Explores in detail the degree to which private sector firms are beginning to replace governments in "governing" some areas of international relations.

Governments today are too often unwilling to intervene in global commerce, and international organizations are too often unable to govern effectively. In their place, firms increasingly cooperate internationally to establish the rules and standards of behavior for themselves and for others, taking on the mantle of authority to govern specific issue areas. Are they stepping into the breach to supply needed collective goods? Or are they organizing themselves in order to prevent governments from interfering in their business? This book explores the meaning of this private international authority, both for theory and policy, through case studies of specific industries, associations, and issue areas in both contemporary and historical perspective.

[Contributors include Pamela Burke, Lynn Mytelka and Michel Delapierre, Liora Salter, Susan Sell, Timothy Sinclair, Deborah Spar, and Michael Webb.]

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A. Claire Cutler is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Victoria, Canada. She is the coeditor (with Mark W. Zacher) of Canadian Foreign Policy and International Economic Regimes. Virginia Haufler is Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Associate Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Dangerous Commerce: Insurance and the Management of International Risk, and coeditor (with Karol Soltan and Eric Uslaner) of Institutions and Social Order. Tony Porter is Associate Professor of Political Science at McMaster University and author of States, Markets, and Regimes in Global Finance.

"The topic is both timely and significant. In my judgment the problem of private authority is connected to the erosion of state power and is central to the emerging and increasing deterritorialized world of global politics." — Richard W. Mansbach, Iowa State University

"The subject matter is pioneering and of enormous significance both for international relations theory and for a practical understanding of contemporary global politics. " — Yale H. Ferguson, Rutgers University-Newark