Contested or competitive multilateralism? A reply to Julia C. Morse and Robert O. Keohane

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In their thoughtful analysis of a dimension of global governance which has in recent years attracted a good deal of scholarly attention - namely the growing plurality and diversity of international institutions and regimes to address similar or overlapping global issues - Julia Morse and Robert Keohane identify and distinguish a specific feature of this dimension which they term contested multilateralism. ¹

Given a scholarly literature already rich with varying accounts of pluralist global governance; including those which emphasise the multiplicity of competing regimes (e.g. Nico Krisch,²Paul Berman³), those which highlight the fragmented nature of an international legal order composed of conflicting or uncoordinated international regimes (e.g. Martti Koskenniemi⁴), those which introduce the idea of regime complexity to underscore the unintegrated but overlapping and connected nature of many sets of global institutional arrangements (e.g. Larry Helfer,⁵Kal Raustiala and David Victor,⁶Karen Alter and Sophie Meunier⁷), and the nuanced accounts of global and transnational legal ordering which emphasise the multiplicity of normative orders beyond the state (e.g. Terence Halliday and Gregory Shaffer,⁸Neil Walker⁹) what additional insight does the analytical frame of 'contested multilateralism' introduced by Morse and Keohane offer us?

The authors define the specific object of their interest to be the conscious decision by a group of states, or some combination of states, international institutions and non-state actors, to challenge the rules, practices or mandate of an existing multilateral institution by shifting to or establishing a different multilateral institution whose rules, practices or mandate conflict in some way with the initial multilateral institution. Their interest, in other words, is in the political decision to establish or shift towards an alternative multilateral institution to address a given issue or problem in circumstances in which there is dissatisfaction with how it is being addressed by a prior multilateral institution, where that second institution then competes and conflicts with the practice or rules of the first.

Lawyers are used to thinking about 'forum shopping' as a practice involving private litigants who choose amongst existing legal possibilities to find the venue most favourable to their interests when litigating or bringing proceedings. Morse and Keohane are interested in a similar kind of...