Thread by @ProfPaulPoast

With all the talk of the 🇺🇸-🇨🇳 "Blame War", a key actor has been operating under the radar: the World Health Organization

In fact, the @WHO's central role in the #COVID19 pandemic is an opportunity to teach students how international organizations impact world politics

[THREAD]

The key thing the @WHO has done during the crisis is provide information.

That includes...

...information on the appropriate way to respond...

https://twitter.com/JIMrichards1010/status/1239140710558969857

...information on the number of cases...

who.int/dg/speeches/de…

...and even information about the appropriate name of the virus.

https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1240347789961224192

That the WHO is providing information is unsurprising for two reasons:

1) That's the founding purpose of the WHO

2) That's what IOs do in general

First, information distribution and sharing is a founding WHO principle.

The earliest precursor to the WHO, the 1851 International Sanitary Conference, focused on creating and sharing standards for countries to implement cholera quarantines

Source: apps.who.int/iris/bitstream…

But this was *just* a convention (read: treaty).

Actual organizations came into existence at the turn of the 20th century with the creation of the Pan-American Sanitary Bureau (1902) and then the Office International d'Hygiène Publique (1907)

Both IOs were aimed at the "mundane" tasks of disseminating health information

Source: who.int/archives/fonds…

Eventually, these IOs, and the Health Organization established as part of the League of Nations, were subsumed into the WHO in 1946

Second, distributing information is really a key part of what IOs do.

Bob Keohane and Lisa Martin made this point forcefully in their classic 1995 @Journal_IS piece (which was a response to JJM's "False Promise" piece)

jstor.org/stable/2539214…

They make their point directly:

In a new @CambridgeUP book, @carsonaust & @AllieCarnegie take the "information" provision function of IOs further, by highlighting their role in distributing secret and sensitive information

cambridge.org/core/books/sec…

Admittedly, providing information (or helping to coordinate policies) is not "exciting".

This is a point that @jurpelai & I make in our @UChicagoPress book, "Organizing Democracy"

press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book…

Indeed, you could say the work of most IOs is "mundane" (not to be confused with "unimportant")

That doesn't mean the WHO, or any IO, doesn't want to seek to do more.

After all, they are massive bureaucracies and, like any bureaucracy, they tend to "creep" and "seek autonomy"

(i.e. they want to control their budget)

This is a point that @erinrgraham brilliantly makes about the @WHO in this @EuroJournIR article

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

She writes that, in the case of the WHO, its bureaucracy was highly fragmented: regional offices were basically able to operate like independent fiefdoms. Eventually, the WHO go this under control. Until that happened, the WHO didn't always do what its member states wanted

A nice example of lack of control is that no one could really account for how money in WHO regional offices was being spent to help countries achieve "Health for All" goals

@erinrgraham's paper contrasts nicely with a recent @InternatlTheory piece by @CKreuderSonnen

cambridge.org/core/journals/…

In this paper, @CKreuderSonnen looks at when IOs, such as the @WHO, take actions that seem to encroach on the powers of member states.

An example is a unilaterally declared travel warning

He refers to this as "mission creep to authority leap".

Specifically, the WHO went from simple "information provision" to "naming and shaming" countries unable (unwilling?) to control the spread of SARS

On the one hand (@erinrgraham's paper), centralizing the IOs bureaucracy makes it easier for the member states to control. On the other hand (@CKreuderSonnen's paper), centralizing the IO's bureaucracy made it easier for it to take an authority leap

Worth exploring further!

But my main point is that, in either case, a key function of the @WHO is pretty mundane work, such as information distribution.

But like the DMV or post-office (remember, the Universal Postal Union is also an IO), it's the "mundane work" of IOs (and governments) that, on a day-to-day basis, help make the world go round.

[END]