Princeton UP Ideas Podcast · New Books Network

Allison Carnegie and Richard Clark, "Global Governance Under Fire: How International Organizations Resist the Populist Wave" (Princeton UP, 2026)

·27 min·1 clip

NATO answered Turkey's objection to Sweden and Finland by using appeasement and sidelining together, "throwing spaghetti at the wall."

1. The New Books Network episode with host Eleonora Mattiaci covers "Global Governance Under Fire: How International Organizations Resist the Populist Wave," published in 2026 in Princeton University Press's Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series. 2. Guests Alison Carnegie of Columbia University and Richard "Ricky" Clark are political scientists who built the book on interviews with staff at international organizations. 3. Their thesis is that these organizations are "living, breathing entities" with bureaucratic autonomy, able to work around hostile powerful states such as the US rather than simply absorb attacks. 4. They define four strategies: appeasing populist leaders, appeasing domestic publics, sidelining leaders by seeking money or information elsewhere, and sidelining publics by operating in secret. 5. NATO's response to Turkey's objections over Sweden and Finland combined anti-terror law changes and counterterrorism coordinators, threats of diplomatic isolation, a steady Twitter messaging campaign, and closed-door meetings. 6. The IMF case shows secrecy at work, since board minutes stay confidential for five to seven years, which lets leaders cooperate privately but reduces transparency. 7. They say the project began with a "sunnier" story of adaptive survival, then grew more complicated as they traced downstream costs to legitimacy, since buying off the loudest complainers raises the question "how is that legitimate?" 8. On method, Clark describes a toolkit of case studies, elite interviews, original-data regressions, and causal inference, with the claim resting on all of them pointing in the same direction because randomizing which organizations populists attack is impossible. 9. They expect pushback citing Trump's withdrawal from 66 international organizations and funding cuts, and respond that they are not claiming institutions are stronger, only that they adapt and persist. 10. Suited to international relations scholars, graduate students, and readers following populism and multilateralism.

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