. Soon enough there was no real League left to defend; its short, unhappy life testified to the latent failure of any system of governance that fails to integrate power with legitimacy. When in the wake of humankind's next collectively maniacal war Lord Robert Cecil declared, "The League is Dead. Long Live the United Nations," we entered (or at least appeared to enter) a new epoch of global governance.

What followed were quantum normative leaps that seemed to revolutionize the international order: The UN Charter restraints on the use of force, the Nuremburg Charter and Tribunal, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Collectively they purported to tear great holes in the carapace of national sovereignty even while the UN Charter reaffirmed the inalienable values of political independence and territorial integrity. Also suggestive of a kinder, gentler, ineffably more cosmopolitan age emerging from the abbatoir of World War II was the very first (and unanimous) vote of the new General Assembly, which created UNICEF. Designed to help the children affected by war, UNICEF, now joined by a host of humanitarian organizations, continues as the leader in defending the welfare of children even as millions continue to be stunted from malnutrition, enslaved, and twisted into the shape of merciless soldiers in the service of pitiless adults.

The foundation of global governance in the UN Charter has much to commend it as an approach to international peace, but many of the key premises upon which the new order was built--an order that persists formally to the present--were based on the power logic of a fading epoch. Particularly the entrenching of the permanent veto in five members of the Security Council would eventually raise critical questions of legitimacy and help to shrink the council's role in the arena of threats to international peace and security.

As far as the use of force was concerned, the Cold War largely sidelined the United Nations, although it did provide a forum for informal communication between the belligerents. In issue areas where the Cold War antagonists had more-or-less common interests shared with most other states, perhaps most notably the law of the sea, the UN could serve as the arena of normative development. In addition, the institution may have helped accelerate and normalize the process of decolonization, arguably making it a bit less traumatic and chaotic than it might otherwise have been. Even in the area of peace and security it did manage a residual role through the invention of peacekeeping operations that played a marginal role in the containment or mitigation of minor conflicts, including some with a potential to become major.

Though the end of the Cold War fundamentally changed the international system of states in realpolitik terms, it did not have the same effect of reshaping the formal institutions of global governance as had occurred following previous high dramas of the twentieth century. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 appeared to offer an opportunity to reimagine the UN system--an opportunity, if such it were, that was not seized. Institutional inertia, added to the inertial force of legacy ideas and identities, continues to hamper global cooperation, thus supporting the conclusion that institutions, once in place, tend to develop incentive systems that serve their self-perpetuation however dysfunctional to the realization of their seminal aims. Meanwhile, around the borders of the UN we see new institutions emerge, such as the International Criminal Court. However, as the initial work of the ICC demonstrates, creating new international institutions to fill global governance gaps tends to inflame ingrained conceptions of sovereignty inherited from the centuries of state formation in a world far removed from today's complicated and delicate interdependencies and its technologies of mass destruction.

Nevertheless, the post-Cold War period has witnessed nontrivial progress in the evolution of global institutions--for example, UNAIDS was created to address the most devastating global health threat, comparable to the mass diseases that have previously affected humanity, such as the Great Flu of 1918. Moreover, even at the peace-and-security heart of the UN, there are signs of unease at the weakness of the UN system. One such sign was the first-ever 1992 meeting of heads of state in the Security Council to discuss threats to international security. Another was the publication of Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's An Agenda for Peace, highlighting deficiencies in the inherited order and suggesting the direction of change. (2) A third was the evolution, with great power support, or in some cases acquiescence, of peace operations that went far beyond old-fashioned peacekeeping to imposing order and/or helping to rebuild failed states. The coincidental launching of Security Council-authorized interventions for humanitarian purposes and the emergence in UN discourse of the Responsibility to Protect also have marked an evolution in views about the limits of sovereignty and the authority of collective actors.

But further progress in this respect has remained elusive, especially on the core constitutional question of the composition of the Security Council and the core normative issue of legitimate responses to crimes against humanity. The review essay in this issue by Serena Sharma underscores the continuing strength of national elite resistance to restraints on their discretion to maintain their power by whatever means they deem necessary.

Our Vision for Global Governance

In the coming years, the journal will be guided by the burning questions of contemporary world order: How can today's interdependencies and interconnected challenges be assessed? Why do some challenges make their way on to the international agenda whereas others do not? Is the current international system capable of negotiating meaningful agreements on critical issues and engendering compliance with global values and norms? What are the avenues for improving global cooperation at strategic, policy, and operational levels?

Journals, like peoples, clarify their identities not only by trying to state what they aare, but also by specifying what they are not. Global Governance is a scholarly journal, but unlike so many of them it is not primarily concerned with the ever finer elaboration of discourse about theory. It is also a journal of international public policy, but unlike, let us say, Foreign Affairs, an excellent example of that genre, it is and will remain rigorous in its epistemological standards even as it encourages passionate and conflicting critical analysis of policies, institutions, norms, and actors. Although both could be said to be journals of "opinion" about policy, we will demand that our authors identify and confront the range of plausible objections to the positions they advocate and that they be explicit about their deep normative preferences and causal premises. Even in our "Global Insights" section (which, given its precedents and our editorial preferences, might more accurately be named "Critical In sights" or "Dissenting Opinions"), we do not intend to provide a forum for excathedra pronouncements. And there will be no sacred cows.

Global Governance differs from Foreign Affairs and similar foreign-policy journals in other consequential ways. One is in the range of authors and opinions to which we are receptive. Over the years Foreign Affairs has become open to a wider body of opinion (perhaps reflecting a novel degree of fragmentation within and a widening of the US foreign policy elite) and does sometimes publish non-US authors, but we think it fair to say that, consciously or otherwise, it does not reflect the full range of policy opinion and analysis that a cosmopolitan perspective will identify. Paradoxically, it also differs from Global Governance in purporting not to have a "normative point of view," that is, a set of values it hopes to advance by convening policy analysts in print. We do not affect normative neutrality.

As we indicated earlier, we take the enhancement of human security and opportunity as our publishing purpose. However, we entertain the old-fashioned, optimistic liberal belief that by cumulatively illuminating global allocative processes and their effect on the human rights and welfare of human beings, rather than serving as a crowd hailer for authors with "correct" opinions, we contribute, however slightly, to the advancement of our values--which happen to coincide with those embodied in the Charter of the United Nations and the various conventions on human rights and humanitarian law.

How will these high-flying generalizations about the identity of Global Governance translate into the details of a quarterly journal? To put the matter a bit differently, what more specific guidelines can we offer prospective contributors? We should, perhaps, begin by saying that we intend proactively to identify authors who are demonstrably able to bring theory and critically analyzed and contextualized practice to bear on neuralgic contemporary issues. Nevertheless, we will continue to welcome manuscripts that have the qualities we have enumerated and that eloquently address those same issues. However, we will attempt to cluster articles and to combine articles with solicited comments to the end of revealing every important facet of an important contemporary issue and the widest possible range of well-informed and well-argued policy recommendations bearing on it. One way of accomplishing that is to offer the possibility of publishing in a "special section" a collection of carefully selected and revised conference papers (subject to peer review, of course).

Though our writ runs far beyond the activities of formal intergovernmental organizations, they will remain very much on our radar screen, and naturally we will tend to emphasize the United Nations and its specialized agencies and the global institutions implicated in trade, investment, and development. Periodic assessment of these institutions, of their processes and the resulting outcomes in the material world, is one of our tactical goals.

Inheriting a Reputation ... and an Agenda

We are pleased to inherit the original mandate for Global Governance, which first appeared in 1995 at the height of the turbulence that stemmed from the end of the Cold War and a renewed interest in the United Nations and multilateralism. One of our predecessors as editor, Tom Weiss, whose 2009 John W. Holmes lecture was presented at the ACUNS annual meeting in Trinidad and Tobago, has an essay in this edition: an insightful and frankly spoken look at the overall "disappointing" performance of the international civil service system. With human capital the most important asset in addressing global issues, the question of international public administration is an ideal place to start.

In their farewell essay, our predecessors articulated a challenging agenda for global governance and set forth some challenges for rethinking policy and scholarship. They argued for the "end of statism in contemporary regulation of global affairs. ... Instead of the statist condition where global governance is wholly determined by national governments, the present-day polycentric circumstance sees global governance emanating from multi-actor regulatory networks (3)." As well, they left us with six other claims and entreaties about lines of future inquiry for the journal.

First, they claimed, there are serious shortcomings in the participation of global civil society in contemporary institutional arrangements; in other words, there is a democracy deficit in multilateral institutions. Chadwick Alger's essay in this edition speaks well to the participatory aspect of global governance in asking the question of how legislative authorities at national and global levels can be better integrated into global governance networks.

Second, our predecessors argued for institutional realignment to reflect shifts in global power: the G8 and, arguably, the Security Council (in its present form are anachronistic, they insisted. In this issue, Barry Carin and Alan Mehlenbacher take on the question, Who should be at the table when authoritative decisions on global governance are made? On what basis, for example, should the decisionmaking power on climate change and energy center in the G-20, and not the G-21, G-22, etc.?

Third, our predecessors urged a hard, new look at the "morally reprehensible and politically dangerous allocation of world resources." Certainly the present global trading and investment system, with its roots in the Bretton Woods institutions established after World War II, has to this point left vast numbers of people in a condition of desperate want even as it appears to have facilitated the emergence of several hundred million people, mostly in China and India, from the depths of poverty. One ironic anomaly in the present order of things is the coexistence, sometimes within countries, of the disorders of obesity and malnutrition. (4) Related is our predecessors' admonition to evaluate the challenges of population growth and the implications of world demographics on virtually every major global issue. We are pleased to report that the forthcoming Volume 16, Number 3, of Global Governance is devoted to a related theme, that of international migration. A leading expert in this field, Khalid Koser, is kindly serving as guest editor for this upcoming issue, and it promises to be a penetrating look at the global flow of people and both its benign and malign consequences.

A fifth critical agenda item, our predecessors noted, is unsustainable ecological practices. Obviously, there are vicious cycles of harm from biodiversity loss, energy consumption patterns, pollution, and natural resource utilization. The 1987 Brundtland Commission report, Our Common Future, diagnosed the problem and prescribed an array of responses that remain far short of realization and by no means uniformly accepted even in principle. We still seem on the road to an unsustainable future. (5) And, with the expansion of ostensible global goods like international trade come global "bads," such as bioinvasion; Peter Stoett's article in this issue argues for a new global convention to regulate and manage the problem of alien species invasion.

Finally, we inherit from the previous editorial team a deep interest in the exquisitely prickly issues associated with the multiplicity of historic cultural divides. Are we witnessing a process of homogenization, or, quite the contrary, deepening cultural rifts even as we celebrate in international forums the universality and inseparability of human rights? Was Samuel Huntington right about a Clash of Civilizations, or is the world really "flat" as Thomas Friedman suggests? (6) What are the roles, consequences, and durability of inherited social behaviors, narratives, beliefs, and value systems, and what effect are they now having and are likely to have on the behavior of states, international organizations, and transnational actors?

In addition to these six agenda items, we believe it is critical to reexamine how the international community addresses the perpetual bedrock issues of international peace and security in their protean forms. If, as widely predicted, climate change leads to greater scarcity of goods essential to basic survival, we can anticipate rising levels of all forms of political violence. Meanwhile, the primary formal institution for addressing violence and insecurity, the United Nations, seems barely able to sustain its present level of inadequate performance; indeed, one could argue that it is in a condition of systemic crisis. (7)

A Look Ahead

What do we propose to do within the ambit of our focus? At the highest level of abstraction, our goal is to illuminate and critically assess the allocation processes. How do they work? Who participates in them, and who is excluded? Who gains and who loses from their results, and how severe are the losses? Is there a collective opportunity loss? That is, could more actors have gained more without loss to the principal beneficiaries if the process were changed (the answer probably varying depending on whether the goods are of a positional character, as in the case of power)? What are the material forces, and what are the mentalities (in the spirit of Fernand Braudel) that shape these processes? How great is their inertial force? Given the larger tectonic forces at work, how great is the scope for policy interventions that can improve outcomes? What are the policy alternatives that are in play? Have some been overlooked? Does the past help in assessing their relative utility? How well can we predict the direct and indirect outcomes of proposed policy inputs?

Now that the post-Cold War era has passed in the ashes of September 11, it is urgent that we take stock of the international system. In the coming issues of Global Governance, we will seek to invigorate debate and to provide a forum for passionate and reasoned argument about the limitations of and possibilities for contemporary international cooperation in an uncertain future. We intend to facilitate spirited, contentious, and orderly discourse about how to revise norms, institutions, processes, and the identities and interest horizons of actors in order to improve allocational outcomes in part through enhanced cooperation among major states and other key participants in global governance.

To that end, we plan a number of editorial innovations. One is frequent symposia on neuralgic issues and texts. The Goldstone Report, for example, has been the subject and catalyst of sulphurous but not always illuminating de bate about the laws of war, just war norms, and the capacity of the United Nations to generate credible inquiries into the alleged violation of fundamental legal norms. That report will be considered in the next issue. We will seek balance, although not at the expense of logic and fastidious respect for evidence. We welcome passion as long as it is connected to the canons of reasoned discourse. Another editorial innovation will be periodic interviews with leading policymakers in one field or another, conducted by the editors or their proxies and followed by critically minded commentary.

Thematic emphases in the next several years will include the following: How to address (1) persistent noncompliance with global norms and Security Council directives; (2) the metastasis of conventional arms distribution and the spread of the technologies and the weapons of mass destruction; (3) transnational organized crime and terrorism; (4) deterioration of the environment, particularly in parts of the world where people are peculiarly vulnerable and governments particularly inept; (5) the potential for financial crises of unprecedented global proportions; (6) the still horrendous condition of women in many parts of the world; and (7) the probable intensification of internal violence, mass displacement, and the collapse of life support systems where governmental capacity is already doubtful.

In sum, we invite contributions that contribute creatively to the extant policy discourse on any of the following subjects:

* The Architecture and Processes of Global Governance. Here we invite research and policy insights on the structure of the international system as it seeks to cope with contemporary challenges. We are particularly interested in the ways in which the UN and other international organizations interact with private sector actors, NGOs, national governments, and civil society actors in the various issue areas.

* Interstate Conflict. We welcome work that takes on the challenges of interstate war and the continuing danger to international peace and security that emanate from enduring international rivalries. From the tensions between India and Pakistan, to border tensions in the Andes region, to cross-border military interventions in Africa, it would be folly to believe that the problem of interstate conflict is a challenge solely of the past.

* Human Security and Internal Conflicts. We invite research-and-policy dialogue on the underlying causes of threats to international peace and security that lie in state weakness and social stress including ideological, religious, and ethnic conflict and economic distress and on unilateral and collaborative efforts to build more effective, democratic states in the wake of civil wars. Within this concentration, the journal is especially interested in research that addresses the prevention, management, and settlement of civil wars and current efforts to improve international peace operations and postconflict assistance, whether conducted by the United Nations or other actors.

* Sustainable Development. We encourage an exploration of today's most critical environmental issues: (1) energy scarcity and the effects of great-power rivalry on oil-exporting states such as Sudan, Nigeria, Iran, and Iraq; (2) water scarcity and quality; and (3) global health issues, in particular the relationship between health and other global governance concerns such as migration and conflict.

* Poverty Reduction and the Millennium Development Goals. What have we learned about how to do it? Who is doing what? How do market forces and actors affect international ameliorative efforts by governments, NGOs, and international organizations?

* Governance and State Fragility. Increasingly, donor agencies, the international financial institutions, and international organizations have adopted comprehensive assessment approaches to democratic governance. The concentration on democracy will also include a core focus on governance, electoral processes, and human rights with a view toward enhancing models and the underlying theories and methods of assessment, especially those in use in the UN system organizations and indicators such as those used by the World Bank. How can local, national, regional, and global development actors respond better to the challenge of engagement in fragile states?

* Economic Growth and the Private Sector in Global Governance. We invite analysis of the role of private-sector entities significantly involved with a range of global governance issues. How do international private sector actors contribute to, or detract from, the success of international regimes to manage transnational threats and opportunities?

* Cases That Challenge Theory. Finally, we are particularly interested in analysis of those cases that challenge conventional theory. What does the persistence of enmity in postwar Bosnia say about the prospects for democratization in deeply divided societies? How does the experience of Zimbabwe challenge a teleological view of progress in human development?

At the end of the day, our role is both to shape and to facilitate the agenda of global governance through the presentation of the most rigorous and creative policy-relevant research and thought about how to enhance the human condition. To that end we dedicate ourselves.

Notes

Tom Farer is dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and is the former president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States (OAS), the first American ever to head a principal organ of the OAS. He has also served as president of the University of New Mexico. Within the US government, he served as special assistant first to the General Counsel of the Department of Defense and then to the assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs. He has taught law at Columbia University, American University. Rutgers, Tulane, and Harvard and international relations at Cambridge University, Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, and the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. He has been a senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has published twelve books and monographs and well over 100 articles and book chapters primarily concerning issues of international and comparative law, foreign policy, human rights, and international institutions. His most recent book is Confronting Global Terrorism and American Neo-Conservatism: The Framework of a Liberal Grand Strategy (2008).

Timothy D. Sisk is professor of international and comparative politics at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver and is director of both the Center for Sustainable Development and International Peace (SDIP) and the Korbel Program in Humanitarian Assistance. He also serves as an associate fellow of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy in Geneva, Switzerland. He has conducted extensive research on the role of international and regional organizations, particularly the United Nations, on peace operations, peacemaking, and peacebuilding. Sisk's most recent publication is International Mediation in Civil Wars: Bargaining with Bullets (2009). Previous publications for which he is the editor are From War to Democracy: Dilemmas of Peacebuilding (with Anna Jarstad, 2008) and The Dilemmas of Statebuilding: Confronting the Contradictions of Postwar Peace Operations (with Roland Paris, 2009).

(1.) Indeed, one of us so framed it a few years ago; see Tom Farer, "Toward an Effective Legal Order: From International Concert to Coexistence," Cambridge Review of International Affairs 17, no. 1 (2004).

(2.) Boutrous Boutros-Ghali, "An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking, and Peacekeeping," UN Doc. A/47/277-S/24111 (17 June 1992).

(3.) Barry Carin, Jan Aart Scholte, and Gordon Smith, "Editorial Exit," Global Governance 15, no. 4: 562-563.

(4.) Food and Agricultural Organization, The State of Food Security in the World 2008: High Prices and Food Security: Threats and Opportunities (Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization, 2008).

(5.) The Report of the Brundtland Commission, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press and the United Nations, 1987).

(6.) Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1998); Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2005).

(7.) UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, A New Partnership Agenda: Charting a New Horizon for UN Peacekeeping, July 2009.