International Organizations (1) , What are they?

Hello everyone. As of today I’m commencing a new series of blog posts. It will be titled “International Organizations” and in it I’m going to teach you about a set of international and regional organizations, approaching the following aspects (1) Genesis (2)Objectives (3) Structure (4) Relevance Nowadays.

The Program is planned to be the following(but it may be subject to future changes):
1. Theory of organizations
1.1. Concept of International Organization
1.2. Classification
2. Universal International Organizations
2.1. IMF – International Monetary Fund
2.2. WB Group – World Bank
2.3. WTO – World Trade Organization
2.4. UN – United Nations
3. Regional International Organizations
3.1. NATO – North Atlantic Treaty Organization
3.2. EU – European Union
4. Final Balance

References and extra information will be posted at the end of every post.

Alright, let’s start.

International Organizations are actors in International Relations and they play a huge role and have influence in the International System. These are some of the important aspects of International Organizations:
• They create a forum for cooperation between states, which is increasingly important due to globalization, where states are highly inter-dependent.
• They attempt to achieve certain objectives which can only be fulfilled as a collective.
• They promote international peace.
• They aim to improve the development of current infrastructures.
• They contributes towards the development of scale economies, which culminates in cheaper end prices.
• They create International Law

There are 2 types of International Organizations:
• Intergovernmental Organization → which are only composed by States (countries)
• Non-Governmental Organization → which are composed by civil society

Throughout the 1st part of this course that is already programmed we will only be talking about Intergovernmental Organizations. These can be of 2 types:
• Universal →not defined by regional limits; belonging the UN system.
• Regional → defined by a regional limit (eg. European Union) (there are a lot more regional).

These organizations are created with various purposes, where an organization can fulfill one or various such as:
• economic →eg. European Union (EU)
• financial → eg. International Monetary Fund (IMF)
• politic → eg. United Nations (UN)
• cultural → eg. Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP)
• commercial →eg. World Trade Organization (WTO)
• social → eg. UNESCO

For an “institution” to be considered an Intergovernmental Organization it must have a set of characteristics:
• Must be a source of International Law.
• It must have an headquarters.
• They must be created and joined in a voluntary manner.
• They must have an organic structure, which means they are autonomous and indecent from states.

Even though we are not going to be studying the non-governmental organization throughout the rest of the posts I think that it is a nice contribution towards our understanding of the importance of these organizations in our current society if we talk a little more about NGO’s.

Much like IGO, NGOs have various fields of action like Humanitarian → Red Cross; Environmental → eg. Green Peace; Social → eg. Save The Children; Cultural.

In spite of not being as influential as organizations composed by states, NGO play an important role in todays society.
Their power is to influence and to raise awareness about certain issues. This can be done by providing transparent, reliable information ; with Sensitizing campaigns, inter-help and an appeal towards the spirit of solidarity.

That's it for today. I hope you learned something about International Organizations, their importance in our inter-dependent society and the different types of organizations there are.
Next post we are going to start with our first Universal Intra-governmental Organization which is the IMF (International Monetary Fund).

On a final note I'm definately interested in continuing this series but that will ultimately depend on my availability and also the interest shown by the steem community towards this topic, so please leave a comment and let me know if this interests you.

Thanks and See you next time,
v0nd