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Allison Carnegie and Richard Clark, "Global Governance Under Fire: How International Organizations Resist the Populist Wave" (Princeton UP, 2026)
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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Eleonora Matiacci, an associate professor of political science at Amherst College. Today, I'm here with Professor Alison Carnegie, a professor of political science at Columbia University, and Professor Ricky Clark, who is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. Professors Carnegie and Clark's new book is called Global Governance Under How International Organizations Resist the Populist Wave. This book was published in 2026 by Princeton University Press in their Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series. Professors Carnegie and Clark, thank you for joining us and welcome.
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A
Thank you for having us.
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C
Thank you so much for having us.
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B
Let's start with your central argument. Populist leaders increasingly reject international organizations, and in fact, they rally followers against what they call, quote, unquote, quote, the global elite. So many observers assume that these institutions are sort of passive victims of these populist attacks. But you challenge that conventional wisdom. What sparked your interest in studying how these institutions fight back? And what existing scholarship or assumptions are you pushing back against?
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C
So a lot of our research focuses on how these international organizations are living, breathing entities, right? They're bureaucracies staffed by experts. And we spent a lot of time, both for this project and other projects, talking to these individuals that staff the organizations and learning that they have a lot of autonomy, they have distance from member states, and sometimes they can sort of pursue their own preferences. And we found that this is true even when powerful member states are hostile towards these organizations. And so these individuals matter, and they have strong incentives to ensure that organizations can survive and thrive, even when they have pushback from member states. And so we sort of push back on the long tradition in the literature that describes these institutions as beholden to member states and especially to powerful states. Right. Like the US and the conventional wisdom is sort of that these states dominate the institutions. They act to rein in any agency or sort of slack that these bureaucrats have. And what we're showing is that these institutions have the incentives and ability to work around these powerful states when they start to attack international institutions. I think we're also interested in research showing that international organizations are autonomous bodies. And so there's a research tradition that suggests that when they do pursue their own preferences, this is a really bad thing. Right, because then they're pursuing narrow interests. They're not doing what member states had sort of delegated them to do. I think we're pushing back on that a little bit, because in this case, the institutions acting autonomously is A way to ensure that the institutions survive. And we think these institutions are normatively important, that they do important work that helps to, for instance, reinforce the liberal international order. And so I think our story is a little bit more nuanced where this may be a case where agency has sort of good and bad elements.
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A
Yeah, I totally agree with what Ricky just said. And I would just add that we're sort of in a moment where there's a lot of scholarship and popular discourse and just a lot of hand waving about, you know, the decline of globalization and the end of the liberal international order. And I think Ricky and I were more interested, as opposed to asking, are these institutions declining? Are they about to die? We were more interested in how are they changing? Can we learn something interesting about the nature of global governance today and say something about the future of the liberal international order rather than just, is it surviving or is it declining? And so we wanted to know how. What does it look like? And I think that kind of led us to look at what these international organizations are doing in response to challenges that they're facing.
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B
That is. That is great. And I have to say, throughout the book, there's a lot of nuance. It's a very rich book, which makes me appreciate it even more. Let me ask you. So you explain to us how you came to this question. Let me ask you. So, you know, many of our listeners will be watching headlines about countries leaving international organizations, or leaders attacking international organizations, or leaders even creating their own international organizations. Why does it matter whether we see these organizations as passive or strategic?
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C
Yeah, I think this was sort of a motivating question for us in starting this book project. And I think what surprised us is that if these institutions were really passive and you would expect them to be debilitated or severely harmed by these sustained attacks that they've suffered over the last decade. And I think starting with sort of Brexit and Trump's first election in 2016, you would expect sort of powerful state pushback. And this extends also to leaders like Bolsonaro in Brazil or Orban in Hungary, that these institutions would be helpless. Right. They would have no way to work around this resistance, and you would have withdrawal and funding cuts that would really cripple them. And this is just not uniformly the case. And so one of the puzzles we were interested in is like, why have these institutions continued to operate? Some of them more or less business as usual, how have they found ways to plug funding gaps to maintain normal operations, and so on? And so I think our conclusion in Part is that these institutions have become politicized in ways that have abetted their survival, as there's this back and forth between hostile governments and institutions, but also that complicate the picture for downstream implications like legitimacy or transparency. And so it's this kind of nuanced story. It's not as simple as, well, they're passive and struggling. Instead, they have this ability to react in the moment to these attacks.
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A
Absolutely. And I would just add that I think the stakes are a lot higher than a lot of people realize because international organizations do so much in terms of global governance in ways that affects the lives of everyday people. And there are so many political and economic effects that they have. And they govern things like international trade, foreign aid, international finance, peace, conflict. And so understanding how they're doing that, either successfully or unsuccessfully or in an unbiased way or in a biased way, these have ramifications for real people in ways that people might not understand because they operate sort of behind the scenes in many ways. And so we really wanted to kind of understand what is going on and how is that affecting the lives of everyday people.
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B
This is an important point. I, you know, I, I, I studied international relations, but you write that I never stop to think about the ways in which the presence of international organ affects our everyday lives. So I'm glad you're making this point. Let's get into your argument. You write, quote, populists present a particularly formidable and sustained challenge, end quote. And you identify four key strategies that international organizations use to deal with populists. With this challenge, can you walk us through a specific example of one of these strategies in action and give us sort of a sense of how NIO actively responded to populist pressure? And while you're at it, maybe you can tell us about what those four strategies are.
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A
So for sure, absolutely. Yeah. So the way we're thinking about these international organizations is they can target in terms of their communications and in terms of the benefits they give, they can target leaders of countries and they can also target domestic populations. And increasingly they're doing so through things like social media channels and the forms of communication they're using. So when we thought about the strategies that they have to push back against populism or other challenges, we thought about both levels of targeting, and so we thought about international organizations just giving their detractors what they want. Right. They just appease them. So you could appease populist leaders themselves if they make demands, you could just give them what they're asking for or sort of the domestic public's on the ground to try to shore up support among the domestic population. Or alternatively, you could try to sideline them. And by that I mean go around the populist detractors. So rather than give them what they want, maybe you look elsewhere for contributions in terms of money or information or things like that. You can also sideline, or I should say international organizations can also sideline people on the ground that don't like the international organizations and kind of get around that by operating in secret, for example. So those people can't tell what the international organization's doing. And what we found, especially in researching specific cases where international organizations have used these strategies is often they use all four together, sort of just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. So just, you know, you asked for a specific example. One of, one of them might be, you might remember a couple years ago when there was a big issue with Turkey and NATO because Sweden and Finland wanted to join NATO. Turkey was pushing back because of issues regarding Kurdish militants and things. And so what NATO did was try to use each of these four strategies. So on the one hand, it tried to just give Turkey what it wanted. It strengthened a bunch of anti terror laws and hired counterterrorism coordinators. But then it also tried to sideline Turkey. It said, well, listen, if you are going to push back, you're not invited to the White House, you're going to be isolated diplomatically. And then if you read NATO's Twitter thread, it was constantly tweeting about the issue. And so we kind of interpreted that as trying to appease the domestic population to drum up some domestic support for NATO's perspective. And then also NATO held a lot of meetings with Turkey out of the public eye to. And so one way to interpret that is that they were trying to sideline people that were opposed and so they could operate in secret where there wasn't that domestic pressure. And so that's just one example where an IO used each of these strategies sort of in tandem to try to achieve its goals. Get in the game with the college branded Venmo debit card. Rep your team with every tap and earn up to 5% cash back with Venmo. Stash a new rewards program from Venmo. No monthly fee, no minimum balance, just school pride and spending power. Get in the game and sign up for the Venmo debit card@venmo.com collegecard the Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank NA Select Schools available Venmo stash Terms and exclusions apply@venmo me.termsterms max $100 cash back per month.
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B
It's, it's a very, it's a very striking example. I like this image of the spaghetti. Spaghetti to the wall. You know, that's what you gotta do. You gotta do what you gotta do. I get it. So let's talk about your findings. One of the most provocative findings in your book has to do with unintended consequences. So you find that, yes, defensive strategies help fortify global governance against populists, but they might also produce unintended consequences. And so, for example, one of these consequences is that they could erode institutional legitimacy and fuel further resistance. Were there any surprising turns in your thinking as you developed these arguments?
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C
I think there definitely were. And in fact, at the beginning of this project, I think the story was a lot sunnier. We were thinking about how these institutions are really versatile actors and they can adapt to resistance in the moment in order to survive. And the key observation at that point was just that these institutions are surviving, they're continuing to do their work. And so the puzzle was why and how. As we dug deeper into these methodologies, these four strategies that institutions can use, and thought through the downstream implications, the story became a lot more complicated. And so if you think about something like secrecy provisions, the ability to sideline publics that might be skeptical of international organizations, these populist publics that tend to dislike elite institutions, secrecy does allow this collaboration between the populist leader and the institution. And so you can retain that leaders participation in the institution, which is really important.
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B
Could you tell us what you mean by secrecy here, just to make sure?
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C
Yeah. So examples would be like Alison talked about closed door meetings being one example. In the chapter on secrecy provisions, we actually look at the International Monetary Fund, where the board meetings, the minutes from board meetings are kept confidential for five to seven years after a given meeting. And so leaders can go in and they can act constructively and sort of engage in cooperative ways with these institutions, knowing that any deliberations will be hidden from the public eye. And given that the IMF is somewhat of a divisive international institution, especially for recipient countries, this is really important to the work of the institution. But if we start to then look towards downstream implications, this undermines institutional transparency. Right. It's not clear what's being discussed, what issues are being worked on at the institutional level. And if we think about sort of like canonical stories of international cooperation, transparency is really central to their work. Right. They publish reports, they make data available. And so it undermines one of the central sort of tenets of the liberal order in these liberal institutions. And that makes for a much more, I think, interesting and nuanced story about the downstream implications of this work. Right. Does it undermine legitimacy, transparency, the perceived kind of democraticness of these institutions?
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A
Yeah, and I think that's absolutely right. And also it's interesting because you can't just get around the negative effects of sidelining by appeasing. Because how can anybody possibly feel that an organization is legitimate if they just buy off members that are oppositional? And if, if the members that get the most goodies from the organization are just the ones that complain the loudest, how is that legitimate? And so there are, I think, are negative implications often with each of these strategies. And so the more it becomes politicized in any of these dimensions, I think you get into sort of dangerous territory because they might lose legitimacy and acceptance from the members.
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B
So your argument has lots of nuances. And the way you go about testing this argument is using what we call a multi method approach. You bring in novel data and you bring in lots and lots of interviews. Can you tell us a little bit about how you thought about designing the research design part of the book?
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C
I think research design is a central problem when you're studying international organizations. They're just not conducive to sort of the clean econometric causal inference work that I think a lot of folks are familiar with in political science these days. Because cooperation is what we would say, like endogenous to lots of things. Right? It's caused by member state preferences, it's caused by economic trends. And so oftentimes both the outcomes and the drivers are highly correlated with the cooperation itself. And so when we think about studying international cooperation, I think we tend to think of different methods as kind of tools in a toolkit. And so a good scholar of international organizations is going to have many of these tools available to them. They might be proficient in writing case studies, in conducting elite interviews, in doing correlational analysis and trying to do causal inference with quantitative data. And so our goal in this book was to try and show that across various methodologies the patterns are similar, Right. And that they point in the same direction and a direction that's aligned with our theoretical framework. So in our case, this meant lots of case studies, observational regressions with original data that we had to go out and collect because it wasn't available to us. Ex ante interviews with policymakers to try and get at, you know, why are you acting in these ways, and what are your incentives and how are you thinking about the challenges that you're facing? And then if you can do that, if you can show that across a bunch of these methods, sort of everything points in the same direction. We think it's reasonable to make causal claims, even if you're not able to do so in kind of an inferential or clean way.
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A
Yeah. I mean, ideally, we would ask populists to randomize which international organizations they are challenging and then, you know, find the causal effect. And we just don't have that sort of ability in the international setting. So, as Ricky said, I think it's more like just kind of looking for evidence anywhere you can find it and putting together a narrative based on all of the different pieces that you've assembled.
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B
In some ways, you have to get out of your way, to go out of your way to sort of make an ambiguous case. And you do it, and you do it very well. It's such a pleasure to. Like, I feel like when I read the book, like, I feel like I'm in good hands. You know, you've done what you need to do, which is great. Let's talk about the reactions to your book. I mean, ultimately, you're making a claim that runs counter to much of the current discourse about weakened multilateralism. Where do you expect readers to push back on your argument?
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C
I mean, I think readers are likely to push back because they're observing what they think is these institutions becoming much weaker. Right. They see withdrawal. They see Trump pulling out of 66 international organizations just a few weeks ago. They see the Paris Agreement struggling to reach its benchmarks, many countries struggling to reach benchmarks. You see funding cuts in many of these institutions, not just from the US but from some European countries. They're kind of reassessing their allocations to aid organizations as well. And so these examples would sort of suggest that the liberal order is decaying and that we're in a moment of crisis for multilateralism. I think what we're doing is we're not saying that these institutions are stronger or weaker than before, per se, but we are highlighting adaptability and survival. We're showing that these institutions can persist, that they're not likely to sort of collapse in on themselves imminently as a result of these attacks. And that is, in fact, striking because the attacks are coming from many of the architects of these institutions, the powerful states that disproportionately fund them and have participated in large amounts previously. So I think our conclusion is just that these Institutions are working in qualitatively different ways than before, and they're surviving, which is somewhat puzzling if you think that these institutions are just becoming extremely weak.
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A
Absolutely. And another possible pushback that we've gotten is people saying, well, haven't international organizations always been politicized to some extent? Doesn't the powerful states always run the show? So is this new? And I think it is new in the sense that the politicization is accelerating and also changing in interesting ways. And you see populist momentum building in states across the globe and in, you know, all. All regions of the world. And so I think the challenges that iOS are facing have changed, and the ways that they're adapting to them have also changed in ways that are really important to study.
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B
Yeah, I agree. It's kind of a unique moment, kind of unprecedented. Let's talk about the practical implications of your research. When Leaders of iOS of international organizations read your book, what should they do differently?
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C
We spent a lot of time thinking about this, and the conclusion of the book includes kind of a mix of different strategies that these institutions might undertake. But I think the first one is just that you can't rely too heavily on any one of these strategies to push back against institutions, because that's when you see these downstream negative implications becoming most severe for things like legitimacy and transparency. So, for instance, going back to secrecy, again, if you rely too heavily on secrecy, significantly reduce transparency. If you rely too much on sidelining, trying to work around these populist leaders, it reduces legitimacy and perceived democraticness, because then you're shrinking the set of cooperative states. And so I think the more that you rely on any one of these strategies, the more apparent it's going to be that legitimacy, transparency, democraticness of global governance is being undermined. So one thing we say is that leaders should sort of rely on a mix of these strategies. Right. And if you do so, then you can reduce the negative implications for any one area. We think that's kind of a fruitful suggestion.
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A
Yeah. And just like you see states diversifying and relying less on any one partner or, you know, specific supply chain, we think that it would be helpful for iOS to diversify and have multiple sources of funding or multiple sources of information. And. And I think really the sort of thrust of the. The point is just to take a proactive approach and rather than just wait to be challenged and hope the populist challenge is not so severe that you can't handle it, you know, be proactive and develop tools and a plan for how to approach this kind of resistance.
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B
So hedge and make a plan. I like it. I like it. Let's think about the reader, the listeners. Now, if our listeners could take away just one core idea from the book, what would that idea be?
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C
I think the central idea is that international organizations have adapted their operations to endure despite this widespread populist backlash. But in the process, they've sort of warped their operations or altered the way they do business in ways that can weaken institutional legitimacy and transparency.
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A
Yeah, I agree. I mean, maybe just even more succinctly, just populism is politicizing international organizations.
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B
That is a scary thought. That is a scary thought. Well, Professors Carnegie and Professor Clark, we've taken enough of your time today. We always ask one last question, which is. Which is perhaps an unfair question to ask to someone who just published the whole book, but here we go. What are you working on right now?
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A
Yeah, so Ricky and I have been working together for many years now, and so we're always working on something together, and we have a lot of different ideas that usually has something to do with global governance. Right now, we've been in very early stages, just kind of chatting about how international organizations reshape the nature of coercion and coercive tools that states choose. So thinking about how if international organizations bind you to a set of rules in one area, and so it's harder to use those tools for coercion. Think about, you know, the WTO binding states to specific rules when it comes to trade, so then it's harder to manipulate your trade policies to coerce your partners. So maybe you switch to using different tools. And so kind of thinking about how international organizations have shaped the strategies and the tools that. That states use for coercion and what that means for global governance.
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C
I mean, I think on this point, there's sort of this big assumption in the literature that the existence of international institutions means that cooperation is increasing and coercive behavior is decreasing. And I think one question we have is, is this actually true? Like, in absolute levels, do we actually see reductions in coercion, or is it just being displaced into the areas that are least bound by international organizations? And so it's a big question and one we're hoping to dig into more in the coming months.
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B
That's great. That's fantastic. And if there's a book that comes out of this, you must come back and tell us all about it.
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C
Of course.
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B
Thank you, Professors Carnegie and Clark, for taking the time to talk with us today. My guests have been Professor Alison Carnegie and Professor Ricky Clark. They are the authors of a new book, Global Governance under How International Organizations Resist the Populist Wave. The book was published in 2026 by Princeton University Press in their Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series. I'm your host, Eleonora Matiacci. Until next time,
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A
Sam.