Most Interesting 2020: Roger, The Origins of Informality: Why the Legal Foundations of Global Governance are Shifting, and Why It Matters

The twelfth in our series "Most Interesting 2020":

Charles B. Roger, The Origins of Informality: Why the Legal Foundations of Global Governance are Shifting, and Why It Matters (Oxford Univ. Press 2020)

I consider Charles B. Roger’s book The Origins of Informality to be not only most the most interesting, but also the most important book on international law that was published in 2020. Above all, Roger’s book makes perfectly clear that any account of global governance that does not take informal international organizations into account is inherently incomplete. Especially given that most of IR scholarship on international law is still focused on formal international organizations, this is a powerful message which is bound to change our thinking about global governance. Roger’s book is so compelling because it combines clear conceptualizations and straightforward theorizing with a rigorous and systematic empirical analysis. His theory convincingly locates the origins of (the proliferation of) informal international organizations within the domestic political arenas of powerful states. By arguing that the growth of political polarization over the last decades and the emergence of the regulatory state can account for the rise of informal international organizations, Roger enables us to understand how important political trends in Western societies have been affecting the shape of global governance. Important is also that Roger’s empirical findings challenge the functionalist approach to informal international organizations which has hitherto been dominating the IR literature on this topic. In sum, my expectation is that, in a few years, The Origins of Informality will be considered to be a milestone in the literature on global governance and international law not only by me, but by the scholarly community at large.

Dr. Benjamin Faude
LSE Fellow in Global Politics
Department of Government and Department of International Relations
London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)