As a disciplinarian of international organizations, reputation has serious shortcomings. Even though international organizations have strong incentives to maintain a good reputation, reputational concerns will sometimes fail to spur preventive or corrective action. Organizations have multiple audiences, so efforts to preserve a “good” reputation may pull organizations in many different directions, and steps taken to preserve a good reputation will not always be salutary. Recent incidents of sexual violence by UN peacekeepers in the Central African Republic illustrate these points.

For most of its history, the International Law Commission has been in the business of producing draft articles. Yet, Sean Murphy’s coverage of the Commission’s sixty-fifth session reveals that the Commission has decisively turned away from this format. As Jacob Katz Cogan’s earlier post observes, the Commission is demonstrating a new-found preference for outputs that are explicitly non-binding and betray no aspiration to form the basis for multilateral treaties. The Commission’s embrace of alternative formats is a promising response to some of the risks and criticisms associated with producing draft articles. But it is also an incomplete response. To ensure that its work continues to be relevant, ambitious, and influential, the Commission must revise its working methods as well as its outputs. In particular, the Commission should develop procedures for engaging with and soliciting input from the non-state actors who are becoming an increasingly important audience for the Commission’s work.

International organizations undermine democracy, or so their critics charge: not only do international organizations themselves operate undemocratically, but they undercut democratic governance within their member states. In particular, when states participate in international organizations, they lose control over policy outcomes because each state must share decision-making authority with other member states. And within member states, national legislatures—the bodies specifically designed to be responsive to popular control—are marginalized. Legislatures lack direct influence over international organizations and also have little influence over the executive branch’s interactions with such organizations.