New book: 'Making Glo­bal Norms: Po­li­ti­cs ver­sus Sci­en­ce in In­ter­na­tio­nal Or­ga­niza­tions'

The book shows that executive policymakers in international organizations routinely wear two hats: they act as state representatives and as experts with distinct professional worldviews. Global norms—the core infrastructure of economic and political globalization—emerge through negotiations among these dual loyalties, as executives bargain not only with governments but also with technocratic staff inside international organizations. Whether politics or science prevails varies across issue areas and moments in time, with significant implications for how norms are translated into policy. Focusing on forty years of archival evidence from the International Monetary Fund, Kentikelenis and Seabrooke develop a mixed-methods framework to explain how variation in scientific consensus and political contestation shapes outcomes.