This thesis seeks to establish the concept of jurisdiction as an analytical framework for conceptualising the powers of international organizations. The basic claim is that a distinction ought to be drawn between the types of actions an organization can take and the legal relationship between the organization and the persons, objects and scenarios where it is empowered to act. Existing scholarship focuses solely on the former dimension whereas the latter, referred to as jurisdiction, is underexplored. The thesis develops an analytical framework comprised of elements which are essential components of international jurisdiction. This framework is derived from the reasoning of the PCIJ and the ICJ on international organizations. It identifies three foundational elements which are essential and incommensurable: state consent, techniques of delimiting jurisdiction and the compétence de la compétence principle. The framework seeks to examine each of these elements individually, but also to capture the dynamic between them. It is not claimed that the distinction between the types of action and the relationship between institution and objects; between jurisdiction and legal powers, is always watertight. However, it is argued that reconceptualising the ‘powers’ of organizations along the lines advanced by this thesis is beneficial in two ways. First, it is argued that the introduction of the concept into existing constructions concerning legal powers adds nuance and subtlety, therefore enhancing the ability of law to act as an effective constraint upon international organizations. Second, the concept of jurisdiction offers fresh insights into complex questions of contemporary global governance, in particular, the overlapping competences of organizations.

abstract: International organizations are ubiquitous in the international system and often intervene in domestic political affairs. Interventions can occur because states do not have adequate infrastructure to govern, because a political regime seeks international legitimation of its rule, or because an intervention may prevent political crisis. Whatever the reason, there are consequences of such interventions for domestic society. This project asks how interventions sanctioned by international organizations affect individual political involvement, specifically attitudes toward democracy and democratic institutions. I theorize and empirically demonstrate that when an international intervention reinforces existing democratic institutions in a state, individual levels of confidence in democracy and levels of trust in democratic institutions improve. By contrast, when an intervention undermines existing democratic institutions, levels of confidence in democracy and trust in democratic institutions decrease. This research is important because it shows that the determinants of individual political engagement are not only domestic, but also affected by international-level phenomena. This means that international organizations and the interventions they regularly employ in states can meaningfully affect the prospects for democratic consolidation. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Political Science 2015

In the last three decades, a growing body of research has suggested that using a mix or system of human resources management (HRM) practices can lead to superior organizational performance. These practices (such as selective recruitment and hiring procedures, performance-based compensation systems, employee participation, and training and development) have been referred to as high performance work systems (HPWS) and originated from the study of strategic human resource management (SHRM), where researchers have examined the impact of these systems on organizational performance outcomes. The relationship between HRM and organizational performance has received increasing interest from scholars and practitioners in the field of public administration. Scholars strive to identify the effects of HRM practices on organizational performance based on the notion that these practices will lead to enhanced attitudinal outcomes, such as organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and motivation, which will have positive impacts on organizational performance. This study contributes to further our understanding of the impact of management on performance in public organizations through empirical evidence drawn from theories of HRM. The growing interest among scholars in understanding the effects of management on performance presumes that the adoption of best practices will lead to improvements in organizational performance. The purpose of this mixed-methods study is to examine the effects of HPWS practices on individual worker attitudes in international governmental organizations (IGOs) by reporting the results of a staff survey and follow-up interviews conducted on a cross-section of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) employees. The UNRWA is an international relief and human development Agency with a quasi-governmental role, delivering essential public services to over five million registered Palestinian refugees. UNRWA services include education, healthcare, social services, and emergency aid. In 2006, the UNRWA began a comprehensive reform program to strengthen its management capacity. Accordingly, one of the main achievements of the reform process is the deployment of new HRM systems that included recruitment strategies, performance appraisals, training and development, and compensation and rewards systems. The underlying message of the reform process has been adopting HPWS practices, which is the object of this study. Since the 1990s, the UNRWA has become increasingly interested in policy analysis and organizational research. Especially because of recent changes in the Agency’s management style, the UNRWA has become more focused on integrating knowledge and management research into its work. Therefore, when the researcher sought permission to examine the effects of the newly adopted HPWS practices on employee attitudes, the staff and upper management were very collaborative and co-operative. Surveys and interviews were conducted with program administrators, operations directors, and field staff, representing employees from different countries with varying lengths of service as well as an extensive range of levels of education and professional backgrounds. A total of 505 questionnaires were distributed in seven service departments and a total of 234 usable responses were obtained. In addition to questionnaires, a total of 10 face-to-face interviews were conducted to explore the data obtained from questionnaires and to understand further the implications of applying HPWS practices in an IGO context. Statistical analysis of the survey data and interviews provided a representation of the effects of four bundles of HPWS adopted by the organization (independent variables), on four worker attitude measures (dependent variables). The four independent variables are the HPWS practices that are the most common and most accepted in the HRM literature: staffing and recruitment, compensation and rewards, performance appraisal, and training and development. The four dependent variables are employee commitment, job satisfaction, motivation, and intention to quit. Preliminary statistical analysis consisted of descriptive statistics for all study variables, as well as Cronbach’s alpha for measuring the internal consistency reliability coefficients for all the survey subscales to examine its internal consistency. Four research hypotheses were tested using multiple regression analyses and Pearson correlation coefficients in an attempt to estimate the net effect of each of the independent variables and understand the relationship between study variables. The bivariate relationships between the dependent and independent variables have shown that the relationships are in the anticipated directions. One of the main conclusions regarding the effects of specific HPWS practices in an IGO context is that some practices, such as training and development, outperform other practices, such as staffing and recruitment. These findings are consistent with previous research on multinational corporations operating in different national contexts, and other studies comparing the effects of HPWS in different industries. The results also indicated that HPWS practices have synergistic and complementary effects on each of the employee attitudes that exceed their individual effects. Therefore, in order to expand our understanding of the effects of HPWS on organizational performance, different variables need to be considered such as national context, industry, and other organizational factors may moderate the HRM–performance relationship. The findings of this study support previous studies in this stream of research. The qualitative data were used to verify quantitative data and provide insights that were difficult to gain from surveys alone. The qualitative data indicated that more effective implementation and administration of HPWS practices would lead to better employee outcomes. In other words, the newly announced austerity measures negatively influence perceptions towards the newly implemented HPWS, which may also have influenced employee attitude outcomes.

No description available.

I theorize that a sub-set of states build and maintain authoritarian organizations (AOs) that exist to protect and reinforce authoritarian practices and values. First, I offer a logic for understanding AOs and their contributions to their member states. Second, I develop a framework that hypothesizes a range of benefits that an AO might offer its member states, identifying both material benefits (that contribute to repression and co-optation behaviors) and ideational benefits (that legitimize autocratic behavior) that an AO might provide. Finally, I assess three contemporary AOs: the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Qualitative evidence shows that AOs most successfully contribute to the ideational side of the dictator’s toolkit, particularly by co-opting civil society into a structure set and maintained by authoritarians, and legitimizing authoritarian rule via distorting authoritarian practices, bandwagoning mutual rhetorical support at the international level, and challenging democracy as a norm of governance, chipping away at the Third and Fourth Waves of democratization. My research challenges the dominant understanding of IOs as generally democratizing actors, by identifying a subset of IOs that deliberately perform against this expectation. This research agenda also furthers our understanding the dictator’s toolkit by adding an international component to explanations of how non-democratic governments survive and counter democratizing pressures at home and abroad. / Political Science

In the contemporary international system, non-state actors pose an acute threat to the interests of states. Transnational terrorism is a particularly notable example of the security threats that non-state actors pose. While the literature on international agreements has focused on state-level compliance, much of international law concerns the behavior of non-state entities such as terrorist groups, transnational crime organizations, corporations, and individuals. This study considers whether the international counter-terrorism regime developed over the past five decades has been effective at reducing transnational terrorism and consider the implications for the study of other instruments of international law which regard non-state actor behavior. Because these agreements establish clear benchmarks, they provide observable outcomes for donors that may want to give foreign aid, but are uncertain about whether aid recipients will use aid for its intended purpose. Agreements allow donors to condition aid allocation on benchmarks set by treaties, rather than observed levels of non-state behavior alone, increasing donor-recipient trust and capacity building aid flows. I find that countries ratifying counter-terrorism agreements see a significant increase in foreign aid receipts. I then assess the effectiveness of eight UN counter-terrorism conventions individually, using terrorism data germane to the type of terrorist activity the specific agreement attempts to curtail. I find support for the hypothesis that counter-terrorism agreements reduce transnational terrorism for five of the agreements in issue areas of terrorist bombing, kidnapping, hostage-taking, and financing. I conclude by discussing how the variation in effectiveness of counter-terrorism agreements found may help shed light on the design of effective international agreements when the locus of compliance is non-state actors and treaty design more generally. / text

In the last thirty years, there has been a significant increase in the globalization process, or as other refer to it, the internationalization, free trade, or liberalization. This trend was reflected in the increasing number of newly formed international organization (economic and security) as well as in the increased membership in the already existing ones. The evidence of this trend has been particularly visible since the end of the Cold War, when the race of the Eastern European countries to enter international organizations has been as competitive as ever. Nonetheless, a number of countries, upon careful evaluation and consideration of membership, has opted out of the opportunity to enter such international agreements. The question that this paper addresses is how do countries decided whether to enter or not international organizations? In other words, what elements, processes, and motives lie behind the decision of countries to commit to a new membership? Most of the studies that have addressed this topic have done so from an international perspective as they addressed the politics between countries, as well as the costs and benefits in terms of power, sovereignty, and national income once in the organizations. This paper, on the other hand, approaches the issue from a comparative perspective, both economic and political. It attempts to answer the research question by looking at the domestic sources of decision -making and how they influence this decision. Namely, a decision to become more open to trade has several implications for a country, depending on its size, and already established trade openness, among other factors. The impact of increased openness will most seriously affect the domestic players, both negatively and positively. Thus, in considering the impact that the policy could have on their welfare, players align their interests in order to express their preferences on the issue to the decision makers. The ability of the domestic actors to have their preferences considered in turn depends on the structure of the institutions through which they can participate in the political process i.e. how are their votes turned into seats, and who has most impact in the policymaking. Thus, depending on the impact of globalization on a country's domestic welfare, as well as the composition of the domestic players (export versus import intensive), the decision of the country on whether to participate or not will finally depend on the preference filtering mechanism given by the electoral and representative systems a country has. Thus, the decisions to join or not to will sometime reflect a special interest, while at other times it will be the result of an agreement reached by all of the existing groups.

The purpose of this investigation is to look at the international organization from the point of view of a small, non-military nation to discover if and how it may be useful to such a nation in carrying out its foreign policy objectives in a bi-polar, nuclear world.

Master's thesis Cultural Diversity and its Protection in International Law focuses on the concept of cultural diversity within international law and examines the various means of its protection and promotion. Although the theme of cultural diversity is relatively new for international law, the issue developed significantly in the last fifteen years. This thesis therefore outlines the development of the protection of cultural diversity in an international environment and focuses on its current relevance. The first part of the thesis describes the historical development of the protection of cultural diversity from the perspective of international law. It focuses on the concept of cultural diversity within the framework of international organizations. The thesis then presents various means of protection and preservation of cultural diversity, be it earlier documents dealing with the protection of cultural diversity or the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions from 2005, which is one of the most important milestones in these efforts. The second part examines in detail the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, the role of civil society in its implementation and the existing positive and negative impacts...

International Organizations are a growing force in the global arena. While themandate and influence of the UN has increased over the last decades, the existinglegal regime regarding privileges and immunities remain the same as they were atthe founding of the organization. This has led to mass tort claims towards the UN,stemming from damages caused by the organizations. These damages often consistof human rights violations, something the organization is generally regarded as aprotector of, rather than violator.As individuals seek to obtain reparations and remedies for the damages inflictedupon them, they are generally obstructed by the claim for immunity by theinternational organization. This constitutes a conflict of competing interests thatthe domestic courts must address and solve. This conflict is central to my thesis,as I will discover how this issue has been tackled by the national as well asinternational courts, and which consequences the current legal practice has for theindividuals. The thesis concludes with a discussion on what needs to be done inorder to bridge the current accountability gap created by the immunity ofinternational organizations.