Book cover of Transforming International Institutions: How Money Quietly Sidelined Multilateralism at The United Nations

Book description

Transforming International Institutions illuminates how a slow, quiet, subterranean process can produce big, radical change in international institutions and organizations. Drawing on historical institutionalism and interpretive tools of international law, Graham provides a novel theory of uncoordinated change over time. It highlights how early participants in a process who do…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Transforming International Institutions as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Funding of international organizations is one of the most obscure yet most consequential aspects of their work. Erin R. Graham convincingly demonstrates that the states that created the UN did not foresee the impending decolonization and the loss of the Western majority in the UN General Assembly, the UN body responsible for adopting the organization’s budget. Major donors, unable to maintain control over the regular budget, switched to providing voluntary funding—money that states can choose to give to the UN on their own terms, specifying projects and locations for their use.

The switch did not come about through an overhaul…

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December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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