Learn about the most prominent international organizations that address the world's most important problems in this free resource. In an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world, some problems are too important for countries to solve on their own. Countries must work together, and they do so in part through international organizations that facilitate cooperation and promote diplomatic solutions to global problems. As the problems being addressed at the global level evolve, international institutions must adapt.
The World Trade Organization has been criticized for not updating its regulations to meet the needs of new technological advances; the United Nations Security Council has been criticized for preserving an outdated balance of power; and concerns abound about the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. More generally, critics are concerned that international institutions such as these require too much political will and resources to be agile enough to respond to urgent problems. Protesters block a police line from moving through an intersection in downtown Seattle on November 30, 1999, the first day of meetings of the World Trade Organization conference. This creates an embarrassing situation for the United Nations, which for political reasons is obliged to examine international entities whose legal existence it cannot recognize.
Rather than national jurisdiction, it is intended to guarantee legal responsibility through internal legal mechanisms of the intergovernmental organization itself and access to administrative courts. Treaties are formed when legal representatives (governments) of several states go through a ratification process, providing the IGO with international legal personality. For example, Keohane and Nye point out that the impact of intersocial interactions and transnational actors on international affairs has often been ignored both in policy-oriented writings and in more theoretical works, and that when they have been recognized, they have often been relegated to the environment of interstate politics, and relatively little attention has been paid to them in their own right or to their connections to the interstate system. The first general international organization to address a variety of issues was the League of Nations, founded on January 10, 1920 with the primary mission of maintaining world peace after the First World War.
Ironically, it is quite possible that research and debate on international organizations and their political impact are carried out under the auspices of bodies excluded from the categories of debate because they have no impact. They exclude treaties or agreements administered by another international organization (such as the various special unions of the International Union for the Protection of Industrial Property). A clear and unambiguous, theoretically acceptable definition of international NGOs remains to be formulated. One of the first prominent examples of international organization is the Congress of Vienna of 1814-1815, which was an international diplomatic conference to reconstitute the European political order after the fall of French emperor Napoleon.
Judge and Skjelsbaek have tried to promote the use of transnational associations as a substitute for international NGOs to distinguish them from other types of transnational organizations. Perhaps the best-known type of international organization that doesn't fit neatly into all three categories is organized religion. Therefore, the editors of the Yearbook have developed a set of seven rules designed to identify an international NGO in terms of objectives, members, structure, officers, funding, autonomy and activities. Others were developed to defend mutual interests with unified objectives to preserve peace through conflict resolution and better international relations, promote international cooperation on issues such as environmental protection, promote human rights, promote social development (education, health care), provide humanitarian aid and economic development. International organizations are sometimes referred to as intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), to clarify the distinction between international non-governmental organizations (INGI), which are non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that operate at the international level.
