The research, published in Frontiers in Political Science by Thorsten Bonacker of the Center for Conflict Studies at Marburg University, shifts attention away from the diplomatic negotiations conventionally associated with international decolonization and toward an overlooked instrument of the Trusteeship System: the visiting missions. Between 1947 and 1993, the Trusteeship Council sent 41 such missions to eleven trust territories, seven in Africa and four in Oceania, to investigate, inspect, and report on conditions there. Drawing on actor-network theory, and particularly sociologist Michel Callon’s model of translation, Bonacker traces how these missions established themselves as an “obligatory passage point,” a position through which all knowledge about the territories had to flow before it could count as authoritative in New York.

The theoretical stakes are considerable. Much existing scholarship asks how much influence the United Nations exercised over decolonization, or whether the organization genuinely pushed colonial powers toward self-determination or merely perpetuated colonial rule in a new guise. Bonacker argues that both framings take the UN’s power for granted, treating it as a pre-existing force that simply produced effects. Actor-network theory, by contrast, examines the process through which such power arises in the first place. In Callon’s framework, translation unfolds through four moments: problematization, in which an actor defines a problem in a way that makes itself indispensable; interessement, in which other actors are locked into the roles assigned to them; enrolment, in which those roles are negotiated and stabilized; and mobilization, in which a few spokespeople come to represent an entire heterogeneous universe of actors. Crucially, Bonacker adds, each of these moments presupposes not just an alignment of interests but a literal displacement of bodies, documents, and objects across space.

The founding case is instructive precisely because it unsettles the assumption that authority flows from a mandate. The first visiting mission did not originate in an initiative from New York at all. It began with a petition submitted on 18 November 1946 by representatives of Western Samoa’s inhabitants, who demanded self-government, asked New Zealand to serve as protector and advisor in the manner of Britain’s relationship with Tonga, and called for reunification of the Samoan islands divided among Germany, Great Britain, and the United States in 1899. The petition drew on the legacy of the Mau movement, which had campaigned for independence since the 1920s. New Zealand forwarded the petition, and the Trusteeship Council decided on 24 April 1947 to send a mission to investigate it. What had been conceived as a fact-finding exercise was translated, in Bonacker’s terms, into an interest of the UN’s own: assessing administrative progress toward self-government.

The mission’s composition reflected the unequal ground on which these translations were staged. The Trusteeship Council nominated Francis B. Sayre, a former US High Commissioner of the Philippines, and Pierre Ryckmans, Governor-General of the Belgian Congo from 1934 to 1946, to represent the administering powers. Both possessed extensive colonial administrative experience, a qualification that was no accident, since the mission’s claim to epistemic authority rested substantially on forms of expertise that were themselves products of empire. Only one member from a non-administering power joined them: Eduardo Cruz-Coke, a Chilean politician and former health minister. They were accompanied by anthropologist Felix Keesing of Stanford University, New Zealand Prime Minister Peter Fraser, and Secretariat staff including Norwegian diplomat Peter M. Anker and stenographer Regina Respler, the sole woman on the team.

Before any mission departed, an elaborate apparatus of preparation drew its participants into their roles. Mission members received background reports on the history, culture, geography, and economy of the territories, biographical profiles of local representatives, maps, and newspaper clippings. They also received health briefings: vaccinations through the UN Medical Service, malaria prophylaxis, medications for diarrhea and fever, and a brochure titled “Health in the Tropics: Hints for Newcomers.” Clothing generated repeated correspondence, with the Field Operation Service compiling a list that included twelve pairs of white socks, six sets of underwear, four pairs of khaki shorts, and two pairs of shoes, alongside advice that white shoes were generally not worn locally and detailed instructions on tropical evening dress. These devices, Bonacker argues, did not merely inform the travelers; they equipped and enrolled them, fixing their identities as observers and interpreters of the territories.

Logistics performed the same binding work on everyone else. Securing flight tickets required coordination between the UN field service, travel agencies, mission members, and local administrations. Telegrams triggered bookings, the recruitment of translators and cooks, the hiring of accommodation, and the dispatch of invitation cards that drew local representatives into their intended role as hosts in advance. Budget forms, disbursement vouchers, shipping authorizations, and staff rules, sixteen such documents for the 1968 mission to New Guinea alone, were air-freighted to destinations and made the entire enterprise financially accountable. Conflicts over per diems and first-class reservations, which mission chairmen repeatedly called embarrassing while traveling, show that this enrolment was never friction-free.

Once in the field, the missions oscillated between two roles, an oscillation orchestrated not by the mandate alone but by the objects at hand. Public receptions with banners, musical performances, microphones, stages, and gift exchanges cast the members as diplomats representing the United Nations. Visits to schools, hospitals, and administrative offices transformed them into inspectors, their gazes and body language shifting as technical equipment was demonstrated and pupils and patients were questioned. Inscription devices, in the phrase of Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, then converted these impressions into data: pens, notepads, typewriters, report-writing rules, staplers, and correction tapes translated conversations and observations into the administrative language on which any assessment of a territory’s progress toward independence would depend.

The culmination was the report, a document that condensed the multiplicity of voices encountered on the ground, petitioners, chiefs, missionaries, administrators, into a single authoritative account that henceforth spoke on their behalf. In the Samoan case, the report’s recommendations went beyond what the administering power expected, proposing that the indigenous population be given the power to initiate legislation and that Samoans hold a majority in the Legislative Council. Remarkably, translation had begun before the report even existed: two days before the mission left Apia, New Zealand’s Prime Minister announced constitutional proposals, including a guaranteed Samoan majority, that the mission’s later report noted with “very great satisfaction” to be in line with its own recommendations, because the members had deliberately kept both parties informed of the general trend of its thinking. New Zealand’s Samoa Amendment Act of November 1947 reorganized the Legislative Assembly along just these lines, and Western Samoa became the first independent state in Polynesia in 1962.

Bonacker describes the overall effect as a dual delocalization: UN mandates were translated into on-the-ground assessments that made the organization’s presence tangible in the territories, while local realities were simultaneously translated into facts that traveled to New York and became negotiable in the Trusteeship Council and General Assembly. The same process, he emphasizes, reproduced colonial inequalities of voice, determining whose evidence and demands would register and whose would be attenuated or omitted. The mechanism outlived the Trusteeship System itself, which held its final visiting mission in Palau in 1993: contemporary fact-finding missions and peacebuilding operations perform the same work of translation, though continuously rather than at intervals of two or three years. What the study ultimately shows is that stenographers, pilots, typewriters, and flying boats were as much threads in the fabric of decolonization as the diplomats who negotiated in New York, and that the UN became an actor in ending empire only through the patient, material labor of connecting periphery and center.

Subject of Research: The role of United Nations visiting missions in producing knowledge and authority during international decolonization under the Trusteeship System

Article Title: Translation at a distance: United Nations visiting missions and the making of international decolonization

Article References: Bonacker, T. (2026). Translation at a distance: United Nations visiting missions and the making of international decolonization. Frontiers in Political Science, 8, Article 1973829. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1973829

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1973829

Keywords: United Nations, decolonization, Trusteeship System, visiting missions, actor-network theory, Western Samoa, knowledge production, Trusteeship Council, international organizations, colonial administration, self-determination, fact-finding

The starting point of the analysis is the fragmented state of AI governance itself. Scholars describe the current landscape as underdeveloped, unorganized and immature, populated by three broad categories of actors. Private sector giants such as Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, IBM and Meta have produced industry guidelines, ethics documents and voluntary commitments, often favoring self-regulation that does not slow the pace of development. Public sector actors, including national governments and intergovernmental bodies like the G20, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the United Nations, have published national strategies and international agreements. Non-governmental organizations, professional bodies such as the IEEE, think tanks and advocacy groups round out the picture, setting standards and drawing attention to emerging risks. Yet despite this flurry of activity, there is still no generally recognized global governance mechanism for AI, and no consensus on what one should even look like.

The central obstacle, according to the study, lies in the divergent approaches of the three actors that lead AI development worldwide. The United States has published more AI strategies and policy reports than any other country and pursues a market-driven, less restrictive model, prioritizing sector-specific governance, granting autonomy to federal agencies and allowing industry to shape policy through consultation and voluntary commitments. There is no federal AI law; the most prominent federal action has been the Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy AI, while state legislatures pass a patchwork of regulations on applications ranging from elections to healthcare. China, by contrast, treats AI as an extension of its centrally planned political system, aligning development with national and socialist values through a rule-based approach while tolerating decentralized innovation at the local level. Its 2017 New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan declares the ambition to become the world leader in AI by 2030. The European Union has carved out a third position, weaving the narrative of trustworthy, human-centered AI into global discourse and releasing the EU AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive AI law, which classifies systems into four risk categories with escalating regulatory requirements.

These three actors each want to lead globally, and their competing ambitions generate concrete barriers to cooperation. The EU’s risk-based regulation is perceived by the US as innovation-stifling, while the US preference for self-regulation clashes with both the EU’s legal approach and China’s state-led model. Geopolitics deepens the divide: decoupling technology supply chains, the ongoing chip war and trade tensions have made faster AI innovation a matter of national security for Washington and Beijing, while the EU pursues open strategic autonomy. Ideological differences compound the problem. The US and EU favor collaboration with democratic partners, whereas China’s use of AI for mass surveillance and social scoring has alienated Western states, pushing it toward partnerships with Russia and developing countries through the Belt and Road Initiative and an AI study group within BRICS. Even the preferred modes of cooperation differ, with the US and EU working through existing institutions while China builds new alternative ones, a dynamic that risks accelerating bloc formation in an already fragmented landscape.

The consequences of this non-cooperation are far from abstract. The study catalogs a series of risks that are amplified or directly generated by the standoff between the three powers. Heightened nationalism in AI development could divert attention from global concerns such as sustainability toward short-term economic interests, fostering protectionist policies that disrupt markets and widen inequalities between nations. The US-China rivalry could spill over into other international conflicts as more countries pursue AI purely for competitive advantage, concentrating power among leading nations while dispersing costs widely. A hollowed-out multilateral system could fragment into minilateral groupings, enabling forum shopping in which countries align with the least restrictive regime. Cross-border risks, from AI-driven cyberattacks to nefarious uses of open-source models, become harder to manage without joint research and coordination, and societal-scale risks from frontier AI models could go unassessed without an international consortium pooling expertise and regulatory resources.

Perhaps most alarming is the prospect of a race to the bottom, in which each actor prioritizes speed over safety, cutting corners to be first to achieve breakthroughs. Coordination would help establish AI safety standards and agree on red lines that should not be crossed, including military applications such as lethal autonomous weapons systems and bioweapons. A competitive race toward artificial general intelligence among the three most capable actors could expose humanity to existential and global catastrophic risks, the study warns, making collective management of long-term dangers as urgent as addressing immediate harms.

To diagnose the problem, Olugbade turns to the collective action literature, a field transformed by Mancur Olson’s 1965 book The Logic of Collective Action and later by the Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom. Collective action problems arise when group members pursue short-term individual interests at the expense of long-term shared interests, leaving everyone worse off than if they had cooperated. The key to classifying such problems lies in the nature of the goods at stake, defined by two properties: excludability, whether access can be limited, and rivalry, whether use by one diminishes availability for others. Global AI governance, the study argues, is non-excludable, since any of the three actors can currently influence AI’s direction, but rivalrous, because dominance by one precludes equivalent influence by the others. That combination makes global AI governance a common good, placing it in the same analytical category as the common-pool resources Ostrom famously studied, from fisheries to irrigation systems.

Ostrom distilled eight design principles from long-enduring institutions that successfully managed common-pool resources, and the study applies each to AI governance. Clearly defined boundaries would mean identifying who has a right to do what, using multistakeholder mechanisms while granting the three leading powers special privileges of influence as incentives to participate. Rules must be congruent with local conditions, since centrally determined universal rules are unlikely to survive the ideological differences among the three actors; regional and local mechanisms must complement global ones. Collective-choice arrangements should allow stakeholders at every level to modify rules as the technology evolves. Monitoring and graduated sanctions are deemed crucial, addressing the enforcement weakness that has undermined initiatives like the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI and the OECD AI Principles. Mutual monitoring between the US and China, each interested in the other’s activities, could be leveraged, with sanctions escalating progressively based on compliance history. Conflict-resolution mechanisms, minimal recognition of the rights of governance bodies to organize, and nested enterprises complete the framework.

The study also draws on the analytical framework for large-scale collective action developed by Sverker Jagers and colleagues, which identifies facilitators such as trust, reciprocity and reputational stake, and stressors such as anonymity, lack of accountability, heterogeneity, risk and uncertainty. Applied to AI governance, the facilitators include a shared perspective among all three actors on using AI to solve global challenges and a common willingness to work with international organizations, with China engaging the UN and the US and EU supporting the OECD. These glimmers of common ground, the study suggests, could serve as entry points around which global AI governance is organized, with international organizations such as the UN, the OECD and the Global Partnership on AI acting as third-party interventions with the capacity and legitimacy to generate cooperation, including through the newly proposed International Scientific Panel on AI.

The study’s central conclusion challenges the many proposals for a single centralized global AI authority, such as a G20 coordinating committee, an International Artificial Intelligence Organization or an Intergovernmental Panel on AI modeled on the climate body. Such centralized mechanisms, the analysis finds, are less likely to succeed than a polycentric, multilevel arrangement in which interconnected but independent governance institutions operate at global, regional, national and subnational scales, each determined by the stakeholders at that level and guided by the principle of subsidiarity. Polycentric systems allow learning from experimentation, build trust, respond to local contexts and reduce opportunistic behavior. Enforcement, supported by monitoring, sanctioning, information provision and conflict resolution, remains the linchpin of implementation. The author acknowledges that the paper focuses on institutional design considerations rather than specifying exact institutions, and calls for future research on how polycentric arrangements could be implemented and how information provision should be structured. But the message is clear: any global AI governance proposal that ignores the non-cooperation of the United States, China and the European Union is likely doomed to fail, and the path forward runs not through a single world AI authority but through a resilient mosaic of overlapping, mutually adjusting institutions.

Subject of Research: Global governance of artificial intelligence analyzed through collective action theory

Article Title: In search of a global governance mechanism for Artificial Intelligence (AI): a collective action perspective

Article References: Olugbade, O. (2025). In search of a global governance mechanism for Artificial Intelligence (AI): a collective action perspective. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(2), 139-161. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00113-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00113-z

Keywords: artificial intelligence, global governance, collective action, common-pool resources, Elinor Ostrom, polycentric governance, EU AI Act, US-China rivalry, institutional design, AI regulation, international organizations, frontier AI risks

The study draws on the GLOBE survey, an online questionnaire titled “International Organizations and the Future of Global Governance” administered between May and November 2021. The survey reached 1,004 staff members across 30 international organizations, with an 8.4 percent response rate that matches comparable elite surveys in the field. For this analysis, the authors narrowed the sample to 451 responses from four critical global governance sectors: trade, finance, security and climate change. Respondents were carefully selected—only secretariat members with policy-related roles were included, excluding purely administrative personnel, consultants and locally hired staff. To validate the sample, the researchers compared its demographic composition against official UN staff statistics covering 116,388 employees from 38 organizations, finding a reasonable approximation of the broader international civil service.

The survey’s first major contribution is a new empirical variable: perceived autonomy. Respondents rated, on a five-point scale, how autonomous their organization is from the influence of individual member states across five policy functions—settling disputes between member states, setting policies and strategies, reviewing internal operations, establishing organizational norms, and ensuring compliance. The results reveal moderate autonomy overall, with a weighted mean of 2.92, just below the midpoint of the scale. Scores across the 18 organizations analyzed ranged from 2.2 to 3.5, indicating meaningful variation but no dramatic outliers. Notably, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Trade scored highest at 3.5, followed closely by the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group at 3.49, the International Organization of Securities Commissions at 3.4, and DG CLIMA at 3.32. At the bottom of the ranking sat the Financial Stability Board at 2.2, NATO at 2.3, and the OSCE and Mercosur, both at 2.6.

Perhaps the most technically interesting finding concerns where autonomy is strongest and weakest within organizations. Staff perceive their institutions as most autonomous in reviewing internal operations, with a mean of 3.27, and in norm-setting, at 3.26. This suggests that international bureaucracies enjoy considerable discretion over their own administrative machinery, largely insulated from direct state interference. Autonomy drops sharply, however, in functions that expose organizations to external political pressure. Policy-setting scores a mean of just 2.62, and dispute resolution between member states falls to the lowest level at 2.57. In other words, the closer an organization’s activity moves to the contested politics of its member states, the less independent its staff feel—a pattern consistent with principal-agent theory, which holds that states retain their tightest control over the most consequential delegations of authority.

The researchers benchmarked these perceptions against two established quantitative datasets: the International Authority Database, which measures de jure authority across seven policy functions, and the Measure of International Authority dataset, which tracks delegation and pooling of legal authority. The comparison produced instructive convergences and divergences. The security sector scored lowest in both datasets—0.25 in the IAD and 0.27 in MIA delegation—and staff perceptions confirmed this, with a sector mean of 2.68, the lowest of the four. Trade, which ranks highest in MIA delegation at 0.44, delivered a correspondingly high perceived autonomy of 3.17. But the within-sector variation proved more striking than the between-sector differences. The finance sector contains both one of the most autonomous organizations in the sample, IOSCO at 3.4, and one of the least, the Financial Stability Board at 2.2. Similarly, trade spans the entire spectrum, from DG TRADE at the top to Mercosur near the bottom.

The study’s second axis examined horizontal interactions—how staff perceive their dealings with other international organizations. Here the findings challenge a core assumption of the regime complexity literature. Scholars have long warned that dense, overlapping governance architectures produce “governance congestion”: conflicting mandates, coordination failures and institutional rivalry that degrade policy outcomes. Yet when asked to rate challenges such as overlapping responsibilities, implementation of field actions, hierarchical relations, competition and the involvement of too many actors, staff reported relatively few problems. The weighted overall score was 3.72 on a five-point scale where higher values indicate fewer difficulties—clearly above the midpoint and closer to “somewhat problematic” than to genuinely problematic. Mercosur, the WTO and IOSCO reported the smoothest inter-organizational relations, while the African Union at 2.99 and UNEP at 3.18 reported the most friction.

Sectoral patterns in these interactions are statistically robust. Trade organizations reported the fewest challenges, with a sector mean of 3.97, followed by finance at 3.81, security at 3.71 and climate change at 3.46. Pairwise t-tests confirmed that most of these differences are significant, with the largest gap between trade and climate change, where the t-statistic reached approximately 12.19. Within the issue-level breakdown, the implementation of field actions was the least problematic challenge overall, with a weighted mean of 3.92, while the involvement of too many actors was the most troublesome at 3.39. This last finding is telling: it suggests that the primary friction in global governance is not rivalry between organizations but sheer institutional crowding—too many players at the table, particularly in the fragmented climate regime, where UNFCCC and UNEP staff both flagged actor proliferation as a leading concern.

The sector-specific results map closely onto what institutional theory would predict, with some surprises. In finance, the pillar-like structure of the sector—where IOSCO monopolizes securities regulation and the Bank for International Settlements occupies a unique niche with no direct competitors—translated into minimal reported inter-organizational conflict. The IMF scored 3.01 on perceived autonomy versus the BIS at 2.73, confirming that the Fund enjoys greater internal discretion, especially over reviewing its own operations, but remains constrained in dispute resolution and policy-setting, echoing scholarship that portrays the IMF as a negotiation arena shaped by powerful members. In security, the dominance of member states and the veto politics of the UN Security Council produced the lowest autonomy perceptions, with NATO and the OSCE particularly exposed—though the IAEA, acting as a coordinating body, bucked the trend. The African Union emerged as the sample’s clearest case of governance congestion, reporting the highest difficulties across overlapping mandates, competition and crowded coordination spaces.

The climate change sector delivered the study’s most sobering portrait. Consistent with the fragmentation literature pioneered by scholars like Keohane and Victor, climate staff reported the most problematic interactions of any sector, driven by hierarchical tensions, competition and the proliferation of actors ranging from UN bodies to city networks like C40. Yet the sector also displayed a sharp internal divide: DG CLIMA and C40 staff perceived high autonomy, while UN institutions recorded significantly lower scores. Taken together, the findings suggest that fears of systemic governance congestion may be overstated for well-structured, functionally specialized regimes like trade and finance, but remain valid for fragmented domains like climate and security. The authors frame their study as an exploratory first step, calling for longitudinal research on how budget changes, external political shocks and shifting ideologies in key member states translate into the internal behavior of international bureaucracies—and ultimately into the policy outcomes that affect us all.

Subject of Research: Perceived autonomy and inter-organizational interactions among international organization staff across global governance sectors

Article Title: Inside global governance: perspectives of international organization staff on autonomy and horizontal interactions

Article References: Holesch, A., Jordana, J., Marx, A., & Schmitt, L. (2025). Inside global governance: perspectives of international organization staff on autonomy and horizontal interactions. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(3), 205-228. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00110-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00110-2

Keywords: international organizations, global governance, bureaucratic autonomy, regime complexity, GLOBE survey, WTO, IMF, climate governance, security governance, trade governance, international bureaucracies, member states

Methodologically, the study is a qualitative-dominant mixed-methods analysis built on a comparative case study design. The authors combine social constructivism, which treats international organizations as social phenomena that diffuse norms and reshape what states consider legitimate behavior, with institutionalism, which conceptualizes the same organizations as concrete mechanisms for delivering regional security and stability. Their primary evidence consists of official reports and policy documents from the EU and NATO, supplemented by academic literature, think-tank analyses and statistical indicators covering security, investment and democratic performance. Qualitative content analysis and comparative analysis were used to extract themes of stabilization, democratization, military cooperation and economic support, while secondary quantitative indicators tracked trends in citizen safety and wellbeing across the six Western Balkan countries. This dual lens matters, because a purely military reading of Balkan security misses the socio-economic roots of instability, and a purely normative reading misses the hard power that ended the shooting.

The theoretical scaffolding rests on a longer history of international organization. The authors trace the concept back to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which established state sovereignty as the organizing principle of international relations, through the structured diplomatic cooperation introduced at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, to the League of Nations, the first universal attempt at collective security after World War I. Although the League failed, it laid the conceptual foundation for the post-1948 explosion of multilateral institutions. The paper notes that international organizations grew from roughly 50 in the interwar period to about 80, and then surged to around 6,000 by 1980 as the Bretton Woods system, built around the US dollar as a reference currency, sought to prevent economic conflicts and maintain monetary stability and free trade. In the authors’ framing, international organization is a process, and international organizations are snapshots of that process at particular stages—a formulation borrowed from the interwar scholar Inis Claude.

Against this backdrop, the Western Balkans present a distinctive threat landscape. The region’s governments classify risks into conventional threats and weapons of mass destruction, transnational and unconventional threats, poor governance, and natural disasters. Nationalist-political, ethnic and religious tensions, together with disputes over indeterminate borders, remain the dangers most capable of destabilizing the region and reigniting armed conflict. Yet the study emphasizes a second, quieter threat: weak institutions, corruption and organized crime, which erode the state’s capacity to protect its own population. When states cannot guarantee basic security, the authors argue, the importance of international security organizations is reaffirmed—the United Nations as the largest multilateral body deploying peacekeeping missions, and NATO as the intergovernmental regional alliance dedicated to peace, security and defense. These dynamics also created urgency for Europe to assume greater responsibility for international peace and to present itself as a global strategic actor.

The empirical core of the paper documents how that responsibility has been exercised on the ground. Following NATO’s 1999 campaign in Kosovo, the UN-mandated security force KFOR was deployed under Security Council Resolution 1244 to provide security and monitor the withdrawal of Serb armed forces, and it continues as a peacekeeping force supporting the Kosovo Security Force. After nearly eight years of UN administration, Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence in 2008 created conditions for the EU to launch EULEX in November 2008 through the so-called six-point plan, a mission covering rule of law responsibilities in politics, justice and customs. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the overall security situation was relatively stable by 2012, but corruption and organized crime persisted as significant challenges; the EU closed its police mission EUPM in June 2012, an operation born of the bloc’s crisis-management ambitions, while continuing to support the rule of law. The European Commission, through its annual country reports, continues to monitor judicial independence, the fight against corruption and organized crime, democratic governance, public administration reform and fundamental rights across the region.

The enlargement framework itself functions as a security instrument, and the study maps each country’s position within it with technical precision. Montenegro began its accession process in December 2011, opened negotiations in 2012, and held its 2016 parliamentary elections under a revised and transparent legal framework characterized by general respect for fundamental freedoms, though progress on media freedom and the economy remains outstanding. Serbia was granted EU candidate status in March 2012 and opened the first negotiating chapters in December 2015, with the pace of talks tied explicitly to rule-of-law progress and the normalization of relations with Kosovo. Albania received candidate status in June 2014 and has advanced on key priorities, including justice reform and the judicial vetting process, but low conviction rates for organized crime offenses such as money laundering and trafficking remain a sticking point. Bosnia and Herzegovina submitted its EU application in February 2016, while Kosovo has taken major steps toward visa liberalization, conditioned on ratifying its border agreement with Montenegro and strengthening the fight against organized crime. Croatia, an EU member since 2013, illustrates the post-accession challenge: the Commission’s reports flag economic performance, public administration, state-owned enterprises and lingering clientelism as areas demanding reform.

On the military dimension, the paper draws on analysis from the Kosovo-based think tank KIPRED to argue that NATO’s arrival fundamentally altered the regional balance. First, the security situation stabilized and armed conflict was discouraged, transforming a region of war-torn societies with hostile neighborly relations into a relatively peaceful one. Second, NATO influenced the transformation of mass territorial-defense armies into smaller professional forces, reducing offensive capabilities against neighbors. Third, NATO enlargement played a crucial role in closing off attempts at violent border change. Fourth, the Partnership for Peace channeled defense cooperation exclusively through Brussels, ending hopes of bilateral or regional counter-balancing alliances. The same analysis, however, flags a genuine concern: Serbia’s defense cooperation with Russia, which includes the Joint Serbo-Russian Center for Response to Emergency Situations—the first such center Russia has opened in Europe since the Cold War—joint military maneuvers, and Serbia’s observer status in the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization’s parliamentary assembly. The study contends that Russia exploits troubled ethnic relations in countries outside the EU and NATO—Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and North Macedonia—to re-extend its influence, finding fertile ground wherever Brussels shows indecision and US leadership on enlargement wavers.

Threat perceptions within the region itself are strikingly asymmetric, and the authors treat this asymmetry as data. Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia consider the threat of armed conflict almost non-existent; Albania and Kosovo predict a significant decline; Croatia and Montenegro judge it greatly reduced; Serbia treats it merely as reduced. None of the six completely rules out armed conflict, which could arise mainly from attempts at violent border change, though the possibility of a successful offensive against neighbors is judged small. In military capabilities and defense industry, Serbia and Croatia dominate, while the other states’ forces are marginal: Albania’s military budget stands at roughly 101.75 million euros, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s at around 46 million, and Kosovo’s at 42.03 million with an expected increase. Serbia projects Kosovo as a direct conventional threat and a troubled entity, and the paper suggests Belgrade maintains military planning for unforeseen situations against Pristina. KIPRED’s assessment is sobering: short of a conventional offensive to annex territory north of the Ibar, any Serbian-Kosovar conflict would likely be protracted, with both sides suffering comparable domestic and foreign political injury. The study concludes that the only rational path is normalization of defense relations through confidence-building measures, alongside Kosovo’s membership in the Partnership for Peace, which could eventually allow KFOR’s withdrawal while preserving stability.

The discussion and conclusion sections broaden the lens to non-traditional security. The reduction of large-scale armed conflict confirms the stabilizing impact of NATO’s military presence and broader Euro-Atlantic engagement, supporting the argument that international organizations function as security providers and confidence-building mechanisms in fragile regions. But security has evolved beyond military threats: organized crime, corruption, irregular migration and refugee flows continue to undermine institutional consolidation, and external dangers such as international terrorism and violent extremism—including the threat posed by ISIS—demonstrate the interconnectedness of regional and global security, demanding cooperation in intelligence sharing, border management and social resilience. The authors classify the region’s unfinished transformation into three processes—stabilization and state-building, democratization and institution-building, and Euro-Atlantic integration—and warn that stabilization built from the outside, running in parallel with democratization, risks instability where credible measures overlook conflict leaders. Their verdict is measured: international organizations have been instrumental in stabilizing the Western Balkans, but long-term security depends on addressing internal vulnerabilities alongside external risks through comprehensive, multidimensional engagement—a finding that resonates far beyond the Balkans for every fragile region where peace is being engineered from the outside in.

Subject of Research: The role of international organizations, particularly the EU and NATO, in regional security and stability in the Western Balkans

Article Title: Role of international organizations in the security of the Western Balkans

Article References: Oxha, S., Rushiti, F., & Mirtezani, L. (2026). Role of international organizations in the security of the Western Balkans. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 204. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00562-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00562-9

Keywords: Western Balkans, NATO, European Union, regional security, international organizations, Kosovo, Serbia, EULEX, KFOR, Euro-Atlantic integration, organized crime, Russia

The special issue examines AI’s policy implications from five distinct angles. One study probes public trust and opinion within the European Union, another compares governance models in Singapore and France, a third frames global AI governance as a classic collective action problem, a fourth dissects regulatory challenges in the defense sector across the European Union and the United States, and a fifth investigates the ethical and legal implications of facial recognition technology in both democratic and autocratic states. Taken together, they map the fault lines where national sovereignty, ethical oversight, and international cooperation collide, and they suggest that no single country or institution can manage the technology alone.

The comparative analysis of national governance models reveals just how different the world’s responses have become. In a study of Singapore and France, Alibašić shows how international organizations and global governance frameworks shape national AI strategies in markedly different ways. Singapore has built an innovation-centric model, one that treats regulatory agility as a competitive advantage and leans heavily on market-driven experimentation. France, by contrast, has pursued an ethics-driven approach in which the state plays a leading role in setting boundaries and safeguarding public values. The contrast is not merely stylistic. It illustrates a fundamental tension in AI policy worldwide: whether the primary goal of regulation is to accelerate innovation or to constrain it in the name of rights, safety, and democratic accountability.

That tension becomes even sharper when the technology in question is designed for the battlefield. Parisini’s comparative study of the European Union and the United States in the defense sector underscores the fragmented nature of EU defense AI governance, which is spread across institutions and member states, and contrasts it with the far more centralized strategy of the US Department of Defense. The analysis identifies capability gaps within the EU that could be narrowed through stronger transatlantic cooperation, an argument that echoes the findings on Singapore and France about the importance of international coordination. In other words, whether the domain is civilian innovation or military capability, the same lesson emerges: jurisdictions that try to go it alone leave gaps that cooperation could close.

At the global level, the picture grows more daunting still. Olugbade situates these national differences within a broader framework, arguing that AI governance is fundamentally a collective action problem, one made worse by the non-cooperation of the three dominant powers: the United States, China, and the European Union. When the largest producers and deployers of AI cannot agree on shared rules, smaller states are left to choose among incompatible standards, and the technology flows through the cracks. Olugbade’s answer is a polycentric governance mechanism, a system in which multiple centers of authority, from national regulators to international organizations, each govern parts of the problem while reconciling national autonomy with global cooperation. Rather than waiting for a single worldwide treaty that may never arrive, polycentricity accepts overlapping jurisdictions and seeks alignment among them.

The stakes of this fragmentation are not abstract. Robles and colleagues examine regulatory frameworks for facial recognition technology across a range of political regimes and document how unevenly such measures are applied. In democratic states, facial recognition raises acute concerns about civil liberties, wrongful identification, and the chilling of lawful assembly; in autocratic states, the same technology can become an instrument of surveillance and social control. The study’s central finding, the need for harmonized international standards, echoes a sentiment running through the entire special issue: without common benchmarks, the ethical floor for AI technologies will be set by the least restrictive jurisdiction, and the consequences will spill across borders.

Public trust emerges as the connective tissue binding all of these analyses together. Jensen and Chen focus on public sentiment toward AI within the European Union and identify class-based divides in how the technology is perceived, along with skepticism rooted in deficits of governance trust. Citizens who distrust the institutions regulating AI are unlikely to accept its deployment, however technically sound the safeguards may be. The authors propose citizen engagement and transparency initiatives as mechanisms to bridge this trust gap, a micro-level prescription that complements the macro-level analyses of global governance offered elsewhere in the issue. The implication is that legitimacy must be built at both ends of the scale: in the deliberations of international bodies and in the lived experience of ordinary people confronting algorithmic decision-making.

What makes the synthesis compelling is the convergence of these five studies on a shared set of themes: governance fragmentation, public trust, ethical considerations, and international cooperation. The comparative evidence suggests that harmonizing AI governance requires multilevel collaboration, both within regions such as the European Union and across global power blocs that currently view each other with suspicion. The collective warning is stark. Without coordinated global policies, AI governance will remain uneven, and that unevenness will put democratic accountability and international security at risk simultaneously. A technology that respects no borders cannot be governed effectively by institutions that stop at them.

The policy implications are concrete. The synthesis calls for enhanced international cooperation, stronger citizen engagement to foster trust, and the establishment of ethical standards for emerging technologies such as facial recognition. It also sketches institutional mechanisms that could translate high-level policy convergence into practice without demanding complete harmonization. Regulatory sandboxes, flexible spaces where governments can trial data-sharing protocols or algorithmic audits under shared principles while maintaining oversight, offer one path for incremental alignment. International AI observatories, hosted by multilateral organizations such as the OECD, UNESCO, or the UN Tech Envoy, could coordinate monitoring, ethics benchmarking, and risk assessment across jurisdictions. Capacity-building initiatives, including South–South knowledge transfer networks and AI policy toolkits tailored to institutional contexts, would support low- and middle-income countries that currently lack the regulatory infrastructure to engage on equal terms.

The research agenda that follows is equally clear. Future work should explore mechanisms for enforcing global AI standards while respecting national sovereignty, and should conduct empirical studies on whether polycentric governance frameworks actually deliver in practice. Multi-scalar research comparing AI implementation across local, national, and regional levels would reveal where governance gaps emerge and how they might be mitigated. The special issue as a whole advocates a multi-level, polycentric approach that bridges the gap between national autonomy and global regulatory alignment, setting the stage for AI governance that is both more robust and more democratically accountable. The alternative, a world in which each bloc writes its own rules and trusts no one else’s, is not a stable equilibrium but a slow-motion race to the weakest standard. The choice, the synthesis suggests, is still open, but the window for making it deliberately is narrowing with every deployment.

Subject of Research: Comparative analysis of global AI governance frameworks and polycentric policy coordination

Article Title: From fragmentation to polycentricity: a comparative synthesis on AI governance and global policy coordination

Article References: Woods, D. (2025). From fragmentation to polycentricity: a comparative synthesis on AI governance and global policy coordination. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(2), 87-92. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00118-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00118-8

Keywords: artificial intelligence, AI governance, polycentric governance, global policy coordination, public trust, facial recognition technology, EU regulation, defense sector, collective action, regulatory sandboxes, international organizations, comparative public policy

The review, published online on August 1, 2026, in ECNU Review of Education, was conducted by Luís Miguel Carvalho and Catarina Gonçalves of the Institute of Education, University of Lisbon. The authors examined 42 peer-reviewed articles published between 2005 and 2023, mapping a body of work known as the sociology of policy instruments in education. Their goal was twofold: to take stock of what this research tradition has revealed about contemporary education policy, and to identify where the field should go next. The result is both a synthesis of nearly two decades of scholarship and a framework for understanding how apparently mundane administrative devices carry profound political weight.

The intellectual core of the sociology of policy instruments is the claim that instruments are simultaneously technical and social devices. Legislation, contracts, assessments, benchmarks, indicators, funding mechanisms, and communication platforms all embody specific values and assumptions about the relationship between government, education professionals, learners, and society. A national testing regime, for instance, encodes beliefs about what knowledge matters, how learning should be demonstrated, and who is entitled to judge school quality. A funding contract encodes assumptions about incentives and accountability. Studying these embedded assumptions, the review argues, makes it possible to see how power operates through arrangements that are usually presented as merely practical.

The literature reviewed shows a clear center of gravity. Researchers have concentrated especially on performance-based instruments: the OECD’s PISA assessments, national large-scale assessments, school evaluation and self-evaluation schemes, indicators, standards, and accreditation procedures. This concentration, the authors suggest, reflects a broader transformation in how education systems are governed—a shift toward governance through comparison, data, and performance-oriented accountability. In such systems, the instrument is not an afterthought to policy; it is the medium through which policy is imagined, debated, and enforced.

The review also documents a second trend in the research: growing attention to European education governance, to global intergovernmental organizations, to private companies, and to intermediary actors who work between national policy and local practice. This shift mirrors changes in the policy landscape itself. As international assessments and transnational benchmarks gain influence, the actors who design, interpret, and circulate these tools—organizations, consultants, data providers, and broker institutions—acquire authority that traditional accounts of education policy rarely captured. Instrument-based research, the review shows, is particularly well suited to illuminating this redistribution of influence.

To organize the existing knowledge, Carvalho and Gonçalves distinguish three dimensions. The first concerns the institutional ideas embedded in instruments—the values, theories of schooling, and assumptions about governance that tools carry within them. The second concerns the trajectories instruments follow as they are designed, adopted, and used in practice. The third concerns the effects instruments generate once they are in circulation. Crucially, the review emphasizes, instruments do not simply travel unchanged from policymaking centers to schools. National traditions, political interests, professional identities, and local conditions can lead to adoption, opposition, hybridization, or the creation of entirely new tools. A similar assessment or indicator scheme may therefore take quite different forms in different systems, depending on the institutional soil in which it is planted.

From this synthesis, the authors distill six recurring effects of policy instruments. Instruments can legitimize certain actors and coalitions while marginalizing others. They can reorganize political spaces and timelines, changing who participates in decision-making and on what schedule. They can privilege certain forms of knowledge and expertise over others, elevating statistical and managerial competence in the process. They can gather actors around common issues, creating new arenas of cooperation and contestation. They can produce hybrid policies when several tools and governing logics interact within the same system. And they can generate unintended consequences that no designer anticipated.

The review offers concrete illustrations of these dynamics. Comparative assessments such as PISA may strengthen the authority of international organizations and structure national debate around rankings and league tables. Indicators designed to inform policy deliberation can harden into simplified rankings that obscure the complexity they were meant to capture. Performance tools introduced to encourage innovation may instead intensify supervision or standardize classroom practice. In each case, the effect flows not from malice or error but from the way the instrument itself organizes attention, incentives, and authority—a reminder that design choices are consequential even when they appear innocuous.

“Studies on policy instruments are well suited to address the complexity of education policy: the multiple policy scales as interdependent contexts, the variety of individual and collective actors involved, and the various governance patterns, ranging from state-oriented to market-oriented regimes, and from norm-based governance patterns to performance-oriented ones,” said Carvalho and Gonçalves. The methodological strength of this approach lies precisely in its capacity to connect levels: a single testing regime can be analyzed simultaneously as a national political project, a transnational data infrastructure, a professional constraint on teachers, and a market opportunity for private providers. Few other lenses in education research hold these scales together so naturally.

The review is candid about its limits and the gaps it exposes. The evidence base remains strongly centered on Europe, leaving large regions of the world underrepresented in the literature. Researchers have also paid less attention to combinations of multiple instruments, even though real education systems almost always deploy tools in bundles rather than in isolation. The authors call for a broader geo-cultural range of studies, clearer theoretical foundations, and more systematic explanations of why the same instrument follows different trajectories in different settings. Answering these calls, they suggest, would turn a promising research perspective into a genuinely comparative science of educational governance.

For policymakers and education leaders, the findings carry a practical caution: choosing a policy instrument is itself a political decision. A test, an indicator, a contract, or a digital platform may affect not only whether a policy achieves its stated goals, but also what goals appear legitimate in the first place, who gains authority over schools, and which realities remain visible or become obscured by the data collected. A ministry that selects a new evaluation framework is, in effect, redrawing the map of who may speak credibly about education. Recognizing this does not mean abandoning instruments—governance without tools is impossible—but it does mean treating their selection and design as matters requiring the same scrutiny as policy content itself.

For researchers, the review provides a map of a developing field and a framework for examining the complex links between technical devices, institutional change, and power in education. The sociology of policy instruments, as synthesized by Carvalho and Gonçalves, invites scholars to ask deceptively simple questions about the tools that surround schooling: What ideas do they carry? Whose interests do they serve? How do they travel, mutate, and combine? And what worlds do they make possible—or foreclose? As education systems worldwide continue to embrace data, comparison, and performance, those questions grow only more urgent, and the instruments themselves grow only more consequential.

Subject of Research: The role of policy instruments in shaping ideas, actors, and governance in education policy

Article Title: Policy instruments are never neutral — they shape ideas, actors, and change

Article References: Policy instruments are never neutral — they shape ideas, actors, and change. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: education policy, policy instruments, scoping review, PISA, accountability, governance, indicators, school evaluation, Europeanization, international organizations, performance governance, sociology of education

The study, authored by Benjamin Faude of the University of Glasgow and Tim Heinkelmann-Wild of the European University Institute and LMU Munich, takes aim at the prevailing pessimism in international relations scholarship. Some prominent theorists had warned that an American exit from hegemony would trigger a collapse of the liberal international order, while others had predicted that global institutions would prove resilient without U.S. leadership. The authors position themselves between these poles. They contend that although the challenge posed by Trump’s second term is more severe than his first, the continued decline of global governance and a resurgence of unrestrained great-power politics are not inevitable. Everything, they argue, depends on how the major powers that still support international institutions choose to respond.

To understand why the stakes are so high, the researchers dissect the Trumpian challenge along two dimensions: material and ideational. The material challenge is straightforwardly fiscal and organizational. American disengagement strips institutions of resources and, given the country’s predominant power, curtails their ability to influence international affairs, potentially rippling outward as other states follow Washington’s example. The first Trump administration had already stopped funding for UNRWA and the UN Population Fund and exited a long list of agreements and bodies, from the Trans-Pacific Partnership to the Arms Trade Treaty and the Iran nuclear deal. Rather than relying on multilateral arrangements, it favored bilateral negotiations and hub-and-spoke frameworks that placed the United States at the center, such as the Artemis Accords for space exploration and the Abraham Accords in the Middle East.

The ideational challenge, the authors suggest, is in some ways more corrosive. Trump has paired withdrawals with nationalist rhetoric and an ideological critique that questions the very legitimacy of international cooperation. He dismissed climate change as mythical and an expensive hoax, accused the WHO of being a puppet of China, and called the WTO broken and a disaster for the country. Such public attacks, the paper warns, can erode the perceived value of adhering to institutional norms and rules, potentially producing what scholars term compliance pessimism or even cascades of norm violations that spread skepticism across the international system.

Crucially, the researchers place Trumpism in historical context and find both continuity and rupture. The United States has always had an ambivalent relationship with the institutions it helped found. Before Trump, Washington had withdrawn material support from international organizations and agreements more than 140 times, making it the most frequent quitter of such bodies. Republican administrations have withheld funding from the UN Population Fund for decades, and the Reagan administration cut contributions to the UN, the IMF, and the World Bank while seeking greater influence over them. What distinguishes Trump is the peak of this pattern and the fundamental nature of the critique. Previous administrations justified nonparticipation by citing an asymmetrical distribution of costs, as George W. Bush did with the Kyoto Protocol. Trump’s allies, by contrast, attack the foundational mission itself. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared at his confirmation hearing that the post-war global order is not just obsolete but is now a weapon being used against the United States.

The paper then examines how defenders of global governance responded during the first Trump term, and the record is instructive. Western powers, often working in concert with international bureaucracies, deployed two broad strategies: appeasement and defense. NATO members increased defense spending toward two percent of GDP to address Trump’s complaints, while the World Bank tempered criticism through the creation of a fund for female entrepreneurs, reduced lending to China, and efforts to mobilize private capital. The Universal Postal Union even persuaded the administration to reverse its planned exit by allowing high-volume countries to set their own postal rates. Where appeasement was inappropriate, defenders reaffirmed the value of contested institutions publicly, shamed the United States, and mobilized alternative funding. When American contributions to the UN Population Fund stopped, other states increased theirs, and the European Union doubled down on climate commitments after the U.S. left the Paris Agreement, enlisting China as the largest emitter.

The failures are equally revealing. When the U.S. cut UNRWA funding in 2018, European states were divided and some followed the American example, forcing the agency to sharply reduce services for Palestinians. The Arms Trade Treaty came to be regarded as a failed initiative after the U.S. withdrawal, and European attempts to preserve the Iran nuclear deal proved half-hearted, with governments unwilling to shield their companies from secondary sanctions. The lesson, according to the authors, is that Trumpism can be effectively countered, but only when powerful states act decisively and in concert.

That condition is now in doubt. The response of Western governments to the second Trump administration has been noticeably weaker, with public defenses of the Paris Agreement, the WHO, and UNESCO more restrained, and the UN’s severe budget crisis left unaddressed. NATO members have agreed to raise defense spending to five percent of GDP by 2035 largely to keep the United States committed to the alliance, and the European Union concluded a tariff arrangement with Washington that openly contravenes key WTO rules. The authors attribute this timidity to the changed geopolitical context: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made European states far more dependent on American security guarantees, making them hesitant to provoke retaliation by openly defending contested institutions.

What future, then, awaits the rules-based order? The paper sketches two scenarios. In the darker one, global governance decays into a nineteenth-century-style concert of great powers, in which Washington, Beijing, and Moscow collude to divide the world into spheres of influence free from institutional constraint. The authors regard this as realistic, noting that international orders tend to expire through gradual deterioration rather than sudden collapse. But they also identify a more hopeful pathway: creative destruction, in which legacy institutions are transformed or supplemented by innovative forms of governance better suited to current conditions. They point to the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement, adopted by 52 members as a workaround to the paralyzed WTO dispute settlement system, and to the proliferation of low-cost institutions such as informal intergovernmental organizations, transgovernmental networks, and public-private partnerships. These flexible bodies can be layered atop formal organizations, filling governance gaps while drawing on the resources and legitimacy of the older institutions, producing hybrid structures with both substantive and political fit for complex problems.

Which scenario materializes hinges on political choices that remain unresolved. If European states cannot overcome their geopolitical constraints and rising populist nationalism, non-Western powers will shape the future of global governance instead. China has announced its own Global Governance Initiative and has shown both reformist and revisionist tendencies, supporting Western defenses of the Paris Agreement, the WHO, and the WTO during Trump’s first term while promoting illiberal policies in the UN Human Rights Council and UNESCO. European reluctance, the authors caution, risks hollowed-out multilateralism. Their prescription is clear: liberal states must actively promote the innovative adaptation of global governance to a political, economic, and technological environment radically different from the one in which the post-war institutions were created. Decline, in their view, is a choice, and so is renewal.

Subject of Research: The impact of Trumpism on the material and ideational foundations of global governance institutions

Article Title: Destruction or renewal? Trumpism and the future of global governance

Article References: Faude, B., & Heinkelmann-Wild, T. (2025). Destruction or renewal? Trumpism and the future of global governance. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 305-315. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00130-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00130-y

Keywords: global governance, Trumpism, international organizations, liberal international order, great-power politics, World Trade Organization, Paris Agreement, World Health Organization, institutional resilience, low-cost institutions, China, European Union