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This book explores the emergence, change, and consolidation of institutional restraints on power. It argues that combining the traditional focus on efforts to acquire power with the "Lockean" focus on restraining power offers a more complete depiction of international politics, and shifts focus away from the actions of a handful of powerful states.
List of contents
- 1: Introduction: The main question and argument driving this study
- 2: The existing literature
- 3: The evolution of domestic institutional restraints
- 4: International laws and courts as institutional restraints
- 5: International assemblies and parliaments as institutional restraints
- 6: International secretariats as institutional restraints
- 7: Conclusions
About the author
Alexandru V. Grigorescu is Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago. His research focuses on international organizations, especially on how they adopt structures and roles similar to domestic institutions. His work has been published in journals such as International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Review of International Organizations, and World Politics. He is the author of Democratic Intergovernmental Organizations? (2015) and The Ebb and Flow of Global Governance (2020), both with Cambridge University Press. In the early 1990s, before his academic career, he served as a diplomat in the Romanian Foreign Ministry and was posted to the UN.
Summary
This book explores the emergence, change, and consolidation of institutional restraints on power. It argues that combining the traditional focus on efforts to acquire power with the "Lockean" focus on restraining power offers a more complete depiction of international politics, and shifts focus away from the actions of a handful of powerful states.
Additional text
Restraining Power through Institutions offers a major new argument regarding international order-namely, that the causal logics that explain the development of important domestic institutional restraints on power also explain the development of international institutional restraints. Although the two levels are at different stages of development, their common logic of institutional consolidation is carefully traced through Grigorescu's historical analysis. This is a highly ambitious work with a bold argument and an encompassing scope. It will surely be an important contribution to ongoing debates about the development of international institutions.
